Why Don't Brands Get That Straight White Cis Men Are The Center Of The Universe?

It hurts them when they are not!

Once upon a time, during the height of the COVID pandemic, Target came out with a line of absurdly hideous prairie dresses, the likes of which we hadn't seen since they raided the FLDS in search of Warren Jeffs. While there is certainly a way to do prairie dresses in a cute and flattering way (see:  Batsheva , which initially started the trend), these dresses were dumpy as hell. Many people on the internet agreed that they were, in fact, sartorial monstrosities, and kicked off a viral #TargetDressChallenge trend in which people took pictures in the dresses posing as ridiculous old-timey pioneer ladies.

A self-esteem-ectomy in a dress 

Now, I could go on about how it is pretty bad, actually, to buy dresses you're not actually going to wear for one photo op, given the fact that 66% percent of fast fashion ends up in a landfill ...

debbie downer GIF    Giphy 

But I shall spare you. The reason I bring you this tale of vestiary crime today is to point out that while I and many other people did not like these particular Target dresses and made some jokes about them, we did not go right off the goddamned deep end the way that conservatives have over Pride marketing this year. The reason I put it in this particular light is due to the way they are trying to frame this opposition not as homophobia, but as annoyance . "We're not homophobic! We're not transphobic!" they proclaim on social media, "We're just tired of seeing rainbow flags everywhere! Enough!"

As if that's actually going to fool anyone.

We have all been annoyed at commercials and trends that did not speak to us, personally. I have lived through bandage dresses, cold shoulder tops and at least two years where I could not find a going-out top with a back. Every other commercial on Peacock these days is that one where people sing about mailing their poop to the tune of "My Way," which really makes it annoying to catch up on "Real Housewives of Atlanta." But I don't protest or boycott companies for these kinds of things. I boycott them because of the way they treat their workers, or the ways in which they contribute to filling those tube top landfills, or for things they do that actually hurt people — not things that just personally annoy me. Boycotting things and people who actually do bad things is what those now sobbing over fucking Cracker Barrel betraying them by acknowledging Pride month used to derisively call "cancel culture."

Now, the king of "Oh no, the cancel culture! It is killing me! It is killing everything!," Joe Rogan, has thrown a big old hissy fit over all of these brands annoying him by acknowledging Pride month or even just acknowledging LGBTQ+ people in general. Because as we all know, the only people it is morally acceptable to market to are heterosexual white men.

Via New York Post:  

With massive companies facing public backlash for engaging in woke messaging, Rogan’s guest, standup comedian Theo Von, proposed an app that could show customers of a business “where they put their political money.”

“A little of that is going on right now with all the woke s—,” Rogan responded. “Target lost billions of dollars because they tried to have this Pride selection.”

“Yeah, and obviously the Bud Light thing with Dylan Mulvaney, they’ve lost $20+ billion,” Rogan added. “Can you imagine, you’re just gonna send a f—— can to a confused person – that ‘Day 365 of womanhood’ – and you send that person a f—— can with their face on it and your company loses $20 billion?” Rogan said. “That is wild s—, man.”

“So we’re seeing that now where we never saw that before, where people are going ‘Enough! Enough! Stop shoving this down everybody’s throat,’” Rogan observed.

Is this man seriously going to suggest that we've never seen homophobia and transphobia before?

We have absolutely seen this before. We've seen it from Jerry Falwell, we've seen it from the recently deceased Pat Robertson, we saw it from Rush Limbaugh and the people who used to lose their shit every time a celebrity came out of the closet and the people who were afraid that gay marriage would make their marriage less special. We've seen it from literally every Republican right up until Donald Trump came on the scene and they had to drop their "moral majority" bullshit for a hot minute.

In fact — in fact — one of the lines the people who have been flipping out about brands doing Pride marketing have been using "We just want them to remain neutral in the culture war (by just pretending that LGBTQ+ people don't exist)" is a line that has been repeated ad nauseum by the One Million Moms for decades at this point.

Joe Rogan is a One Million Moms now. That is who he is .

This is a man, by the way, who was absolutely outraged that people would think he was racist and not want to listen to his show because he repeatedly said the n-word . This is a man who has had, as a guest on his show, Gavin McInnes, Owen Benjamin, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, Milo Yiannopoulos, Chuck Johnson, Sargon of Akkad, Stefan Molyneux and a variety of other professionally hateful assholes. He had another guy on his show who compared making people wear masks in public in order to prevent the spread of a highly contagious virus to Nazi Germany. He praised Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) as a swell guy after he went on an anti-Semitic rant on Twitter. He spread an outright lie that kids who "identified as cats" were using litter boxes at schools, for the purposes of attacking trans people.

 I could go on. 

According to Rogan, if you boycott him or encourage others to boycott him because of these things, you are an evil social justice warrior who is doing cancel culture. If you think it's disgusting the way he and his guests attack vulnerable populations with lies and slurs? What are you, some kind of Puritan who hates comedy?

But this man and his audience of "alpha males" simply cannot handle a fucking display of clothes they don't like and don't want to wear, they can't handle brands marketing to populations that don't include them. Please. I wish my biggest freaking problem in life was that ruffles and ditsy floral patterns make me look like Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? or even that most jeans are too short for me, but unfortunately I have to live in a world where people with actual power are conspiring to take away my reproductive rights. Whoops!

“When I go to Target I don’t want to see like f—— tuck pants, like they’re designed to help you tuck your d—,” Rogan said. “Hey, that’s not normal, I don’t want that right in front of everybody. It’s weird.”

He added that the vanguard of the transgender movement is pushing ideology in a way that resembles religious conquest.

“There’s a lot of f—— real weirdness with this group of people that is trying to change the way people view sexuality and gender,” he said. “They’re proselytizing.”

So are you, my dude. So are you. But no one is out here trying to prevent you from being able to buy clothes you like, simply because you annoy them. Or, really, because you feel that you, personally, should be the target for every product or marketing campaign and companies not going along with that makes you feel insignificant and unimportant. Because when you see people fighting for basic social acceptance and fair treatment, you and everyone like you just gets afraid that social acceptance and fair treatment will lead to them having a higher social status than you do. And therefore, you need to keep them down. It's pathetic.

The only reason people like Joe Rogan are doing this "We're not homophobic or transphobic, we're just tired of rainbow flags!" schtick is because they know that it is extremely not cool to be Jerry Falwell or the One Million Moms and they want, desperately, to try to draw a distinction between themselves and " those kinds of homophobes and transphobes." Even if that were actually the case, which it's obviously not, they would be absolute babies for trying to compare their personal bugaboos to people or companies doing things that are actually discriminatory, unjust or hateful.

No one is forcing Joe Rogan to buy pants that help him tuck his dick (though with all of the steroids he's taken over the years ...), just like no one was forcing me to wear a goddamned prairie dress or cold shoulder top, or how I can just walk out of the room and get another glass of rosé when the commercials get too scatological for me. It's not hard.

OPEN THREAD!

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