Jon Stewart lives, laughs, and criticizes corporate pinkwashing on a new Daily Show
Jon Stewart enters Pride Month’s annual soulless void of corporate political pandering
Aux News Pinkwashing
Jon Stewart kicked off the second episode of The Daily Show’s annual Pride Month spectacular with an update on the “hollow corporate pandering” that has haunted the endcaps at Target for the last few Junes. Running through the confusing, unnecessary, and shockingly overthought advertisements, promotions, and sex-position-themed Whoppers, Stewart watched Kid Rock machinegun a table of Bud Lights, a talking horse discussing the American spirit, and a right-wing rumor that shopping at Target makes you “gay and a pervert.” The ebb and flow of celebrating diversity before placating conservative values is a nauseating up and down that should not be. To wit, Stewart offered a simple plea on tonight’s show: Corporate America, please stand down.
Pride Month always becomes an awkward battleground for corporations. It is there that corporate America hopes to wow employees, customers, and future employees with their concerns over three of the most bone-chilling words in the English language: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet, as soon as people aren’t looking as closely, these valiant organizations upon which this great country was founded shutter DEI programs because, yeah, saying you care about equality doesn’t do shit for your bottom line and tends to make the loudest, most annoying customers even louder and more annoying. Principles aren’t really corporations’ forte. They’re much better at making money by selling products at inflated prices.
Thankfully, by frequently slipping into his blue-collar, Jersey boy accent, Stewart was able to properly harness our collective exhaustion with pinkwashing efforts and the fight against them. Simply put, no one looks over their shoulder at an imaginary graphics box better than Stewart, and tonight saw him in fine form. His authentic and seemingly spontaneous reactions continue to give the show added energy. He is such a natural fit for the role that it never seems like he’s reading cue cards, even as he refers to them for a classic Arby’s dig. Like Steve Harvey on Family Feud, Stewart can cause the audience to erupt in laughter with the slightest tilt of the head.
The weak point was the button sketch starring Desi Lydic and Michael Kosta, which too closely resembled the crutch often used by Last Week Tonight. These sketches tend to recap all the points made in the meat of the segment but rarely elevate the episode. Nevertheless, it offered a window into a better world where corporations return to their roots by “making products as cheaply as we can and selling them to you at the highest price possible.” Happy Pride!
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The bit where he examined the list of ingredients of a box of Mac & Cheese was a great showcase of Stewart’s talents. The joke itself was just alright but his performance elevated it to something that had me laughing out loud.
Jon should book THE SPR3 as s musical guest!
No one wants more of your shitty band.
This is like Ross’ music from Friends.
People complaining about “pinkwashing” (new term? fine) is becoming a trope in and of itself I feel like something else needs to happen here it’s not enough to just point out that companies are pinkwashing in June each year. That’s only half of a joke. There’s gotta be a way to snark back here beyond just pointing it out.
and a right-wing rumor that shopping at Target makes you “gay and a pervert.”Y’know, we were really making progress for a while. Marriage equality was broadly popular and “gay” fell out of favour as an insult. Now it feels like the 90s again (in the worst way) and shitheads are once again acting like allowing LGBTQ people to exist will lead to people marrying farm animals and assaulting children on a daily basis. It’s just so tiresome.
The mirrored shades-wearing walking thumb set sure does get into their feelings about this shit.Funniest thing is when it’s a self-professed atheist yammering at you, with no knowledge or recognition that what they’re parroting is barely-evolved Puritan-level shit of the type that nearly got the Puritans genocided (in England) for being absolutely insane.
One of the things that I always find amusing is our notion of “Puritan” attitudes. Based on historical records, fully 25% of all marriages in “Puritan” New England were of the shotgun (“blunderbuss”?) variety.
And those were just the ones that were caught!
Puritan people were freaks just like the rest of humanity.
It’s funny/tragic just HOW DAMNED MUCH we cribbed from Puritanism, right down to our notion of “justice,” because the Puritans (and I cannot stress this enough) were dangerously insane. In a way that almost – *almost* – makes our national firearm fetish make a certain kind of sense.
In hindsight, maybe the people who burned women alive in public shouldn’t have been the founding moral values of our nation.
Yah but they were tempting men tho. Fairsies squaresies.NOTE: FFS J/K
Hell, they co-opted a civil war that started over taxation in England and escalated it to regicide upon victory and then a dictatorship.
This all 100 years BEFORE the American Revolution. Which feels like important context as to why there were so many Puritans in the new world, considering that after Cromwell died, they brought back the son of the dead king and disinterred/hung Cromwell’s corpse for treason.
Which feels like important context as to why there were so many Puritans in the new world, considering that after Cromwell died, they brought back the son of the dead king and disinterred/hung Cromwell’s corpse for treason. Fellow Milton fan? 😀 I’m glad someone else here knows all this. It’s a pretty fascinating story. I like the theory that Milton only lived to write Paradise Lost because he was considered too pathetic to execute, and that he wrote it from that social/governmental perspective.
i don’t necessarily think ‘giving credit’ is the right way to phrase this, but the current renaming of racism to be ‘anti-DEI’ is probably the strongest branding racism has had in a long time. it’s just vaguely official/corporate/government sounding enough to sound like a real thing, and if you’re dumb and racist it’s gotta be like catnip.
For all the hue and cry over gay stuff these days, the majority of Americans are broadly supportive of LGBT rights. There’s a greater percentage of right-leaning people support gay marriage now, than there was of left-leaning people supporting gay marriage twenty years ago. (Only by a couple of percentage points, but gay marriage is still more popular on the anti-gay side of the political spectrum than it used to be on the pro-gay side.) A greater or lesser amount of rainbows on store shelves and social media isn’t really anything to worry about.
I’m not sure that’s true in terms of the real world (i.e. outside social media and talking head-land). A majority of Republicans have supported gay marriage for a while now, as long as churches are not required by law to perform the services. It’s generally a more libertarian view on the matter.
That depends on where you are and which Republicans you’re around. My Trump-humping relations would be all too happy to outlaw marriage again except for the people who “deserve” it.
The Supreme Court, in the majority opinion where they struck down abortion rights, openly suggested that they “revisit” their ruling about marriage equality. There’s been an explosion of anti-LGBTQ legislation the past few years. There’s astroturfed campaigns across the country trying to ban books from every classroom and library that even tangentially mentions LGBTQ people. Sure looks like the real world to me.
The Supreme Court didn’t strike down abortion rights, it said they were not written into the Constitution as a privacy matter and were to be legislated by the states. Legal scholars agree that Roe was on shaky legal ground from the beginning, and if abortion had been addressed state to state via legislation 50 years ago then we’d long since have settled law.
I didn’t bring that up to debate abortion rights, I brought that up because the justices were practically begging the same far-right loons who challenged Roe to start attacking marriage equality the same way.LGBTQ rights are in the same position as abortion: broadly popular with regular people, but vehemently opposed by a small band of extremists. The problem is that those extremists have completely seized control of the GOP and are now doing as much damage as they can.
the transgender stuff caused folks to lose their minds. they were ok with gays when they were taking up pretty much suburban lifestyles cis folk could relate to, or women wanting a gay friend to dish to and get fashion/makeup/hair tips from, or really even drag queens who identified as gay men when not in drag. Of course its largely a generational thing, with younger liberals/progressives being like of course its fine and older otherwise liberal/progressives balking. not sure where the cutoff lies, precisely.
Why is corporate pandering during Pride month any worse than the corporate pandering done the other 11 months of the year?
Look at it this way. If you are being pandered to in Corporate America, even if only for a month, that means you’ve been mostly accepted.
I wouldn’t put it quite this way as there should definitely be some feet being held against the fire… but I do think it’s a better sign than not. It was much more worrying that many of these same corporations dialed back support when they got pushback.
Perhaps the better (and more cynical way) to put it is that if you’re being pandered to, you’re an emerging market that corporations feel is worth exploiting.Let’s get that gay bread, I guess? Let’s get some assholes paid by finessing people they’d otherwise spit on if they could get away with it.
It worked for Disney.
I mean, sure, but:if they could get away with it.I’d rather have them think they can’t get away with it and at least promote some kind of acceptance. Again, doesn’t mean you don’t call out their two-faced bullshit, but it’s better than the inverse.
“You have money, and we want it, but not at the expense of this other group which has more money.”
The right wing also wants corporations to stop acknowledging the gays, so I do t know why so many social slacktavists are so quick to help them.
I don’t think that’s true. It means that there is a significant group of people to whom that pandering would appeal, though.
No, it just means that the corporations recognize that you have money, and they want it.
But that’s my point.LGBTQ+ people had money before. They have always had just as much (if not slightly more) money as any other person.It’s only been since the 2010s that corporations have started to not be afraid of pandering to LGBTQ+. I think that is a small but tangible step towards greater acceptance.I’m not suggesting that this means equality has been reached. That day won’t come until religious fundamentalism is gone from politics. And that day may never come.
Hey, whatever happened to “Juneteenth?”*crickets*
It’s a federal holiday
Yah but dipshit trolling in hopes of a comment section race war tho.Again, as ever, I miss when trolls were actually funny, or clever, or creative. Now they’re all weird, anarcho capitalist, alt right-adjacent fucksticks trying to do a redpill.
We’re having a cookout, but I doubt you’re invited.
it’s next week.
I’m assuming you are a white guy.If so, Juneteenth was never for you.
So this is the day you learn that things don’t cease to exist just bc you’re not paying attention to them. Otherwise your parents would’ve been very very lucky.
I feel like one of the biggest delineations between Gen X and subsequent generations is that Gen Xers hold no expectation that a corporation should reflect their values, or should even pretend to have values. I prefer my corporations soulless, thank you very much.
I don’t think most people expect corporations to reflect their values, just not actively oppose them. I’m Gen X. I stopped going to Chik Fil-A because of their support of anti-LGBTQ causes. Most places I shop or buy food, I don’t know their values, so I don’t care. It’s only when they put it out there for all to see.On the other hand, if a company shows support for a value I hold, that doesn’t mean I’ll support them monetarily, but it means I’ll tend their way, all else being equal.
Yeah, I’m not sure “I just sit back and enjoy the rot” is the moral high ground ultra man thinks it is.
Most places I shop or buy food, I don’t know their values, so I don’t care. It’s only when they put it out there for all to see.This, 100%. I’m a Xennial, so I don’t have all the Gen X hallmarks, but yeah, when companies are out and proud (pun definitely intended) about being evil, I avoid them at all costs. I know that all brands are evil and exist only to extract wealth, but when they venture into the “we are actively sponsoring laws designed to kill people we don’t like because Jeezus said so” like CFA and Hobby Lobby, that’s a company that’s getting exactly zero of my dollars.Or, as I like to say, I love shopping at Hobby Lobby, their sales are amazing. I got 100% off of everything I brought home the other day.
Not this Gen Xer! I ate Frosted Miniwheats because of their stance on Kosovo!
i dunno about that one.
I’m an elder Millennial and I look at corporations as Neutral Evil at best.
The only reason they do Pride promotions is because they realized it doesn’t affect their bottom line. If that weren’t the case, no way they’d be doing Pride tie-ins.
I disagree. I think they do pride tie-ins because they think it will make the line go up. If they thought it would have no impact, they wouldn’t do it. Why spend money on something if it won’t raise (or at least maintain) profit?Bud Light tried a trans promotion because they thought it would increase market share, and therefore profit, not because they thought it was morally or ethically right.
Exactly. Corporations don’t do activism. They do marketing.
yeah gen xers became their parents, for sure.
grandpa simpson it’ll happen to you.gif
A benefit of the expectation for corporations to show values is that it has made some of them show their shitty values. The expansion of pride themes forces companies like Chickfila and Hobby Lobby to acknowledge they are backing anti-LTGBQT & anti-abortion groups that are actively taking rights from people or makes Goya willing to tell everyone they are run by election denying MAGAs. Who knows if Elon would have shown just how many ways he can be terrible by now if he wasn’t responding to the ad campaigns of businesses. For those with choices, it’s nice working for a company that states we don’t care what bathroom people are using, what healthcare they choose to use, or what gender they identify with.
Exactly; I wouldn’t say voting with your dollar and snubbing businesses for going mask-off religious fascist is as cuddly-cuddly as op describes; if anything it’s acknowledging the corruption in the system and protesting it within the bounds and using the tools of capitalism.
Gen X here. I give 0 shits for the most part, and am contentedly nihilist enough to smirk at the hypocrisy of the people selectively boycotting a corporation when everything else they don’t bother boycott is equally tarnished.
This is the Gen x-est comment.And exhibits everything wrong with Gen X ethos. Not least of which… if nothing you do matters and you don’t care, why so judgy?
As a Gen X’er myself, my perspective has long been that corporate activism via advertising is performative at best, allowing companies to look like they care while conducting business as usual. I’d be curious to hear from members of the LGBT+ community whether these campaigns actually make them more likely to buy products from those companies (I’m skeptical). Seems to me the risk of NOT doing such ads is more of a motivator.
Yes? GenX queer here and of course I’m more likely to pull into a parking lot with a rainbow flag banner than one with a MAGAt banner. Yeah, it’s pandering but I appreciate my money is good enough to be pandered to. I avoid CFA and Hobby Lobby. I can’t vouch for every company I do or don’t buy from but when the companies are out there saying they think people like me are worth advertising to, versus companies that don’t think I’m a full human, I’m going to spend my money with the Good Guys rather than the mustache-twirling Evil Villains, thanks.
It’s funny, because in other threads you see apoplectic dipshits proclaiming that queer visibility and incremental increases in queer representation in media amounts to a fucking takeover.I guess they actually, truly think that one day it’s just gonna ZOMG ALL BE QUEER CONTENT (it won’t), and that it’ll be a crime to even *try* to exist as a cis het white male in any form of media.
Realistically, the entire queer community is just another segment/demographic these companies want to market to. Thassit. It’s part and parcel of the same capitalist society that most of the aforementioned apoplectic dipshits champion.But, hey, a bunch of mediocre creators couldn’t get their dime-a-dozen honky travelogue/“Eat, Pray, Love” vanity projects off the ground, so clearly teh gayes r taking over or something.
It’s not just queer stuff, either. I remember a cereal commercial that featured an interracial couple and comments everywhere were furious that they were “shoving it down our throats.” I don’t know what “it” was, but having it exist on TV amounted to having “it” shoved down your throat.
Yep.If it exists, and they know it, they have to wrangle with it. And if they have to wrangle with it, they might end up hating it less. And if they end up hating it less, they might start to reexamine the network of various emotional zippers and haphazard mental stitching that holds their fragile asses together.It’s weirdly childlike, in a way. Many conservatives see incuriosity as a bulwark, but when they finally meet or directly encounter someone in a hated out-group, they’re like “Oh, yeah, that one’s alright.” And you almost want to say “Oh GOOOOOOOOD! You’re learning! Now consider that – *just* like there are different kinds of white Christians out there – there are vast differences among people *within out-groups*!”
I also wonder how much of this hatred is based on the fact that those in the majority often don’t have a real sense of community. White people (of which I am one) don’t necessarily have a lot that connects them with other white people. Straight people don’t have a lot that connects them with other straight people. Men are often socialised to be actively competitive with and antagonistic towards other men. Other social groups have found the value in community, often as a response to persecution. I think these majority groups look over at these communities that they can’t replicate and feel a certain amount of envy.
Damn! I’d say there’s something to that!
it’s also the difference between feeling oppressed and actually being oppressed.
Well said. There really is no “white culture.” Like, what would that be? Putting mayonnaise on sandwiches? But damn if there aren’t a lot of morons complaining that it’s being destroyed by…something. It’s exhausting and I have to apologize to all non-whites for having to listen to that crap. It’s like I see a Trump rally and feel the need to say, “We’re not all really like that.”
It’s weird because there is a plurality of cultures within the mass of white people; there’s Irish culture, Polish culture, Norwegian culture, Italian culture, and on and on. White people from those groups can connect back to any of it if they choose. But there’s a certain subset of us that’s obsessed with unifying whites into some collective monolith, despite a long history of us refusing to tolerate the slightest differences between us.
Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I think you’re spot on with the envy angle.
The competitive part it is huge. Looking back on life as a straight white man with a Catholic upbringing, there were absolutely zero systematic roadblocks to my success in life. Even in a low-income house, my only real obstacles were things like trying to get good grades or save up enough money to do things. That created a very “me against the world” type of competitive atmosphere, never working to get equal status of others but to get/stay ahead of everyone. I think the community thing is because every common white heavy group is geographic based, but completely ignoring why it is all white people in that location. People who attended the same school, church, job, etc.
Wanted to come back to this, as it’s on point. Particularly in working class white communities I’ve been part of, the scrappy mentality is just (sometimes literally) beaten into you. It’s “That other guy ABSOLUTELY wants your shit, you gotta take it FIRST” energy. And, like…okay? I agree that, as my dad puts it, “The world doesn’t owe you SHIT.” Is what it is. My overall problem with the mentality is that it encourages and creates insularity. It’s a roadblock in the way of *actually* changing a community for the better, which tends to improve the lives of people *in* that community. But yeah, even the tightest-knit suburban white communities are unnecessarily cutthroat, as a matter of course. Just pure, unexamined, lizard-brained reaction. Eh, maybe we’ll learn some shit, someday. Until then, there’s bound to be a few more of these, so there’ll be some humor in there: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
It’s the same debate with “race-swapping” a fictional character. It’s the same every time. You get three groups of people…
The first is the group that says “You can’t have a black mermaid!”
Second is the group that tries to logically explain why you can have a black mermaid, even though MERMAIDS AREN’T REAL.
And the third is the group that’s just angry seeing a black person on their screen where there wasn’t one before.
Yeah, race swapping can be meat for conversation, but only if the counterpoint isn’t “NO I DON’T LIKE IT.”
The first and third groups there are the same. No one genuinely gives a shit whether you can have a black mermaid, or a black stormtrooper, or black Tolkien dwarves, or black Valarians (boy this has come up a lot lately eh?) It’s always just racism. None of these people object as strongly to other departures from source material. The original little mermaid dies at the end, the origin of stormtroopers has been retconned multiple times, no-one is crying out against the erasure of Fatty Bolger, and the HOTD source material is boring as hell (which the show departed from by being good). Whether it’s because they’re explicitly racist and trying to hide it, or because they’re uncomfortable seeing black people and haven’t acknowledged it to themselves, its just racism.
I don’t particularly care about black Elves but I absolutely am crying at the erasure of Fatty Bolger. He helped rally the Hobbits of Buckland to chase away the Ringwraiths and he led a partisan resistance against Saruman during the Scouring of the Shire.Circling back to black Elves/your actual point, though, I remember the exact same fervor about black Vulcans when Tuvok showed up on Voyager. It’s all, as you mentioned, just an excuse. Like Rings of Power and the Star Wars sequels kind of sucked but it had nothing to do with the race of any actor.
I would swap “because” in for “even though”
Fourth group: The ones who go on and on about how people were ruthlessly attacking others unprovoked just because they had a different opinion on the blackness potential of a mermaid, and, just so you know, all those troublemakers were ACTUALLY a much bigger group of fuss-makers than the folks who only wanted to focus on ethics in mermaid racial makeup.
one of the most insane things about that commercial debacle (besides the racism anyway) was that it was only a little over a decade ago.
Remember that Folger’s commercial when the dude was clearly banging his sister?PornHub remembers.
I watched some short retrospective on that, recently. One of those “Legit HOW did this make it past multiple people?” things.
interestingly, i think this is probably the slowest year in terms of corporate pride branding i’ve seen in a decade+.
Well yeah, ‘cause inflation and stagnant wages are killing us, so nobody can afford to go shopping.
Bigger issue is housing, IMO. What was the old percentage/rule of thumb? You should only spend about 30% of monthly income on housing? Yeah, that BEEN fucked for a good, long while now.But, hey, FBI raided RealPage, so baby steps, I guess: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/realpage-rent-price-fixing-probe-escalates-with-fbi-raid/475109
every company is still advertising. they’re just not doing it with any pride angle.
Seeing that we’re in an election year, I bet businesses are scared the pushback will be even worse than last year. They want to go after the market, but also trying to stay out of some MAGAs campaign speech.
sure, i buy that.marketing/advertising in general is in a weird spot as well.