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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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@Allandrel:
What MCU version? I’ve seen every thus-far-released MCU film except Guardians 3 (so no spoilers please) and every episode of all the tie-in TV series they experimented with in the 200xs before they apparently settled on movies-only (Agents of Shield, Agent Carter, and, importantly, the short-lived Inhumans, site of the other MCU appearance of Black Bolt before Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness), and I don’t recall Ms. Marvel cropping up, whether as a shape-shifter or with light-construct powers (way to rip off DC’s Green Lantern, BTW … unless they’re ripping off the DC TV series’ ripoff instead, of course).
That being said, the MCU already has a bunch of shape-shifters, associated already with Captain Marvel, in the Skrull. So, having another might be redundant enough (and having a non-Skrull one, and having it be the other Marvel, confusing enough) to make such a change worthwhile.
But, given the apparent absence of an MCU version of Ms. Marvel, where did you even get this idea from in the first place? The ever-productive upcoming-Marvel-films rumor mill, which is wrong about as often as it is right? Post-credit scene in Guardians 3? (The only plausible place for it to have already become established in MCU canon without my seeing it that I am aware of, unless it’s a blink-and-you-miss it cameo in, say, the super-busy fight scene at the end of Endgame or something like that, and I blinked and I missed it. Despite having watched that one three or four times already.)
@Surplus
Kamala is the main character of the Ms. Marvel TV show on Disney+, which, like every live-action Marvel show produced for Disney+ (and the animated series What If?) is part of the MCU and incorporated into the theatrical films.
The upcoming theatrical film The Marvels follows up on the Captain Marvel film, the Ms. Marvel series, and Wandavision (another Disney+ series, which was basically necessary viewing for the second Dr. Strange movie).
MCU Kamala is not an Inhuman, but a combination of mutant and the Clan Destine. She has a completely different power set from comics Kamala.
@Surplus, cont’d,
Here, let me Google that for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms._Marvel_(TV_series)
And while we’re at it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Cinematic_Universe_television_series#Marvel_Studios
Wasn’t that easy?
@GSS: I guess it was vegetarian because the breading has milk and eggs in it (also cross-contamination from where they cook their regular sandwiches), but it was a fried cauliflower sandwich.
They released it in a few test markets and the righties promptly threw an ingbing. I don’t know if it’s currently on the menu and it’s not quite enough to make me go look (for one thing, the nearest Chick-fil-as are about 25 miles from me and I usually have appealing alternatives when I’m out that way).
@Allandrel
If that happens I expect the poor oppressed mutant fandom to show growth and maturity and reject the blatant franchise washing. As they obviously learned how hurtful and cheap this is when they were subjected to it a couple of times in the InHuman push era.
No. Not really. I’m very sarcastic.
If they’d learned anything they would have shown it by now… at the Gwenpool retcon… or Death of the Inhumans.
@Malitia,
It really is amazing how many X-Men fans seem blindly aligned with mutant supremacists rather than the X-Men.
Though for the last few years that has described Marvel editorial as well, since the Krakoa storyline boils down to “every mutant joins the Brotherhood.”
Again with this mention of series on “Disney +”. I don’t have any “Disney +” in my channel listings (not even when listing “all channels” rather than “all subscribed”) and I’ve yet to see so much as one syndicated rerun of one single episode of one older instance of any of these supposed “TV series” actually appear on, y’know, TV.
AFAICT, these alleged “series” are just a bunch of videos someone posted to some web site and hid away behind a paywall, which means they’re as much a part of the MCU as a Youtube fan cosplay video. And that opinion won’t change until I see some instance of at least one of them on, y’know, an actual bona fide TV, accessible with rabbit ears or at most a cable subscription that’s payable by cheque. If it’s not there, it’s not on TV; and if it’s not on TV or at the cinema, it’s not canon, because you can’t just hide half your canon away from a huge chunk of the population (let’s see: anyone who’s outside larger urban centers or lacking a credit card?) and still call it canon ferchrissakes.
Put another way: “TV”, “cinema”, and their combination imply adherence to a certain social contract, and one part of that social contract is that whatever-it-is eventually trickles down to being accessible by everyone, regardless of location or financial means; eventually it’s on ad-supported TV stations, and eventually it’s on a channel you can get with antenna, subject perhaps to silly “release windowing” through a series of steadily less exclusive and/or expensive options.
In short, if it’s a movie it should eventually turn up on NBC or CTV or something, and if it’s a TV show episode it should eventually turn up as syndicated reruns all over the darn place, perhaps some years after first run but eventually. Sooner or later, even a rural farmer with a rabbit ear set, no or only dial-up internet, and no cable or satellite should be able to get it, if they get any reception at all where they are.
If that doesn’t happen, then the social contract and related norms regarding “TV” and “cinema” are being violated, and it therefore is at best some sort of pseudo-TV.
In the instant case: I’d be satisfied if things on this “Disney +” eventually (after some probably excessive release-window delay) showed up on ABC, the network owned by the same umbrella corporation, and ABC in turn syndicated it to foreign broadcasters (likely CTV here, as they seem to have a near-monopoly on such things). Thus far that clearly hasn’t happened.
@Surplus
Ah, I see. It’s not that you’re ignorant of the Disney+ section of the MCU, it’s that you consider subscription-based streaming content to not be valid, and thus pretend that they don’t exist.
And apparently this extends to butting into other people’s conversations about such shows to harass them for not also pretending that those shows don’t exist.
Have fun with that.
@Allandrel: I’m still not convinced that Surplus thinks we really exist, or if we do that we’re only around to torment him.
There was no “butting in” to “other people’s conversations” or “harassment”. First, this is a public forum, not private email. A conversation here is not your exclusive preserve, and others joining in is not “butting” in. Furthermore, I literally did not know about this “TV show”, as not only have I never seen it in listings, I have never seen it so much as advertised! Not one promo for it has ever run anywhere that I have come across it. More evidence to support my opinion that it’s not “real” TV: not only do you not see it on TV, you don’t even see it referenced, advertised, or in any other way mentioned on TV. If you watch TV, but don’t (or can’t) watch online streaming sites, you are not even informed that it exists at all it seems. I had seen a handful of previous mentions of “Wandavision” (and those were all here, not on TV and not even elsewhere online) but nothing with Ms. Marvel.
There is no bad faith here, much less “harassment”, only ignorance which is entirely the product of other peoples’ choices not to inform (or, bizarrely, advertise something they are attempting to monetize, it seems).
Plus, see my argument re: the violation of the social contract, whereby in particular:
These things make it exclusive to a fairly narrow segment of the population, unlike, well, TV.
Again, talk to me when ABC (or, less likely, some other OTA network) is airing (and syndicating) reruns of the older episodes and I will reconsider my position at that time. 😛
@Surplus,
And yet when encountering someone discussing something that you had not heard of, your response was not to spend 30 seconds with a search engine to look it up, but to accuse them of making it up and derail the conversation with demands that they justify acting as though something that can be verified so easily actually exists.
As for how you avoided seeing the show mentioned before now, it is hardly the responsibility of others to only talk about things that you have noticed, either. And the show received plenty of online advertising and coverage, just like every Disney+ show. They’ve generally been a Pretty Big Deal in Marvel fandom, with discussion right here on WHTM. I have no idea what your online feeds or adblockers are, nor should I or anyone be expected to.
And in regards to the legitimacy of streaming shows: good luck pounding your head against that wall. As technology changes, means of media distribution change as well. And it costs money to watch because creatives want to be paid for the fruits of their labor. Yes, this may require using a debit card rather than a check, but that is because this is 2023, not 1973.
Seriously, if you haven’t heard of something, try LOOKING IT UP instead of lecturing people on THEIR supposed ignorance.
I block all ads online. I only see ads on television. The one place where they apparently didn’t advertise this alleged television show.
I fail to see why I should have to risk having my savings wiped out to watch this show, but didn’t have to take any such risk to see Agent Carter, or Wakanda Forever, or for that matter The Good Doctor or Rise of Skywalker or etc.
And you completely glossed over the geographic/income discrimination issue. You could live in an exurb with sub-$1000 rents and watch Agent Carter, and etc., and I see no justification here for restricting such people from watching Ms. Marvel. The “creatives” got paid for Agent Carter, surely? Yet according to you they somehow wouldn’t get paid for Ms. Marvel if people outside the ever-dwindling set who have good solid salaried white-collar office jobs got to see it? Illogical, illogical, please explain, only humans can explain their illogic …
Apparently Disney aren’t charging enough for their services. To the extent that they’re willing to take a $1.5 billion impairment charge for taking some shows off the air. (That will have an impact on the value of the company but also has some tax benefits)
https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/disney-1-5-billion-content-write-off-charge-streaming-1235631877/
But it seems the idea is that they will suffer some temporary financial embarrassment whilst they reorganise their streaming services and then put the programmes on when they can charge enough to actually turn a profit on them.
What I found amazing about this was that Disney spends $30 billion per annum on creating content. I just can’t see how there can be enough of an audience to recoup on that. Like how many hours would you have to devote just to keep up with one franchise?
@Surplus
If my local library system doesn’t carry a book that I want to read, I will have to buy it. It is still a book even if I have to pay money for it. It is still a book even if none of my local retailers carry it and I have to order it online. It is still a book if I end up purchasing a e-book version of it.
Your bizarre obsession with the distribution channels of media isn’t impressing anyone, and the world will continue to move on with new distribution channels no matter how much you squeeze your eyes shut, stick your fingers in your ears, and yell “NO no no, only the formats that I like are valid!”
Don’t want to call programs on streaming sites TV shows? Fine. Call them streaming shows. But pretending that their distribution channel somehow makes them not legitimate shows is just myopic. (And for the record, plenty of devices exist that let you watch streaming services on a television. Yes, they cost money, JUST LIKE TELEVISIONS DO. Because we live in a capitalist society.)
Are shows on premium cable not real television shows because they are locked behind a paywall?
They aren’t adveriting streaming shows on broadcast TV because that’s not where the market is. The market is online. Same thing with lots of other things. Your not seeing that advertising is because you choose to block ads, not because they aren’t advertising.
Broadcast TV programs generate revenue by selling advertisement time, as you well know. This doesn;t work so well with online content, though, because of adblocking software discussed above. So instead many networks charge a premium for premium content.
If some of us start talking about the new edition of Warhammer 40,000, and you going to demand that we prove that it exists because you have never seen a TV commercial for it?
As for not being able to afford to watch everything you want, again, welcome to capitalism. And prepaid debit cards are thing that exists if you’re so paranoid about electronic transfers that you refuse to enter the nineteen-nineties, which is the last time that I wrote a check. But yes, I know, nobody in the world is as hard-done-by as you are, and people wanting to charge for their work is oppressing you.
For God’s sake, get off your high horse and let people talk about things they like even if you don’t know or care about them.
@ allandrel
A mate’s band released a single that was only available as digital download, or Edison Wax Cylinder.
Boring digital version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtV7WLFfJo
Proper old school version!
@Alan Robertshaw:
Meanwhile, Agents of Shield was obviously profitable enough to garner a good half a dozen or so renewals, year after year. It seems that making your stuff exclusive to urban yuppies isn’t quite the brilliant moneymaking scheme they evidently thought it would be.
@Allandrel:
Apples to oranges.
An apples to apples comparison would be if there were normal books and then there were “streaming books”, and the latter never were available in local stores and never trickled down to public libraries and, therefore, free access; and also their vendors refused cash and checks, so the only way to purchase them was by credit card (or, dangerously, using debit online where a hacker would be able to completely clean out your bank balance and even if the bank promised to reimburse any fraudulently withdrawn funds it would be a weeks-long uphill battle to get them to do so and meanwhile your utilities are bouncing and your rent is bouncing and you can’t buy groceries).
Oh, and “streaming books” could never actually end up in your hands as an actual, normal paper book. Indeed you’d have to have a computer and an internet connection not only to buy it but every time you wanted to read any of it, and you’d have to live somewhere where you could get gigabit fiber to the door if you didn’t want it to take 20-30 seconds to respond every time you clicked the “next page” button. And “your” book could go poof at any time, at the vendor’s whim.
(Actual ebooks can be nearly as bad. Obviously they don’t demand the kind of bandwidth that decent quality streaming video does, and they generally have a dead-tree edition you can get rather than being exclusively ebooks, but try getting one without credit, and DRM means they can indeed go poof on the vendor’s whim if you don’t take proactive precautions against that by ensuring you have a local copy of the file and stripping that DRM from this copy.)
It’s not the distribution channel, it’s the breach of the social contract by withholding it from other distribution channels, even in a windowed-release fashion to milk it of all the exclusive online yuppie money they can get for it before letting non-yuppies see it. I notice you keep evading that social-contract point, probably because you know you can’t refute it.
@ surplus
Is TV access really part of the social contract though?
Generally television is produced by private entities with a view to profit. Nations may have some not for profit TV; for educational or news purposes for example. But pure non essential entertainment is just about the money.
Even here, where we have a publicly owned broadcasting network, if you want to watch TV then you must first buy a TV licence.
That’s to watch any scheduled broadcast on any medium, whether that be a TV, your phone, or a computer. Regardless of the broadcaster.
And watching TV here without a licence is a criminal offence.
There has been talk, from the more right wing elements of the Conservative party, of abolishing the licence fee; but that’s a very unpopular policy here.
So that, to me, suggests people here at least don’t see free TV access as a natural right.
@Surplus
I have not mentioned your “social contract” argument because the idea that there is any social contract requiring creators to make their content available on the medium of your preference exists only in your head.
You misunderstand, perhaps willfully.
The social contract in question is that TV shows are eventually, if not immediately, available without special equipment and without special subscriptions. If you have a set, and especially if you have basic cable or equivalent, whatever-it-is should turn up eventually. It certainly isn’t computer-exclusive, nor credit-card-exclusive, nor exclusive to certain zip codes. If you’re sufficiently not-dirt-poor that you can afford a TV and a home with electrical service, you’re not shut out. The entire non-homeless population has access, in principle. (Some choose not to have a TV, or such, but it is their choice.)
These new “TV shows” break that big-time. They are web videos. Web videos are not the same thing as TV, no matter how they are marketed or by whom. They are significantly less accessible to sizable swathes of the population, among other things, especially when paywalled. They are a different medium, with different (and generally more freeform) formatting as well as being more exclusive. Glossing over these differences with confusing, marketing-department-driven terminology does not make them not exist and, in the end, plays into the hands of the capitalists who are trying to force us all to pay more today for stuff we had to pay much less for yesterday.
When a basic high speed internet service is as cheap and ubiquitous as ordinary TV (preferably, cheaper) and there are online payment options that don’t require taking out a loan or risking your savings, and this Disney + is no more expensive than adding another cable channel, then that will be much less the case — although, there would need to be a computer as cheap as a TV set with both a decent sized display and high speed internet capability. Tiny little phone screens don’t cut it.
Even then, there’s one thing I hadn’t mentioned until now: with real TV, it’s a one-stop shop. You have a list of channels you can scroll through and if it’s real TV and in your geographic area, it’s in there. It might have a red background and need more money to get it but it will be there. The same is obviously not true for web video, and never can be since anyone can in principle start up a whole new web video site at any time. The major Hollywood producers could, though, create some such online one stop shop with every web video they are marketing as a “TV show” listed (and whatever system for divvying them up into cable-like channel packages for purchase), but so far as I know they’ve not done this. Instead it’s all fragmented across dozens of web sites, each with its own idiosyncratic interface. That also means possible compatibility issues with different browsers and configurations, separately for each one. TV doesn’t have that because its one-stop shop also delivers a selected channel in a uniform way, through a uniform interface (whichever HDTV standard superseded NTSC). To be equivalent in usability and convenience the hypothetical online one-stop shop would also need to settle on a uniform format and interface for delivery (say, X.265 video with a 7.1 mp3-format audio sideband) and give up DRM (which doesn’t work anyway, just adds expense and gratuitous extra potential points of failure for their actual paying customers).
The most ridiculous thing here is that about 15 years ago they were heading in that direction: they’d pooled together to create a single site, called Hulu, that was supposed to be exactly such a uniform-interface one-stop shop — and what was on Hulu was also supposed to be on “normal” cable/OTA TV, as well as vice-versa. Just one more distribution channel. But for some reason they backed away from that and started making their own separate siloes and withholding some of the stuff there from normal TV. That was the end of any likely prospect of having genuine “web TV”, rather than just a bunch more web video sites, now behind paywalls.
Perhaps an analogy will help.
TV is kind of like a general store, in terms of ubiquity of access in particular. You probably have a general store within a short drive, and maybe even in walking distance. Even if you live in a small town. If you’re on a farm you might have a 10 minute drive to the nearest one, but it’s not likely to be worse than that. Most basic items can be found there, perhaps at somewhat higher prices than at a grocery store but not at seriously exorbitant ones.
Disney + is more like, well, the Disney Store. It’s not exactly a high-end boutique, but neither is it a general store. You probably don’t have one within a few minutes’ drive of you, and would need to go into a middling to large city to find one. Even if you’re already in such a city it’s probably an hour away through stop-and-go traffic rather than just down the block.
There’s nothing wrong with the Disney Store (at least, nothing that isn’t something that’s wrong with capitalism in general). But it would definitely be wrong to market it as a general store when it clearly breaks the accessibility norms implied by the term “general store”. And it would be wrong to make something exclusive to it that ought to be available in general stores, such as, say, soda pop. The more so if it was something that was normally part of a pairing with something that was accessible there: say, if hamburger buns were readily available at general stores, but beef patties, or ketchup, or some such required going to a specialty shop only found in larger cities.
Calling Disney + videos “TV shows” is like calling the Disney Store a general store, and making some MCU content unavailable elsewhere is like making ketchup exclusive to the Disney Store. 😛
P.S. it would cost me several hundred dollars just to go browse in the nearest Disney Store to where I live, if it’s even possible right now (I’m not sure if they’ve done anything yet about replacing Greyhound’s services here). Accessibility, and affordable accessibility, are important!
@Surplus
No, I understand perfectly. You have made up a set of rules and obligations for how you think media should be available, and are angry that reality is not following it.
But congratulations for completely derailing a conversation that other people were having.
@ Surplus to Requirements
As Alan says
Is there actually any sort of legalese or law about this or is this just something you believe?
Even if so, there is the whole “This is what it says on paper and this is what we actually do.” It would seem a bit hypocritical for you, someone who constantly complains about neurotypicals having a bunch of unspoken rules and social contracts that seems to serve as ways to inconvenience or hurt you, to demand everyone abide by your social contracts.
Regardless, as many have pointed out to you on numerous occasions, no matter how you rant, the world will not change to suit your views. You are continually beating your head on a wall, demanding we acknowledge you are right to do so and sympathize with your resulting injuries
I am not imagining things. YOU DIDN’T USED TO NEED A CREDIT CARD OR HIGH SPEED INTERNET TO NOT MISS THINGS THAT WERE ON TV.
Whole swathes of the population, especially outside of larger urban areas and their affluent suburbs, are being excluded from things they weren’t excluded from before. That’s not “one person’s idiosyncratic view” no matter how much you industry-apologists try to frame it that way. It’s the objective truth, an observable fact.
Oh, and to those who accused me of bad faith based on my not Googling it, if it had turned out to have been a cameo or post-credit scene in Guardians 3 doing so would have led me right to the spoilers I’d previously mentioned I was trying to avoid.