"I Just Don't Understand..."
Performative non-understanding // It’s Just Beer, Bro // Queer Working Class Masculinity // The “Choice” problem
Performative non-understanding
Over the past couple of weeks, the Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light controversy has been rumbling in the foreground of my analytical sphere. What appears to be another Conservative-provoking advertising campaign has gone awry and slipped into anti-transgender sentiment, which has become popular over the past couple of years. I would have been quick to dismiss the Bud Light controversy as “just another” moment of online right-wing social outrage if not for the apparent confluence of mainstream media voices converging around the position of “I just don't understand what all the fuss is about…It’s just beer”.
The statement above is composed of two elements. The first is what I am calling performative non-understanding; the “I just don't understand” part. The second element attempts to draw absurdist boundaries around the artefact of concern by making it seem banal; “it’s just beer”. Statements of performative non-understanding appear to be an increasingly popular mechanism to “start a conversation” online (which largely has become relegated to amplifying one’s own opinion to followers), feigning a sense of humility but also positing that the “other side of the conversation” comes from such a strange and foreign perspective that it is difficult to grasp. It is the social media equivalent of me taking my British self to an American football game and loudly shouting, “I just don't understand. Why is it called football if they are using their hands?”
In the above example, I get to feel smug that the dopes around me aren't enjoying real football, while I also get to define what real football is (soccer, in the case of this laboured example). Any attempt to explain to me why American football is (a form of) football is now being attempted by people who likely have never really thought about why their sport is called football, only that there is some English chap acting smug and superior. Any attempts to aid my understanding will be clumsy, inarticulate and emotionally charged. In short, I win.
Returning to the Bud Light controversy, performative non-understanding is used to disengage from trying to understand why people are upset that Dylan Mulveny became the face of Bud Light. Indeed, it is likely that much of the outage is because Mulveny is trans, but I sincerely doubt that there would be as much outrage if Blair White were the brand ambassador. Both Mulvaney and White are trans. White is Trad and trans and has shared space with Alex jones and Tim Poole. Mulvaney is queer and trans and has shared space with President Joe Biden and Drew Barrymore.
Here we find the crux of the outrage, the trad vs queer dichotomy. White embodies the aspect of traditional Americana, a right-leaning woman with libertarian flair. Mulvany embodies Queer America, breaking tradition to build something novel and cosmopolitan. The problem with selecting someone like Mulvaney to be the brand ambassador of Bud Light is that the decision is a complete departure from what the fans have come to expect. Considering the whole point of consumerism is to generate profit from the expectation of sameness and familiarity, this would always cause controversy (but perhaps not on the scale Bud Light execs had expected).
It’s Just Beer, Bro
Now we move onto the second point, It’s just beer. What a profoundly stupid thing to say. All we need to do is look back at Gamergate to see how outrage within a fandom can quickly spiral into a dedicated social movement. We can look at Depp v Heard to see how Big Names attract Big Attention. The Bud Light controversy was both of those things and more because it was about beer - perhaps the one single food item which has cross-cultural understandings of belonging and identity.
It is odd for me to see those in the media mocking Americans for taking out their dissatisfaction with food or other commercial products, especially given the whole Boston Tea Party thing (although I’d stop short of calling this the Bud Light Kegger). However, there is a working-classness to beer that has perhaps been overlooked. The history of beer (and alcoholic drinks in general) is absolutely fascinating, but without going too off-topic, all I’ll say is that for centuries “beer” was a working-class staple because it was nutritious and the alcohol killed bacteria, making it safer than water in some cases. Indeed, wine became the staple drink of the upper classes (through the expense of import), and beer became more widespread among the working classes because it was cheaper and easier to make. Inner-city breweries became more common, taking advantage of the commercial distribution channels and local labour supply and became as much of the community as the men who worked for them. Guinness, for example, not only exudes Irishness but also the working-class suburb of Dublin where the old brewery still stands (and is now a museum / corporate venue).
It would be hard to dismiss Guinness as reflecting a working-class Irish identity, as a corporate brand, even if it is also associated with experiential Millennial / Zoomer exuberance on “St. Patrick’s Day™”. For Bud Light, who seemingly wanted to improve profitability by moving away from the “frat boy” image, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of what Bud Light represented in terms of American working classness, which is vague, mysterious and puzzling (even to me). At best, I can posit that American working classness goes beyond ideas of the “blue collar worker” to encompass how “People, labour, and location embody Americana” (or The American Spirit). Perhaps, here is where we can find the underlying sociopolitical tensions now targeted at Dylan Mulvaney. They are not Americana, while Bud Light is Americana. Mulvaney is not conforming to “Bud-Light Americana” but is confirming Bud-Light to whatever they are, in this case, Queer.
Queer Working Class Masculinity
It seems strange to write this so soon after Lilly Savage / Paul O'grady’s death. Lilly Savage was an English drag act that commanded massive respect nationwide. Lilly Savage was beloved because of Paul O’grady’s working-class Manchester accent. Lilly Savage invited men to consider the bravery of not only walking the streets of Manchester dressed as a woman but walking into a pub and performing on stage in front of a perhaps hostile audience. This, coupled with the fact that O’Grady was a known Manchester United football club supporter, a rival to Manchester City football club at a time when football hooliganism was all the rage. Paul O’Grady was a working-class drag act who received mainstream attention after a long and arduous career. Dylan Mulvaney, on the other hand, seems soft and cosmopolitan. Mulvaney’s prominence does not appear to be born from any hard graft, skill, or work but from having posted on TikTok every day for a year. From this, Mulvaney has interviewed the president of the United States and scored a lucrative advertising opportunity with Bud Light because Mulvaney has a large following and little else besides a transgender identity.
An uncomfortable issue with LGBT+ representation (as a content sub-genre) is that it is positioned as either parallel or opposed to Americana, not part of it. While Ru Paul’s Drag Race was fantastic for gender-queer representation, it did little to challenge the “bitchy queen” stereotype, despite the manual skill and performance talent on display. Indeed, even some of the prizes and opportunities on the show were focused on the “pink dollar” - a middle-class cosmopolitan market. “Beer for the men, and fruity drinks for the ladies” was a punchline for Al Murry, a comical pub landlord who played with working-class tropes. This sentiment, however, is very much a truism reinforced by the cultural association of wine and mixed spirits with “ being women’s drinks”, furthering the impression that LGBT+ communities do not even drink beer.
My impression of drinking over the past fifteen years has been more focused on getting men into drinking “women’s drinks”, rather than diversifying who gets to enjoy “men’s” beer. This is despite a radical popularisation of “beer” from new lagers to ales, to stouts and everything in between. There is far more consumer choice now than ever before, and the issue of choice is central to tensions around transgenderism, embodied by Dylan Mulvaney. Over a decade ago, the issue of gay rights was popularised by the “born this way” argument. This argument held some degree of biological determinism to same-sex attraction. Gay people were born, not made, over time. They have no choice in same-sex attraction, so why cause them misery? Indeed, such rhetoric helped LGBT+ gain acceptance within libertarian and early MAGA circles. However, the transgender debate has moved away from “born this way” to amplify “self-selected gender” discourses. The personal choice becomes central to gender self-selection, which then raises the questions - how are personal choices coerced, and by whom?
The “Choice” problem
Here we start encountering the phrase “the gay / LGBT / queer agenda” as consolidated concerns that coercive social forces are aimed at influencing behaviour. This concern rapidly spirals into constructing meaning around why such coercive behaviour is being allowed and for what purpose. It is amongst these questions that we find radicals ready and willing to take advantage and provide both a complex system of meaning and assuredness of answers. Here we see the narrative that Queering gender is demonic and akin/permits child abuse because it is a coercive system. While there were some biologically essentialist “woman's brain in a mans body” arguments supporting transgenderism, this has unfortunately fallen by the wayside because it reinforces a gender binary, much to the chagrin of non-binary / gender fluid individuals. Unfortunately, the increased agency of choice presupposes consequences of action and narratives which popularise gender self-selection and encourage others to speculate on the dread surrounding personal choice, similar to gossip about someone’s new partner or drinking habits.