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It’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all the companies and people the right-wing culture warriors have decided to boycott.
The last time we checked in on this loud minority, they were yelling at Maxim magazine for featuring “plus size” model Ashley Graham on their cover as their pick for the sexiest woman alive.
Today the perpetually offended right-wingers are railing against another woman on another magazine cover. This time it’s trans singer Kim Petras, who graces (or disgraces, if you’re a bigot) the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue along with three other women.
Naturally, there are calls for a boycott:
These calls come a day after conservative consumer culture warriors demanded another boycott, this one directed at a beer brand–Miller Light–for an ad from March that … was too respectful of women?
In case you’re keeping score, here are a few more companies that right-wingers are ostensibly boycotting.
- Anheuser-Busch (maker of Bud Light, now hated for sending a can of beer to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her face on it)
- Jack Daniels (had an ad with drag queens in it several years ago)
- Disney (features LGBTQ+ people in movies sometimes, along with people of color, at war with Florida governor Ron DeSantis over the Don’t Say Gay law)
- Keurig (pulled ads from Sean Hannity’s show on Fox)
- Kelloggs (issued special edition “made with pride” versions of cereal)
- Mars (because the green M&M is no longer sexy, or something like that)
- Hershey’s (something something trans influencer something)
- United Airlines (pledging to make pilot training more inclusive of women and people of color)
- Nike (for making Colin Kaepernick and Dylan Mulvaney spokespeople)
- Amazon (for supposedly banning books by right-wingers)
- The NFL (for not treating kneeling players harshly enough, and donating to social justice causes)
- Oreos (for supporting gay pride)
- Ben & Jerry’s (for being dirty hippies, or something)
- Starbucks (waging war on Christmas)
- Gillette (for making ads suggesting that toxic masculinity is bad)
There are many more. Indeed, back in February, an op-ed on the Fox News website listed no fewer than 51 companies for right-wingers to boycott for their alleged “wokeism,” including such names as Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Best Buy, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Lululemon, Macy’s, Target, Walmart, Chewy, Warby Parker, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo. (Yes, they’re boycotting both sides in the soda war.)
Another list I found, which has apparently been floating around in some form since the Trump administration, listed some 400 companies and people for right-wingers to boycott, including such companies as (deep breath) Allied Van Lines, AT&T, Bank of America, Bath & Body Works, Bigelow Tea, Celebrity Cruises, Comcast, Delta Airlines, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Dow Chemical, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Funky Winkerbean (yes, the comic strip), General Motors, HBO, Hefty, Home Shopping Network, the Humane Society, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, IHOP, Land O’Lakes, Mexico (the whole country), Nieman Marcus, Proctor & Gamble, Ragu, Sears, Slimfast, Tinder, Vaseline, Volvo, Wayfair, and Yelp. And that’s just the tip of the boycott iceberg; check out the list to see some of the ridiculous reasons people are calling for boycotts.
At this point it would honestly be easier for conservative boycotters to carry around a list of the companies they aren’t supposed to be boycotting.
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Hey, if this is the hill they want to die on… less collateral damage if they die of starvation or thirst.
I’m kind of enjoying the unintentional play on words.
I boycotted Funky Winkerbean because of the smug looks the characters made after doing crappy wordplay.
Kim Petras is a living example of what is, with extremely rare exceptions, a right-wing fever dream about trans people. She socially transitioned at a very young age, got actual hormone therapy rather than puberty blockers, got SRS (sex reassignment surgery) and a boob job at 16, and the best cosmetic surgery money can buy, resulting in someone who is entirely indistinguishable from a generic rich pretty girl… because in every way which matters, that’s exactly what she is. None of this is remotely normal even in her home country of Germany, let alone anywhere else; especially since SRS isn’t legal there before the age of 18 without permission of the courts, which was granted due to it being “important to her career” (she was a child model and acted in commercials from the age of 13).
It’s basically that trans people are either tall ugly hairy men engaging in mockeries of womanhood or Kim Petras, and both are equally horrifying. It’s a rather strange form of black-and-white thinking. Also while “Trans men? What’s that?” is no longer as prominent as it once was, they’re still glossed over in most circles to the point of being basically irrelevant. The rare cases where they get obsessed over trans men that I’ve seen, they typically get depicted in art as androgynous, often anorexic, usually with a bad haircut, and covered in hideous scars (not just chest scars, generally), with either a blank glassy-eyed expression or an agonized expression meant to communicate “why didn’t you save me?”.
Realistically, most people only boycott a few brands or companies at a time, it’s not hypocritical to pick your battles. I mean, if we made a list of all the things a “true lefty” should be boycotting, it would also be a pretty big list. I think the real thing of note is the difference in reasons for boycotting between the left and the right; aside from “the politics of those whom they donate to”, which both sides do, the Left generally boycotts based on business practices, the Right generally boycotts based on not catering to their socio-cultural and/or religious sensibilities (which mostly boils down to “their bigotries”).
I’ll never understand how they can be so mad at brands for neutral or positive things and never have an “are we the baddies?” moment.
Were they born without a life? They ALL certainly act as if they’ve been denied one – and intend to take the life of everyone now living one, however modest and private and simple, away.
No wonder they want to carry multiple guns at all times. If a weapon is in their hands, people have to be wary of them, which they can imagine is fear and pretend is the same as respect.
They certainly hide from everyday life very well. I never, ever meet them or hear their vomit-like speech in public.
They obviously see Kim Petras as a version of Crying Game false advertising – they find her hot and are having gay panic.
@Snowberry A lot of the anti-trans hysteria in red states focuses on teen girls, who are supposedly being brainwashed by social trends and greedy therapists into transitioning. An unlikely alliance of conservative Christians and TERFs, and the latter’s arguments invoke the same gender essentialism as the former.
This is also rapidly leading them into any ‘woman’ that I see could be trans paranoia for gender policing bathrooms and general existence. I fully expect them to install gender police outside bathrooms soon at the rate of reich wing nuttery they are descending into.
hahahahahaha die mad, transphobes
Are they really boycotting the brands or merely making a show of it? In my experience, they focus instead on supporting brands they perceive as friendly, like Chick-fil-A.
@Carstonio
we’ll see if they buy copies of sports illustrated just to destroy them. but it’s also just a big system of signalling that they definitely hate trans women and don’t find at least some of us sexually attractive and aren’t just doing collective reaction formation to reassert their sexuality
Martha Stewart is also on the cover, so if Kim Petras hadn’t been chosen, would we have heard screams from the right about how old women shouldn’t wear swimsuits and try to be sexy?
I found myself thinking “here we go again” as I was having distinct feelings of deja vu. Then I googled how long ago this was and now I feel old.
But anyway, for people who aren’t familiar with this story….
(Which I will illustrate with this advert that I really liked back in the day.)
But some links here:
https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/03/26/this-is-the-worlds-first-trans-supermodel-that-didnt-get-her-moment/
https://www.universalexports.net/tula-transsexual-bond-girl/
https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/01/05/transgender-james-bond-girl-caroline-cossey-playboy-news-of-the-world-trans-rights/
One big giveaway. They’re not even pretending to be serious about this. Many of their recommended targets are huge operations – or one among several accounting for near blanket market coverage.
No suggestions for how to find adequate or affordable or accessible substitutes. Nor any other practical ideas for sticking to this for any length of time.
Amateurs, pfffft.
Alan Robertshaw
I always thought the most unlikely thing about that ad was the weather . . . well and that Nessie is clearly not a serpent 😉
@ jazzlet
Yeah, it is a little optimistic isn’t it. Although as a fan of extreme weather the Loch still looks beautiful in real life.
Well, yeah…
Like every other print magazine, Sports Illustrated is experiencing a sharp decline in subscribers. So every so often they do something that will, they hope, remind the public that they still exist. With free porn available everywhere, their models are picked for reasons other than being acceptable masturbation fodder for basic men with painfully mainstream tastes. The guys having fits over recent cover models probably don’t even read the magazine anymore, anyway.
Couple things:
Considering what’s going on in “Amazing Spider-Man” right now (hopefully to be SPECTACULARLY retroactively rectified VERY soon; they Deus Ex Machina’d their way into that mess, they can Deus Ex Machina their way out of it), I’m surprised Marvel isn’t on this list, but I guess they’d be included under Disney.
Also, as was pointed out : “1 of 4 covers.” No one is being forced to buy it.
And a personal note: just because I’m down with the cause doesn’t mean I have to imbibe bad beer. Drink local.
@milothas I’ve never understood that one: it’s actually pretty common, esp if you’re on the road. You’re at a truck stop or gas station, the bathroom for your gender is closed up (being cleaned at the moment or what not), you use the one for the other gender if there’s a spot available. Though as a courtesy, if you have an opposite-gender traveling companion, you usually have them serve as scout/ambassador to get you an “all-clear” in the event someone’s in there.
@ jmc7r
I have a thing that whenever anyone is protesting art I have to go in on principle. I’ve seen far more Gilbert & George exhibitions than I would care to otherwise*. It got to the stage that I would go into the White Cube and they’d just let me straight out through the fire exit.
But yeah, never an excuse to drink Bud Light.
(*I don’t dislike their original work but they’ve just been doing the same thing for decades now)
@Alan Robertshaw:
Truth?
Miller doing it is no big to me. It’s an ad. No harm in branching out to expand your customer base. If these self-righteous prats would actually think for a second, they would realize that’s SOP for any business.
From an outside, no dog in the fight perspective:
I don’t get either side of the Bud Light thing.
Unless it’s one of those weird instances where you buy a pack & one of the cans was never filled, getting mad over a can is really dumb.
But on the other hand, what are they actually doing?
Is a cut of the profits from the sales of that particular can going to LGBT charities or not-for-profits/PACs that advance LGBT causes?
Or is it just a decorated hunk of metal?
And not to be a dick, but I don’t know if I’d call this “art.” It’s cheesecake photography.
Alan Robertshaw
Scotland in all it’s weathers is gorgeous, though I don’t recommend trying to get down off Ben mor Coigach or Buachaille Etive Mòr in foggy weather!
How does something that egregious slip past quality control? It’s not like it would be hard to detect with automation: the weight of the case will be low by over four percent.
@ jazzlet
There’s a ridge in Yorkshire called The Chevin. One time I was sat up there with a friend. We noticed a storm coming in. But we just sat there commenting on how it was getting nearer and nearer. Then of course the deluge hit. At which point we had to scramble down. Rather than at any time in the last half hour when it was dry. I wouldn’t mind but she was in mountain rescue at the time. You’d think they’d know about stuff like this.
It wasn’t a horrible descent; just a bit scrabbly and slippy. The Chevin isn’t particularly high. Although it once stood in for The Alps in a Turner painting.