By David Futrelle
So there’s a new Nissan ad featuring Brie Larson, and the internet’s biggest babies want you to think that they’re OUTRAGED.
I mean, maybe they really are outraged, I don’t know, but whether they’re sincere or just faking it, these performatively angry dudes (and a few dudettes) want us all to know about it. They’re trying to make Nissan into the next Gillette, yelling and screaming on social media, making videos, and doing all they can to convince the folks at Nissan that getting “woke” will make them broke.
The subject of all this alleged outrage is actually a rather tame commercial, a generally uninspired and unoriginal attempt to use “girl power” to sell cars. In the ad, we see a woman and her boss standing outside eating tacos from a truck. He tells her she’s not getting a promotion; she looks crushed. Suddenly Brie Larson appears in a brand-new NISSAN SENTRA!!! and tells her to “drop the taco, get in the car.”
Larson then takes the poor office worker on a speedy tour of the nearby streets, highlighting the car’s allegedly superb handling and some new feature that keeps you from backing into things. The idea is that if Nissan doesn’t “compromise” in kitting out this new model Sentra, the office worker shouldn’t compromise at her job. Larson deposits her new friend back at the taco truck and she stalks back to her boss to (we assume) demand the promotion she was unfairly denied.
Somehow this is supposed to make all sensible people FURIOUS. And indeed, a quick survey of some of the spots inhabited by the internet’s most furious reveals the standard outrage. In the comments to a YouTube video in which Larson explains her thoughts about the ad, internet piss babies drop their little bombs.
“Nissan. You went Full Gillette. You never go Full Gillette. “
“Nissan: Get In loser, we’re going bankrupt.”
“Just like that I’m no longer considering Nissan for my next car”
“‘He who goes woke, inevitably goes broke.’Old /pol/ish proverb”
“Now I have to sell my Nissan, thanks Brie. You blank face plank of wood.”
“I love watching companies burn to the ground. It’s quite entertaining.”
“Thanks to women like this, and companies like nissan, we are ushering in a new conservative age around the world!! Please, keep making ads like this, it will ensure atleast another decade of conservative rule. “
“BRANDS BE ADVISED, Going “woke” will lose you my business, I understand on the surface this whole “social justice” thing might seem like a positive force that promotes equality, but I assure you it’s not. Wokeness is an authoritarian extremist ideology of moral absolutism with nearly all the characteristics of a cult.”
And so on and so on.
On Twitter there were similar cries of anguish and anger.
“Congrats on your misandry, Nissan! Great marketing!” complained one Tweeter sarcastically.
“Dammit I just bought a Maxima and now it’s tainted with Brie Larson’s narcissism,” whined another. “Why, Nissan? WHY!?”
“Customers ain’t playing with Nissan acting like a simp for flatbooty clout,” added another.
No, I’m not quite sure what that last one means either, unless “flatbooty” is a synonym for feminist or something.
And if course there were the YouTube videos from the professional outrage-sellers.
It’s all a bit pathetic, really.
Yes, I rather doubt any of these outrage merchants care what I think. But this particular outrage campaign doesn’t seem to be catching on in some places where you’d think it would be an easy sell. Take the Men’s Rights subreddit, where the commercial has elicited some of the requisite outrage but also some yawns.
“Ehhhhhhhhhh… No,” wrote one commenter of the outrage campaign.
[The ad is] saying nothing different than what Jordan Peterson says when it comes to assertiveness and the wage gap. ..
Good for girls isn’t necessarily bad for boys.
“I see no issue with this,” added another commenter. “It’s just ‘don’t let women compromise.’ It doesn’t hurt men AT ALL.”
If this is the reaction from people in the Men’s Rights subreddit, maybe this manufactured outrage is getting a little stale, huh?
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I find it SUPER FUCKING FUNNY one of those baby men quote Tropic Thunder, specifically the scene where RDJ’s character, the one who is literally in black face and its portrayed as a bad thing, makes fun of all those award bait “Insperingly disabled” films, you know a thing SJW’s also dont like. I’m 100% betting that he only listened to the slurs in the speech and didnt listen to anything else
Re: Wienstein, He’s white and famous. It’s a bit optimistic to think he’ll serve out his full sentence. Hopefully he will, though.
@ snowberry
I think whatever happens it’s optimistic to think a 67 year old will serve out a 23 year sentence.
There’s a possibly apocryphal tale of someone receiving a similar sentence in their advanced years and pleading to the judge that they’d never survive it; to which the judge is supposed to have said “Well, just do the best you can.”
I think it’s hilarious that this is titled right wing men.. most ” Right wing” men think that chick is hot and can’t find a reason to bitch . Boy the left must live on this site! ???
@Alan Robertshaw
IIRC he still does face charges in CA court so that could extend his sentence further.
@ naglfar
Indeed. I’m not quite sure how it would work if he was to be further convicted. In Europe you can sometimes ask that all your sentences from various jurisdictions be served concurrently in one prison; although sometimes they do indeed wait until you’ve served one lot before imposing the next batch consecutively.
I’ll ask around my USian lawyer friends.
@Alan Robertshaw
He’s also appealing the decision, which could have an effect on the sentence.
Bastard tries to tell people he feels remorse and is trying to be a better person. Like it’s not to late, like he hasn’t caused lasting damaged. I didn’t think watching a brief thing of his trial would bring me such rage.
re: wine-stain… he’s rich, he may well skip. I don’t think men in his socioeconomic class ever go to prison
One of the reasons their idea of boycotting is so superficially performative (buying things just to show themselves wrecking it in a video) is because that’s the general philosophy behind their definition of “virtue signaling “.
They believe activism is only about the performance, and not the philosophy behind it. It certainly is performative, but there are actual motivations behind activism besides displeasure with something. All they can see is that activists are unhappy with some thing, and don’t believe in whatever motivates us because when someone is sitting at the top of the pyramid, of the intersection of class, race, and gender, they are content with the way things are, because the system works for them, or they believe it will, at some point. There’s never any need for outrage.
One of the major tenets of reactionary conservatism is acceptance of the status quo without questioning it. If they don’t have a problem with something, then “activists” are only pretending to have a problem. They don’t believe activists actually believe what they believe, are faking it, and only want attention.
That and most of these people (white men in particular) have never cared deeply enough about an injustice to have ever boycotted anything in their life, as if perhaps they have only heard of activism by rough description.
@Lakitha
I never thought of it that way, but that explains a lot about their world view.
It seems that in most cases the cruelty and injustice is something they like, so they wouldn’t protest it anyway. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Well, MRAs at the very least have a strange definition of it, seeing as they think making angry shitposts online is activism.
What? But we provide such good health care in prison.
Update: MRAs are now mass-downvoting the video of the ad on YouTube. I don’t think they realize that engagement makes ads more visible and that Nissan doesn’t actually make money based on who likes their video.
I just bought my new orange premium Sentra last week. Male white. Mid 40s here. Already dealing with the comments about this ad from Co workers. Thanks Nissan.
Naglfar:
Seriously though, the list of things these guys don’t understand could fill up an entire rack of encyclopedias! Not only that but they have a thoroughly and egotistically outsized impression of their own importance to American culture.
I do get it though. It must feel pretty bad to have banked their identities on their cultural ownership, only to see themselves being supplanted by women and poc, to find out it’s waning, or worse yet,to find out it was never true in the first place. Its much much easier to be angry about that, than reassess the importance of one’s entire existence.
Yeah, no! Sorry, but I still can’t quite dredge up any meaningful sympathy for ’em.
“Now I have to sell my Nissan, thanks Brie. You blank face plank of wood.”LOL. Always makes me laugh when those right-wing babies shoot themselves in the foot to spite a company that’s likely still raking in the millions because nobody else cares about their tantrum.
In any case, I don’t even have a driver’s licence (by choice) so car commercials never did anything to me except groan at their base manipulation of humans’ tendency to connect unrelated things together to sell wasteful hunks of metal, polymer and pollution.
And fuck yeah for Weinstein. Hopefully by the time he gets out he’ll be a doddering corpse on life-support (if he ever does). Yes, this level of schadenfreude probably makes me a bad person. No, I don’t care.
@Lakitha K Tolbert – I’m a white cishet dude myself, and I don’t think other groups suddenly having a bit more representation is “supplanting” me and people like me in any way, shape or form. The only people holding such opinions are either alt-right/alt-right adjacent, or the vanishingly small number of hardcore ultra-“left” extremists they portray anyone less conservative than Ronald Reagan as.
@Paul
Uh-huh. So these particular right-wing commenters complaining vociferously about Brie Larson (by the way, that is her name) are extreme outliers? All the evidence I’ve seen says otherwise. Just check earlier columns. Or what the heck — go ahead and check right-wing sites on the Internet.
@Paul
On the contrary, the right is very good at finding extremely minor things to melt down about. This blog has thousands of examples.
*Paul Revere voice*
The trolls are coming, the trolls are coming!
Weinstein was transferred to the medical unit at Rikers after a medical procedure at a hospital, but he’s in custody to serve his 23 year sentence no matter how many times he tries to get a trip to the hospital because at least there he can enjoy a more comfortable experience with a tv he can change the channels on, sit in a recliner, etc etc…He’s trying to pull whatever nonsense he thinks might get the judge to agree to have him transferred to jail facilities that are far better than the conditions in any unit at Rikers Island.
He deserves to stay at Rikers, and though he is appealing his conviction(s), there’s little grounds for them to be thrown out, or a new trial granted, or his sentence vacated. One of his lawyers said that the only reason he was convicted and the only reason his sentence was so long, was because of ‘the court of public opinion’. Clearly she’s having difficulty with ‘reading the room’ so to speak, but then, some of the things that she’s said in regards to women and how Weinstein’s victims weren’t really victims (in her view)…She was also upset that the judge wouldn’t close (or maybe it was open?) a window when she requested that. I can’t recall the judge being one bit concerned about what I thought of the temperature of their courtroom, they’re busy getting through their cases for the day and any attorney who isn’t there and prepared with whatever their business with the court is that day will get chewed out and sent to the back of the queue for a reschedule.
I don’t have one iota of sympathy for Harvey Weinstein, his behavior got him 23 years in jail, I just wish that he hadn’t gotten away with it for so long.
I am always amused by these YouTube outrage peddlers. They make stacks getting their target audience all angry, and worked up. They are looking for a fight; where none exists. I stay as far away from these guys, always.