An entertainer named Dylan Mulvaney decided a couple of years ago that he would be more entertaining if he “identified” as a woman.
Not to the point that he had his penis removed, mind you. But just enough to prance around in women’s clothing and adopt a farcical falsetto voice and hang out in women’s restrooms.
So, what he really “identifies” as, is a man with a penis – not to mention billions of Y chromosomes – who likes to prance around in women’s clothing with a farcical falsetto voice and hang out in women’s restrooms.
This rehashed drag show made Mully many millions.
But Mully’s fan base doesn’t include the executive suites of Anheuser Busch. In the marketing boner of the century, some clueless wokester marketing maven in their New York office made Mully the spokes-whatever for their flagship beer, Bud Light.
I suppose hiring a sissy with a partially tucked penis and a falsetto voice to market a macho beer is creative, in the sense that it’s not an obvious thing to do. It’s sort of like hiring PETA to market shotguns. One might say it defies common sense, which I suspect the marketing maven would take as a compliment. In any event, it certainly generated attention for Bud Light.
But it did less well in selling beer. Bud Light sales are down by billions, as is their stock price. Beer-ologists think the damage to the brand is permanent.
Bud Light’s debacle reminds me of Charlie the Tuna, a successful marketing campaign by a canned tuna company that aired for years. A talking cartoon fish called Charlie the Tuna always thought he could get into a can of tuna that tastes good by demonstrating his good taste – in art or music or whatever.
In Bud Light’s catastrophic campaign, they apparently thought they could appeal to customers’ seeking bad-tasting beer with an ad campaign that was in bad taste.
Conventional “wisdom” is that this incident will be taught as a marketing malpractice case study in business schools, the point of the study being “don’t offend your customers.” People still spend buco bucks to get taught such subtleties in our once-great universities.
(I stand corrected. Kids go to places like Harvard Business School and Yale Law School not to learn anything, and they successfully don’t. Rather, it’s to show employers a few years down the road that they’re smart – smart enough to get admitted. But even that is not much of a reason to go anymore, since the schools started focusing not on the smartness of the applicants but on the color of their skin. You don’t have to go to Harvard or Yale to prove your skin color.)
Back to Mully.
Trannies got a little big for their britches. The game plan was to bully the rest of us into not just accepting their act, but applauding it.
As for me, I admit that the tranny act is slightly amusing in the old burlesque comedy sort of way. I confess that I once dressed up as a woman for Halloween. That was in a different century, when we though such hijinks were funny.
I might still applaud the trannies if they presented themselves it in a way that recognized that it’s all for amusement.
But they don’t. They not only demand to hang out in women’s rest rooms, but also women’s locker rooms with your nine-year-old daughter. And they want to compete in swimming or rugby with your 19-year-old daughter. And they want to recruit children into their act.
They seek not acceptance, but exhibition.
Society has had quite enough of this, as we’ve had quite enough of other wokery – from affirmative action, to Covid checks paying people not to work, to celebrating Jewish pogroms, to an open border inviting millions of the least skilled and least educated people in the world to walk right in and have free health care, hotel rooms with cable TV, and a Bud Light, on us.
“Woke” has become a term of derision – to the point that you’d think conservatives dreamed up the word. But it was actually dreamed up by the left as self-congratulatory praise for people of their ilk.
As always, they overplayed their hand. Because, like the trannies, their goal is not to provoke change, but simply to provoke.
the Aspen beat 
Finally some good content about this game of identities. Only about 0.5 percent of the population is transgender. Think about that! So that means that 99 percent of the population is supposed to be changed in order to accommodate their gender identity BS. Really? Get a grip.
While it is true that the so-called “transgender” (more accurately catalogued as “transexual”) population is quite small, infinitesimal even, its presence is magnified by the constant media attention it is paid. As a result, most people believe that this group is far larger than it is. Similarly, should one believe that advertising accurately reflects reality, one would rightfully expect to encounter multiple thousands of bi-racial couples, homosexuals, black physicians/mathematicians/physicists, female mechanics, etc. The fact is that these frequently portrayed phantasmagoria simply are not replicated in reality, which should make one pause and consider whether anything about corporate media, and especially its advertising arm, is truthful. It is always safest to believe the opposite of what we are being told unless and until additional inquiry proves otherwise. The reason that media propagandizing is so successful is that people spend entirely too much time absorbing it rather than living in the real world. One eventually tends to accept as “true” that which one sees and hears, and when one’s entire life is dominated by electronic media, eventually one tends to believe it is an accurate portrayal of “life” rather than “The Truman Show.”
A very perceptive comment, Steve. I would also observe that this same applies to more general reactions to the world. People typically believe that we’re going to hell in a handbasket faster than we really are, because they see media attention on the bad things. Nothing generates clicks as quickly as crime and accidents.
Most people, even on the far-right could not have have cared less about drag. trans, cross-dressing, or whatever. When seen in public, at worst it was a momentary amusement. That was until the far-left started insisting that those who took it seriously be granted unfettered access to women’s formerly exclusive spaces and then children. Only then did people take notice and started having problems with it all.
You’re right that the Bud Light fiasco won’t be making it into the marketing curriculum in the present academic atmosphere where this ideology has been simmering for the last 25 years. But then you’re also right that the next generation of marketing geniuses won’t be coming out of today’s academia anyway.
IMHO, today’s gender insanity is the aftereffect of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Since the ’70s, we always knew that alphabet feminism had devolved to be little more than just another front for the Democrat Party. But when it went all-in to save the presidency of the ultimate misogynous pig, Bill Clinton, that was too much for the ordinary women not into the movement for the left-wing politics. They walked away and went on with their lives. That left the movement in the hands of the perpetually enraged and lunatic fringe in academia, which is where most of today’s anything-goes gender nuttiness festered without adult supervision until recently.
As for Mulvaney, I never took his attention-seeking act particularly seriously. I suspect that as an out-of-work actor during the COVID lockdowns, he saw an opportunity that clicked and paid off very handsomely. Although I have little doubt that he’s as gay as the day is long, I seriously question his commitment to being a true transsexual, at least until he live-streams his transition surgery as a pay-per-view event.
The NFL is trying to help Bud Light regain it’s spot as the top selling worst tasting beer. First is was the NFL Chiefs’ Travis Kelce (before he discovered Pfizer’s money and Taylor Swift, but that’s an entirely different rant). Now it’s Emmitt Smith and Peyton Manning leading the Bud Light charge, resulting in me losing all respect for both of them. Then you have the alleged “conservative commentators” who go along with the scam by referring to biological males as “she/her” in their articles and interviews.
“In the marketing boner of the century…” I saw what you did there.
Anheuser Busch Made a big mistake; but overall they are a good company, they have an history of fabulous pro-America advertisements, and after some penance and groveling, maybe people will get over it. I don’t drink their beer, but it’s pretty obvious they are apologizing and doing their best to get back to their base.
Never been to a drag Queen nightclub performance, but they have an audience in that venue; how they jumped into libraries, etc., is beyond the average person, pure lunacy.
The Marxist left is in a death spiral, I pray they just stay their course. I’ll just stay out of their way.