Bud Light Boycott… Week Three!
You have got to be kidding with this shit.
by Evan Urquhart
Conservatives’ epic battle with their own cultural signifier may end someday, but today is not that day. It all started when Dylan Mulvaney, who is trans, posted a short sponsered video to Instagram highlighting her partnership with the brand. Kid Rock then cashed in on the mash-up of something conservatives love (bad beer) with something they love to hate (trans women) and unloaded an assault rifle into a few cases of Bud Light.
Our favorite Bud Light related headline of the week has got to be “Beer drinkers are saving America,” which ran as a letter to the editor today for Bryan County News. It’s basically all gold, but our favorite bit had to be the repeated capitalisation of “Transgender” … no, wait, it HAD to be the fact that there are “more than 100 physiological differences” between women and men.
screenshot from Bryan County News
Fact check: Listing 100 physiological differences between women and men is not on any standard curriculum for an entry-level biology class.
Another story, from Newsweek, reported that a photo of a fridge with Bud Lights in it had gone viral. So, good for them? Or bad? AdAge says all publicity is good publicity, but the rest of the article is behind a paywall, and we’re not paying for AdAge even if you pay us in craft-brewed IPAs.
One thing that seems clear is that, joking aside, there’s no chance that this is good news for LGBTQ+ people who think brand partnerships are good. Whether or not tis is good or bad for Bud Light in the long run, corporations are run by timid, risk-averse people who don’t want their facilities to be hit with bomb threats. There is no realistic way that corporations won’t feel spooked by all this drama, and decision makers at them will seek to avoid this sort of drama for their own brands. Whether it’s bad for the movement for LGBTQ+ rights as a political movement, as opposed to as a vehicle for corporate sponserships, is an open question. Years of corporate partnerships haven’t prevented us from reaching a point where every gain of recent decades feels suddenly like it’s under threat. It seems at least as likely that an LGBTQ+ movement free of corporate baggage could refocus on the struggle for rights and dignity than that it would be weakened by a few fewer banks and insurance companies marching in Pride parades.