The identity politics of beer

Tastes great, less testosterone.

Released as part of Women’s History Month in March of this year, a Miller Lite ad has only recently gone viral — and, as with Bud Light’s foray into “inclusivity” and transgender affirmation — it has done so for all the wrong reasons. Owned by Molson-Coors, Miller Lite is the second iconic American beer brand whose cosmopolitan, largely female marketing team — some of whom have dealt with the sudden public backlash to the ill-advised campaign by deleting their social media presences — decided was in desperate need of a pointed social conscience. Traditionally, Miller Lite, like Bud Light, has appealled to people who attend ball games, or brisket cookoffs, or fraternity parties. It lives inside red Solo cups and is eventually disposed of by the body largely in the same form as it was first ingested into it, albeit not quite as cold or fizzy.

In this iteration of the Woke beer assault, Miller Lite’s marketing team decided to “make a difference” by using actor and comedian Ilana Glazer to deliver one of those Tik Tok-esque smug lectures wherein the activist, addressing the camera, delivers a scolding monologue detailing the litany of wrongs committed against a particular identity group. In this case, what we’re being harangued about is the plight of women in the beer industry, both historically and at the present moment. Which, if this seems like a rather niche concern, that’s because it is.

But niche concerns are all the rage these days among the corporate Woke, who seem constantly to scan the social fringes to find some supposed bit of cultural violence to suss out, label, then amplify to a degree they find revolutionary, but that most consumers simply find exaggerated and exhausting. With Bud Light, the importance of celebrating the womanhood of a man vamping as a Tween Audrey Hepburn was seen as paramount to updating and “freshening” the brand’s image, which its vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid publicly worried was too “fratty.” That is, it appealed to all the wrong kinds of people — namely, those who drink Bud Light — and Ms Heinerscheid, as one of the anointed (to borrow from Thomas Sowell), was bent on correcting that particular bit of consumer violence. To do so, she was going to liberate the beer from its “fratty” image, granting it license to identify as the Queer pilsner it always knew itself to be. Ms Heinerschied’s bold vision — to take Bud Light into the 21st century, where it was free to live its own truth and become its best self — resulted in a collapse of market share, and a leave of absence for both herself and her boss, David Blake.

In the case of Miller Lite, driven to celebrate Women’s History Month as all domestic beers must necessarily do, the identity group against whom historical violence had been committed, and who therefore required 90 seconds of corporate-crafted redress, was women — from one perspective an ironic counter to Bud Light’s ads, which seemed to suggest women are especially powerful and beautiful only, or maybe especially, when they’re really men. Explained senior director of marketing for Miller Lite, Elizabeth Hitch,

This Women's History Month, Miller Lite wanted to recognize that without women, there would be no beer. To honor this we wanted to acknowledge the missteps in representation of women in beer advertising by cleaning up not just our $#!T, but the whole industry's $#!T while benefiting the future of women and beer.

To spearhead this cleanup of historical affronts to women’s visibility, Miller Lite sent out a press release detailing how their efforts were to take shape outside the corporate board room: first, they’d collect from the internet “outdated, age-old, no-thank-you sexist ads, displays and posters,” physically reproduce the offending material, compost it, use it to grow hops, then donate the hops to 200 women brewers, who will use this product of “bad shit” — ads that in the past have used women in swimsuits to sell beer — to create “good shit,” something Miller Lite’s marketing team imagines will be the beer produced by 200 people with vaginas, which as a brewer’s tool are famed for their nuanced manipulation of yeast. As the ad copy confidently explains to us, without vaginas, beer would never have existed. Which is of course complete nonsense, but then, accurate history is now just a suggestion, to be marshaled in the service of whatever the prevailing Social Justice narrative demands.

— Which, for those of you not keeping pace, currently holds that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman — excepting those women who don’t accept that being a woman is as easy as identifying as one (those are cis women engaging in Hate) — and that making women “visible” is legitimate and virtuous if those women are men, or obese, or Queer, or disabled; but not if those women represent traditional social ideals of beauty or fitness or heterosexuality. That kind of “visibility” must be whitewashed, because to make those types visible is to exploit the poor dears. That’s just science.

Up is down.

Black is white.

Laverne is Squiggy.

Notes Glazer, the ad’s spokesperson, who hasn’t much minded using sex to sell other things, including the Democratic Party:

Women are amazing and infinitely creative. I know women have been erased from building many industries from the ground up, and yet I was still surprised to learn that they were among the first beer brewers in history. After years of treating women like objects, the beer industry has an opportunity to shed more light on just how powerful women's contribution has been. I'm inspired Miller Lite created the space for this reflection, and I'm proud to play a part in repping this step in the right direction. We really made some good $#!T together!"

Proof that “the beer industry” has spent years “treating women like objects” — and by extension, appealing to the vulgar and base instincts of the kind of male chauvinist pigs who enjoy an attractive woman in, eg., a bikini — are depictions of women (and men) enjoying beer on, eg,. a beach, occasionally even alongside a “fratty” pitbull, or maybe a conch salad. And to make sure such visualized sexual violence never again happens in a country in which sexual attraction has now been deemed tantamount to rape by the very same activists who will simultaneously explain how sex work for women is “empowering”, Miller Lite’s female marketing team has taken it upon itself to erase that history, and with it, those females who visibly represented it. Because let’s face it: having no agency of their own, females in bikinis — the ones Miller Lite has gathered up and turned into literal shit (having first blurred their faces in the ad, to ensure that they are de-individualized and reduced purely to their animal appeal; and who also — happily! — won’t have to be compensated for use of their images) — were likely suffering from false consciousness, forever enmeshed and complicit in both white supremacy and patriarchy, both of which are the structural narratives that inscribe women who have not yet become sufficiently woke to their own circumscribed plights. But don’t fret, sisters. More enlightened and sophisticated women will do the worrying and fighting for you. You just sit back and look pretty in the meantime.

My immediate response upon seeing this ad was to Tweet the following:

Angry, entitled beer woman is not meant to sell anything. She’s written with the intent to meet CEI requirements and keep Miller Lite’s corporate social credit score high. It’s protection money to a mafia run by professional victimization archeologists.

This observation was met with persistent hostility by many on the left, who appeared in my timeline to talk about women’s “empowerment,” or the “sexualizing” of the female form, which — as form — is designed to appeal sexually to males in order that we might propagate the species. That is, leftists have again as their aim the destruction and replacement of any norm they ascribe to western sensibilities. Biological reality is merely a western discourse adopted in the service of a meta-narrative maintaining and reinforcing white male structural dominance, the argument goes. It is “oppressive,” and its proponents, “oppressors.” In this way, the cultural Marxist — and that’s who the Woke are, though most of them wouldn’t recognize that fact — can use one of any number of identity groups to perform the same performative task: problematize western ideals in order to replace them with the demands of experiential knowledge production and identity-based hierarchies. To drive this point home, consider Miller Lite’s most famous ad campaign: the “tastes great” vs. “less filling” commercials of the 70s and 80s, often featuring sports celebrities battling over what is presented as the existential question in the epistemic space of American light beers.

Today, the very notion of a light beer being less filling — and lower in calories — runs afoul of the Fat Studies battalion of the Social Justice army of activists. The violent implication of such a campaign — that people are being directed, by current social discourses on body image, to watch their calories in order to maintain a body that, champions of Fat Studies would argue, is oppressive and onerous — doesn’t promote “body positivity,” which is personal, subjective, experiential, and so, real. That such a campaign also doesn’t promote type 2 diabetes and heart disease is likewise true, but let’s not nitpick. This is after all very serious business.

At its core, the radical skepticism is the point: to reduce every argument to the oppressor / oppressed binary, then contend that the only way to battle such a permanent state of enslavement for the now nearly infinite number of marginalized bodies on the intersectional scale (though it is illegitimate to conceive of these as individuals, because doing so would concede that individuals exist, and with them, individual rights), is to adopt a critical consciousness that allows you to understand how to understand your own complicity in the overarching oppression, to keep interrogating it, and to reach a culture-wide consensus of critical consciousness — a new hegemony — in which “inclusivity” (or now, “belonging”) is required, and cannot allow for anything outside itself to be granted legitimacy. The perfect Miller Lite commercial for 2023, from the perspective of, say, the Human Rights Council or BlackRock, might be to film Lizzo in a kiddie pool filled with beer, donuts and loose meats bobbing along the surface, then just let her go to town for a minute and a half while a rainbow cavalcade of identity tokens cheer her on from beach chairs — though dressed in the swimwear of the late 1800s.

If I had to guess, I’d say that the marketing team who thought it a good idea to scold men for advertisements the beer industry created to appeal to them — as if it was beer consumers who created the ads themselves — are likely true believers in the cause of Social Justice pedagogy and activism; that is, they believe it is the job of beer marketers to promote grand social change, even if that means shaming and berating their most loyal customers for sins that were never really sins. And that’s because they just know better than the filthies what comes to count as “good shit” and what comes to count as “bad shit.” Good shit is what they decide it is. Bad shit is what they don’t like. It really is that simple, and to them, it really is that clear cut. Such is the arrogance that comes with presuming to speak for 51% of the population, with the caveat that of course some women will disagree with you, but that those kind of women are captured, “male-adjacent,” suffering from “false consciousness,” and are generally to be pitied as the trashy remnants of a broken age.

From the perspective of the corporation itself, however, the desire to keep a perfect CEI score is what drives these types of ad campaigns. Stakeholder capitalism is global leftism that is using the threat of cutting off investment capital as a way to capture corporations and drive a particular and pernicious collectivist agenda. It’s a type of fascism in the service of global communism. Groups like BlackRock and Vanguard control entire master narratives aimed at undermining a western liberal order, and they have the power to incentivize behavior by either the carrot or the stick. The behavior they wish to incentivize, it is increasingly apparent, is behavior that eventually removes guardrails to individual rights and trains those raised with western sensibilities to become more amenable to a new set of standards by which your betters will run things for you, and you can stop thinking so much, binge your Netflix, and eat your bugs. It’s 2030. You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy! As serfs always have been.

The push-back we’re seeing against these kinds of ads are the product, I believe, of something in the American consciousness that rebels against being told what to believe — particularly, what one must believe. Those who react viscerally to social scoldings are the holdouts — those for whom the programming hasn’t yet taken, and whose outlaw spirit is still part of the national DNA.

There’s a case to be made that something larger is at work here — that these ads are themselves launched in order to gin up outrage which then harms iconic American brands. Us destroying us. Under this line of reasoning, our very disgust with the trajectory of the larger culture is being used to kill off yet other emblems of the west, in a continuation of the cultural Marxist project by more material means. And that should concern us. (See, for instance, here.)

But for now — and bracketing for the moment the idea of 5-D chess being deployed against us — I think it important to display our collective exhaustion and disgust with the politicization of every last bit of the culture, and to make those who are true believers at the very least feel a portion of the exasperation they cause those to whom they presume to lecture. It’s not until the left ceases to feel emboldened to pursue its agenda openly and without worry of any serious backlash that we can even begin to re-orient the country toward its Founding and Framing. Rejecting such ads may seem like an insignificant act. And indeed, there are those out there whose role is to make you believe that — mocking you for puny gestures and your silly boycotts.

Laugh back at them. Refute them. Reject them. And reject their premises entirely. The quickest way to cease ceding ground is to fight for every inch. This is what the left has always known and done.

Now, it’s our turn.

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