OK, The Frogs Probably Aren't Gay

Archived from Apr 24, 2023:

This past Thursday, I wrote about the general tantrums being thrown over Bud Light. I wrote on some of my own experiences in beer and my assumption that our cultural pace is simply too shortsighted for the “boycott” to matter for more than a few days. It’s now Sunday morning (as of writing) and unsurprisingly, “Bud Light” isn’t even close to the most relevant thing on Twitter. For once we can all say “thank you, Elon!” because of his exploding rocket.

Back to the things I was talking about on Thursday, but this time, high level. Boycotts are very interesting to me. Conceptually, and historically, they can and have been very effective. Possibly the most effective modern boycott in the Western imagination was the Montgomery bus boycott, held in Montgomery, Alabama, sometimes considered to be the pivotal moment of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The term boycott, itself, actually comes from the name of a British taxman in Ireland, sent to collect rent for an absent English landlord from the occupied Irish. During the great famine, the farmers asked for a 25% rent discount when their crops were failing and were offered 10%, with no room for negotiation. The community, in turn, decided to shun the collector, Boycott, and quickly he found that he had no one to harvest the land, nor a merchant to purchase from, trade with or sell to. The community saw their needs being denied and banded together to make clear their stance and their dignity. Soon, the proper noun Boycott was a verb, spreading like wild fire across Ireland, England and North America. An honourable, community oriented beginning if I’ve ever heard one. And yet here we find ourselves, about 140 years later, watching an increasingly small, yet shrieking portion of the population shooting cases of beer as a form of spectacle masquerading as protest. Now, as I mentioned in Gay Frogs 1.0 (if you’ll grant me the moniker), modern, “viral” boycotts largely just serve as free advertising for the company purportedly being boycotted. This modern form of, very specific, Twitter outrage boycotts has been well explained by my favourite video game YoutTuber, hbomberguy, here. To summarize the video, he traces the intentional creation of controversial branding back to Keurig making the very normal statement that they didn’t support Sean Hannity standing up for Roy Moore, a grown man repeatedly accused of harassing young girls and pulling their ads from Hannity’s Fox News segment. In my opinion, hardly controversial. Nor, it’s worth noting, were they the only company to do so, and yet a Twitter shitstorm ensued. Posts of people smashing, throwing and generally trashing coffee makers, their personal property, and posting it on Twitter to make a “point”, were rampant for several days. And marketing professionals were, indeed, watching. Suddenly, brands were making “woke” ads; ads which to anyone with a basic sense of human decency will largely come across as tepid and predictable, seemingly with no purpose other than triggering another shitstorm. Nike, Gillette, the pattern repeats itself. There are two things that are inextricably linked to this exhausting ouroboros of ad, reaction, consumption, repeat. Namely: that you are fundamentally being sold something and the fact that the most avowed free market hucksters seem to really not like what the free market does.

The unfortunate reality of seeing something that seems like a step in the right direction from a large company, is that it is just a ploy to get your money. And from a basic understanding of capitalism, that make sense. If you have money, capitalists want you to spend it, regardless of if you actually need the thing being advertised and regardless of how candid their statements are. Amazon can make all the statements they want about fair workplaces and reasonable pay, but they will still do whatever is needed to ultimately make the wealthy even wealthier. I understand that the world is operating at a pace that is quite simply, break neck, especially while the vast majority of us are simply doing our best to make ends meet. Yet, I almost always find myself rolling my eyes when people are making such ridiculous posts and videos because even baseline critical thinking would allow one to understand that by posting they are becoming tools of marketing for the brands they are purporting to boycott, particularly in a time when, statistically, hyper heterosexual, Christian values are less and less popular. The reactivity of these right wing groups who want to desperately claim victimhood is extremely reliable. Years ago, listening to a podcast was the first time I heard the notion that this behaviour, this outrage, these claims of infringed rights, often stem from the fact that white people, and white men even more so, desperately want the one thing they cannot have. Namely, victimhood. Hear that once and suddenly so much is recontextualized. There is no war against men, there is a movement of women wanting to be respected. There is no conspiracy to eradicate white people, there is an increased understanding that all humans deserve dignity. You spend your years reading history books and simply cannot help but cackle when well off, grown adults throw tantrums on the internet and behave as though they are doing something brave, interesting or subversive. I struggle to think of something more pathetic and myopic.

Cultural memory also seems to simply be too short for most boycotts to work anymore, particularly ones carried out for such mundane reasons, and companies know this. It will probably not be long before most of these people quietly go back to buying Bud Light or Coors, the average folks at least. The celebrities may have to hold out until the partnership cheque looks big enough, and until they’re reasonably sure their fans have moved on to campaigning against a new “ideological” brand. Now, I by no means like capitalism. I’ve spent most of my life watching “once in a life time” recessions, wars and natural disasters over and over and over again. Capitalism is not an economy of abundance, it’s an economy of consumption, and only for those who have proved themselves sufficiently useful to someone more wealthy than the rest of us could ever imagine. But today, I’m not here to talk about that. Rather, I’d like to observe that the logical operation of corporations in capitalism is to get as much money as possible, and therefore as many people spending money on a product or at a company as possible. For the most part, I imagine the Venn diagram of folks trashing their own property in the name of boycotts and adamant, uncritical defenders of capitalism is, once again, roughly a circle. It’s so interesting to me how the free market is supposed to exist outside of any regulation up and only up until it begins to include anyone or anything other than the “status quo”. Gender neutral branding for razors? Unheard of (despite the fact so many men are obsessed with women being hairless). An athletic wear company working with athletes who are also activists? A disgrace. Gay beer? Forget it.

It’s tedious, isn’t it? We exist in a world where almost everything is white and almost everything is for men. And when it isn’t explicitly branded for men, men will be punished for being interested in anything associated to femininity, because to be feminine is to be weak, according to this world view. And this, combined with the desperation to feel attacked, explains the sexism and racism in beer, explains the tantrums and the petulant tweets. If women make better beer, was it ever actually for men? If beer is drank by trans and queer people, was it ever cis? The obvious answer is that these questions are absurd. It’s a fermented liquid. It has no gender, no morality, no meaning aside from what we assign it. And it is incredibly telling that one specific group feels such ownership over that meaning, despite their own clear lack of understanding of the entire industry and the people who love it.

I know this was long, I know this was probably tiring and I appreciate you for coming on this very, very long walk with me. What I ultimately want to say is that, beer, and basically everything is for everyone, so long as we make the space in our world and minds for that to be true. So happy Monday, I hope this week you have the chance to share a beer, a meal or a drink with someone who is different than you.