it’s… seriously concerning to me how SO many people don’t understand that companies making their #limited edition pride products is literally just pandering to and taking advantage of a vulnerable community in need of allyship.
it is profitable for McDonald’s to make their Pride Fries box and sell them at the location right by a planned pride march and have it limited for pride month. it is profitable for alcohol companies to market their Pride Edition beer to a vulnerable community that has extremely high rates of addition because it’s the only way some of us can cope with our oppression and abuse.
a toothpaste company posting a rainbow edit of their toothpaste to facebook is pandering. fast food selling pride-themed food right along the route for a parade is deliberate. alcohol and tobacco being at pride and marketing to gay people is because they know they can take advantage of our most vulnerable members. they do not do this to help us. they do this because their ‘activism’ is profitable, and they know it.
i’m not trying to call y’all stupid, because i KNOW liberal media normalizes this idea of losing our minds and being overjoyed by the Great Allyship of big corporations doing the bare minimum so they can benefit off of our pride. i’m just saying y’all NEED to learn the difference between someone helping us out of genuine care and someone putting out some temporary rainbow products because it makes them money.
btw here is a list, care of Out, of brands that are benefiting queer orgs this month. it’s a prrrretty small gesture in most of these cases but at least it’s something.
I’m not trying to think Nabisco or Absolut actually gives a shit about me, rainbow-washing is just like pink-washing. But I also think that having pride stuff out and around as part of the landscape is an unintended and still potentially valuable statement that it’s more profitable and normal to court queer folks’ business and the people who love them than the bigot assholes screaming about “family values” and the “breakdown of morals.” I mean, of fucking course large retail businesses aren’t in the business of something for nothing. But the thing is, little kids who go to McDonald’s in June, who eat rainbow Oreos and see commercials with the two moms at practice or two dads making soup, the giant rainbow bottles on the sides of bus shelters looking out the windows on the way to school? it become part of their background concept of This Is The Place The World Is, with visible gay people. Buying a box of Oreos isn’t going to change the world, but it IS another way we become visible not as tragedies on the news or gross caricatures drawn by religious fundamentalists, but as regular people who like gross junk food and pretty colors just like all the other people that little kid chowing down fries sees and knows – I mean, how the hell many ads does a kid see all day, every day? It’s a whole fucking lot.
Yeah, it doesn’t mean I can buy Pride toothpaste and say “good enough” when there are still so many people who want to muzzle me and cram me back into the closet and take away everything I have, still have to show up with my time and effort and when possible my money for actual queer causes. But in the meantime, that cynical grab for my cash means Gay Background Radiation is getting spread all over middle America by the relentless wallet-seeking hentai tentacles of multinational corporations, and I’ll take every little fucking extra bit of normalization I can get. Also, it tends to make bigots get all bent out of shape and I’m small enough to enjoy that, what can I say.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
I read the OP thinking “Boy, this person sounds young.” Checked and OP is 18.
Yup.
When I was OP’s age, you never saw Pride Month products anywhere. Ever. Ever. I was 18 in 2009. I am not old by any means.
What did we have in 2009? Will and Grace reruns. One character on Glee. If you had high-speed internet and your parents’ cable subscription, you could watch the LogoTV music video stream and realize that all of the ads playing in between songs were only for explicitly gay services: gay travel agents, advice on how to get tested for HIV, legal assistance, condoms. That’s it. You couldn’t walk into a store and buy rainbow Oreos. No one said Happy Pride. EW didn’t have RuPaul on the cover and no one wrote big funny thinkpieces about the Babadook. You didn’t really have any indication that you existed at all. It was a huge deal and very controversial that Facebook offered a purple filter to support The Trevor Project. That’s what you had as a teenager in 2009: a Facebook filter in memory of dead kids like you. In 2009 you existed as a ghost.
We live in a capitalist society. You can complain about moneygrubbing all you want, we can have the assimilation vs. unique community argument for years, but in 2009, 2010, 2011, gay people weren’t considered human enough to be consumers. We weren’t worth taking a chance of a ten-second TV spot on. Please don’t pretend that being widely accepted as consumers means nothing. You don’t have to assign benevolence to the individual companies – it would be foolish to do so – but I beg you, @discourseful, acknowledge what an aisle full of rainbows will do for the psyche of a fourteen-year-old. Acknowledge that without accusing them of being complicit in their own oppression.
Also, while rainbow-washing is undoubtably a new market that global brands are willing to mine, inside nearly every campaign I’ve ever seen target it (source: I work on marketing websites for brands you’ve heard of) is a person or small group of people who fought to gain recognition, to *normalise* acknowledging and supporting Pride. Because targeting people who like Football, or angry male nerds, or female fashion fans is a matter of picking your market sensible and aiming your ads, but Pride’s an electric rail, in small part because of the people within the demographic who will – for valid and understandable reasons – not want corporate culture anywhere in their revolution, but even more so because it will undoubtedly require hiring more community managers and moderation systems when the raging hordes of the potato-men descend on their Facebook page and demand you keep politics out of their Skittle habit. And sometimes the marketers lose the argument, and sometimes they win it, but I – personally – prefer it when they anger the potato-men.