Bud Lite, Transgender, and Drag: Eventually Culture War Issues Become a Big Nothing, but Until Then They Will be Milked for Some Moral Outrage and Political Use
American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the second year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.
August 1, 2023
I was in Tbilisi, the Capital of the Republic of Georgia, reading about the Bud Lite issue. From a country miles away from the United States, an issue such as this one can look strange: I had trouble putting it in perspective. The main issue was that Dylan Mulvaney was sent ONE can of Bud Lite. I still need to keep thinking about that and that I have that correct—one can of beer with her face on it. I play in a baseball league made up of 60-year-olds and older and one of the teams is called the Bud Lites, they have had that name for years. I joked with the manager wondering if the team was getting beer cans with Mulvaney’s face on it. We both wanted a can since a year from now selling them on eBay would certainly fetch a few dollars. As I understand it, Mulvaney only discussed receiving this one can on her social media sites. In other words, to have seen her promotion about the can, and obviously a plug to have her followers buy Bud Lite, you would have needed to have signed on to receive her social media posts. So, one can of beer and limited access to only those people who had clicked that they wanted to receive her posts was the reach of her marketing skills. This was not a national media campaign by Anheuser-Busch, where you as an unwilling viewer were confronted by a transsexual I had never heard about until the uproar over this one can of beer. The only transsexuals I ever heard about were Christine Jorgensen and Renee Richards. I know there is some swimmer who swam for the University of Pennsylvania, but I never followed that issue closely, or even cared to do so. Considering that tuition at the University of Pennsylvania is, give or take, around $52,000 a year, listening to people get all hot-under-the-collar about a school most people cannot afford to ever send their kids to, seemed odd to care about.
Christine Jorgensen, I remember hearing about from my mother, I think we both were puzzled about a man becoming a woman. Jorgensen was the first to publicize her sexual transition beginning in 1952 in Denmark. Her publicity made her a celebrity when she came back to the United States. Actually, she was outed when the New York Daily News published an article about her surgery. But after being outed she seemed to use the publicity to her advantage and developed a nightclub act. Renee Richards, I had known about, and I bumped into her in a bookstore in Forest Hills, New York. I remember backing up and turned around to apologize to whoever I bumped into and there she was. Richards is an ophthalmologist who played professional tennis. She was involved in a New York court case that ruled in her favor so that she could play in United States Tennis Association matches.
So, Kid Rock pulls out a rifle and shoots up some TV sets because he was showing his disgust that Caitlyn Jenner joined Fox News as a contributor. As Jenner stated, “I am humbled by this unique opportunity.” Added to Rock, or is it Kid, shooting up some TV sets, because Jenner first appeared on the Fox News show “Hannity,” Kid Rock shot up some of Hannity’s books. Oh, wait, that did not happen. Then, Kid Rock must have announced he was canceling his subscription to Vanity Fair magazine because they put Jenner on the cover in July 2015. Then, he put a stack of Vanity Fair out in a field and shot them up. Oh, wait, neither did that happen. But, beer, somehow that just hit a certain nerve so that the issue has spread to involve Garth Brooks. Brooks, about to open a bar in Nashville said he would be selling Bud Lite. The way Brooks stated it was not really an endorsement of Bud Lit or Mulvaney, but an either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us attitude is what has taken hold. Brooks stated, “And yes, we’re going to serve every brand of beer. We just are. It’s not our decision to make. Our thing is this, if you [are let] into this house, love one another.” A very wholesome, embracing statement, that, unfortunately was not seen that way if you happen to feel that you are part of some culture war, and your side must win. The best thing Brooks can do now is to invite Caitlyn Jenner to the bar and give her a Bud Lite.
Fox News and Vanity Fair are certainly more accessible than whatever social media sites Mulvaney is on. Admittedly, as I write this, I still am not inclined to want to sign on and receive something, I guess, in my email or on my cellphone from her—it simply does not interest me. Some of this uproar stems from the customer base of beer in general, as opposed to Nike, which is also receiving some backlash over using Mulvaney. About 60 percent of beer consumption is male with about 21 per cent between the ages of 25-34, and Southern states account for slightly more than one-third of all beers consumed. In addition, more people without a college degree make up most beer drinkers, although statistics on this are not all that clear. In other words, this sounds like an issue that is ripe for exploitation by Donald Trump and the other Republicans (go ahead try to name them all) in the race to win the Republican nomination to run for President next year.
Interesting, Kid Rock and his assault on Bud Lite received so much attention that it paints a picture of him seen in only one way: A good old American boy just standing up for traditional American values. Just to put Rock into a broader perspective, he won an award in 1999 at the MTV Video Music Awards as the Sluttiest Male Celebrity, probably because he dedicated his first album to a sex act, orally speaking. The president of an organization called Campaign for Children and Families, a conservative organization, was outraged that he was invited by then President George W. Bush’s daughters to perform at a concert, hosted by the daughters. As the president of the organization stated:
I just read Kid Rock's sexually explicit lyrics and feel ashamed and dirty for even looking at his songs. If this sex-crazed animal, whose favorite word is the F-word, is allowed to sing at Bush's inauguration this will send a clear message to pro-family Americans that the Republican Party has taken them for a ride and ditched them in the gutter. This is the worst I've ever seen. This guy's singing about how he sexually exploits every girl and then asks them if he can do it with their moms.
There is a scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man are finally in the Emerald City and they are in the hall where they are meeting the wizard and Toto pulls back the curtain and the wizard says, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” There is a lot of that going on here. Kid Rock now, not him and his background is getting attention, Bud Lite continues to be in the news about sales dropping, and sometimes the company’s stock price, but less attention is on Nike, another company working with Mulvaney, and nothing about Jenner on Fox News. Think about it, no attention is focused on Caitlyn Jenner on Fox News or on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Associated with the issue of transgender is the issue of the drag queen story hour. This organization began in 2015 but did not receive much attention until a man wearing a Proud Boys shirt pulled out a gun at a story hour in Sparks, Nevada in June 2022. Suddenly, national attention was focused on a different way of reading to children. I guess there is no reason to address RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has been on television for more than a decade. I wonder if he will drink a Bud Lite in any upcoming episode or Kid Rock will shoot up RuPaul merchandise or the Proud Boys will protest in front of the studios where the show is taped. Of course, back in the 1950s there was “Uncle Miltie,” or “Mister Television,” Milton Berle who dressed in drag on his TV variety show. Or in the 1970s there was Flip Wilson who dressed as Geraldine. I guess drag is seen as acceptable, under the right situations, while a drag queen reading to children is different. I assume conservatives approve of drag on television since I have not heard of any outrage over RuPaul. By now, RuPaul has to be a regular fixture on television. Another way to understand this issue, I guess tying transgender and drag together is that somewhere a line was crossed, but where I am not sure. If this whole unable-to-easily-sort-out-this-whole-affair can be used by Republicans to rile up a conservative base and get them to vote, well that seems to be the point.
The thing about a culture war is it can fit a simplicity of how some want to look at American society. Finally, here is something to get behind, particularly if you feel America is going to hell in a handbasket. Talk radio, studies point to more than 90 percent of talk radio as being conservative, adds fuel to the fire. As I drive around parts of America I flip to different stations, and the outrage over Mulvaney and drag queens seems to take up far too much time on these shows. I have to wonder how many people are having their outrage amped up by talk radio even though (like me) they had never heard of Dylan Mulvaney before all this exploded from limited social media interaction and one can of beer. Now, the outrage is metastasizing to include other reasons to keep the uproar going.
Conservative outrage has spread to affect Maybelline since Mulvaney has a video putting on Maybelline makeup. What is interesting about the reaction against Maybelline is that Mulvaney’s involvement is labeled as both an attack on women and children. As one site states:
Many people believe that Mulvaney is not just entering women’s spaces, but mocking them while doing it.
[Sara] Gonzales [of “The News & Why It Matters”] says women have been told to “smash the patriarchy” and “get rid of all of these men who are defeating women,” yet this is clearly “a man coming into a woman’s space… but the movement itself is targeting children.”
How children are being targeting I have no clue, but it is probably part of the broader issue of believing that there is some type of grooming going on where children are targeted for sex by transgenders and drag queens.
Most good studies point to family members or a close family friend as sexually abusing children, often cited as more than 90 per cent, the focus by culture warriors, however, is on transgenders and drag queens as the culprits. The News & Why It Matters which went after Mulvaney as mocking women and targeting children, is less news and more the usual conservative outrage.
Mulvaney is an easy target, if you conveniently put aside all the other issues. Exactly, how this is expected to play out is anyone’s guess. As long as the issue is kept simple, just focus on Mulvaney, Bud Lite, the drag queen story hour, maybe throw in the issue of sex change for kids (which seems like an issue left for parents and their child’s doctor) and somehow something that looks like winning in a culture war might be within reach.
The thing about the culture war mentality is that there is the here and now way of looking at it, as with Mulvaney and Bud Lite and pondering how this issue will end or just fade away, and then there is a much broader way of looking at the culture war as a continuous process of change and adaptation. In 1955, Sports Illustrated ran a cover issue with Willie Mays, then outfielder for the New York Giants, Leo Durocher, the team manager, and between them Larraine Day, an actress and wife of Durocher. Day had her hands on the shoulders of both men. Reaction against the picture was predictable—it was not well received. One man wrote that it was “disgusting.” The Nashville, Tennessee man wrote:
To tell you that I was shocked at SI’s cover would be putting it mildly. The informative note inside the magazine tells me that this is Mrs. Leo Durocher, a white woman, with her arm affectionately around the neck of Willie Mays, a Negro ballplayer.
We see TV commercials today with interracial couples as normal, which is a long way from the reaction to this 1955 Sports Illustrated cover. As one article stated:
[There] are [an] increasing number of advertisements selling everything from cereal to prescription drugs that portray the American family in ways few companies and advertising agencies would have dared a generation ago.
More than 50 years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriage, a growing number of ads feature interracial couples with biracial children.
The acceptance of these commercials is not all positive. For example, one State Farm commercial featured a black man presenting an engagement ring to a white woman—that was not necessarily received well. One Twitter comment about the commercial stated, “This is disgusting, and nobody want to see this.” But, in the case of this commercial, there was no widespread reaction, like in the Bud Lite situation. For the most part most people that saw the commercial simply accepted it without a thought, which is normal—something that is just part of everyday life. I am sure you have seen interracial couples in commercials more times than you can count. Think about how you simply did not give a commercial with an interracial couple a second thought, which somehow will eventually happen with the Mulvaney issue. Despite that, I still want a Bud Lite with her face on it.
A thoughtful book titled, Why Liberals Win (Even When They Lose Elections): How America’s Raucous, Nasty, and Mean “Culture Wars” Make for a More Inclusive Nation, addressed this theme well: The broader way of looking at culture wars. As the author wrote:
[W]e have short memories. Because we move on. …[B]oth sides come to accept the new normal and conservatives move to the next fight. No conservative wants to disenfranchise Mormons (because they believed in polygamy). …So victories no longer appear to be ‘liberal.’ They are simply part of what it means to be an American.
Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Lite will pass, which some may hate to read. Until we reach that point, however, the uproar will continue, playing well on talk radio and some social media sites and popping its head on Fox News, News Max, and OAN. We can also assume that as the 2024 election season heats up (more so than where it is now) that this issue will be used, exploited, and manipulated as a political rallying cry.
Notes
BlazeTV Staff, “Maybelline is TORCHED after partnering with Dylan Mulvaney,” Blaze Media (May 1, 2023): https:// www.theblaze.com/shows/the-news-why-it-matters/maybelline-is-torched-after-partnering-with-dylan-mulvaney
Deborah Block, “Americans See More Interracial Relationships in Advertising,” VOA (March 7, 2021): https:// www.voanews.com/amp/usa_race-america_americans-see-more-interracial-relationships-advertising/6202928.html
Fast Facts: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse, CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: https:// www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childsexualabuse/fastfact.html
Infographic: Demographics of the beer consumer, Beverage Industry (November 7, 2017): https://www.bevindustry.com/articles/90656-infographic-demographics-of-the-beer-consumer
“KID ROCK’s Scheduled Appearance at BUSH Inaugural ‘Shocking,” Blabbermouth.net (January 6, 2005): https:// blabbermouth.net/news/kid-rock-s-scheduled-appearance-at-bush-inaugural-shocking
Kevin Mitchell, “‘Sports Illustrated had shattered a great taboo: How a magazine cover reflected baseball’s long, hard breaking of the colour barrier,” Saskatoon StarPhoenix (August 9, 2022): https://thestarphoenix.com/sports/baseball/an-insult-to-every-decent-white-woman-how-a-sports-illustrated-cover-reflected-baseballs-long-hard-breaking-of-the-colour-barrier/wcm/07707504-f4c7-4457-9333-7b1f1b7cf573/amp/
Stephen Prothero, Why Liberals Win (Even When They Lose Elections): How America’s Raucous, Nasty, and Mean “Culture Wars” Make for a More Inclusive Nation (New York, HarperOne, 2017)
The News & Why It Matters with Sara Gonzales: https:// www.youtube.com/@NewsandWhy
Cari Shane, “The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man,” Smithsonian Magazine (June 9, 2023): https:// www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-first-self-proclaimed-drag-queen-was-a-formerly-enslaved-man-180982311/#:~:text=In%20the%20early%2020th%20century%2C%20performers%20like%20Julian,did%20comedian%20Flip%20Wilson%20in%20the%20early%201970s.
Videos of Kid Rock Bud Lite Shooting, bing.com/videos: https:// www.bing.com/search?q=kid+rock+bud+light+shooting&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-1&ghc=1&lq=0&pq=kid+rock+bud+light+shooting&sc=8-27&sk=&cvid=C7511ED3C3F542DDA6C4646AC928E352&ghsh=0&ghacc=0&ghpl=