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Updated: September 22, 2023 @ 4:47 am
It’s not easy to forge a consensus in a divisive environment, but two things appear to have done it: Bud Light and the over-the-counter birth-control pill.
On the former, what was for many years America’s top-selling beer made a giant tactical marketing blunder. It hired as its spokesperson a transgender woman.
That was evidently an effort to reach out to more liberal-minded consumers, which, at the 30,000-foot level, might make sense. Bud Light was pretty much identified with middle America, guys driving pickups and watching football. A broadened appeal? Sure, theoretically.
It’s entirely predictable that a trans woman would turn off the redder of the beer-drinking market, so the move was dumb on its face, at least as a marketing maneuver. What made it titanically stupid was that the trans woman also fed into all sorts of tropes about women generally: that they are moody, airheaded and are interested mostly in clothes and shopping. Hard to imagine a better way to alienate actual trans people, or, for that matter, the 50% of the population without a Y chromosome. Pretty much everybody had a reason to be offended, or at least disgusted.
As a side note, in case anybody ever wants to dispute the value of marketing or advertising, this is Exhibit A. What, I ask you, made Bud Light consistently outsell Miller Lite? Budweiser is the King of Beers. Order a Dos Equis and you’ll be the most interesting man in the world.
It’s all just sudsy nondescript fermented grain, one barely distinguishable from the next.
It’s marketing, amigo. They don’t spend millions for a 30-second spot at the Super Bowl just to entertain themselves.
Anyway, Bud Light blew it so badly that the best selling brand is now…Modelo, a Mexican brand that nobody had heard of until a decade ago. Quite an accomplishment, if you think about it.
The other one? Well, the FDA just approved a new birth-control pill that will be available without a prescription. Oddly, this occurred without much hullabaloo.
That’s because liberals like it and the anti-abortion forces are…well, they’re OK with it, too. Abortion is the highest priority, and they’re not much interested in fighting a losing battle over the pill. And some Republicans, it should be noted, have come around to the notion that if you’re going to make abortion illegal — or at least far more difficult to get — then you’d probably better improve access to birth control.
So, oddly, there’s a consensus over birth control…and a consensus over an offshoot of the gender identity debate. In 2023, when it’s otherwise all about the red tribe and the blue tribe.
Things take odd turns.
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