I don’t think we’ve ever seen this before the 21st Century emergence of The Great supid, with those entrusted with the management of for-profit companies deliberately choosing virtue -signaling over profitability. What does it all mean?
Today’s example is Sports Illustrated, which, I must confess, I thought was defunct. The once indispensable sports photography and commentary magazine almost went under last year and was apparently bought by a last-minute rescuer. So how does the magazine launch its comeback? Why, by prominently including the above model in its annual swimsuit issue due out this month, displaying other comely and not so comely models in gowns rather than bikinis (Who, other than Oprah, wants to see Gail King in the S.I. swimsuit issue?) and highlighting Angry Lesbian Megan Rapinoe to promote the issue. That should really draw the guys!
Why do this? Don’t get me wrong, now, I’ve always found the swimsuit issue an embarrassment, just a cheap way to get publicity and sell magazines by turning a sports publication into a girlie mag once a year. But what is the point of deliberately annoying the market for the girlie magazine issue, which is straight males? Over at Hot Air media, David Strom quotes “the editor who made [S.I. go woke]” as saying that “she was happy to jettison her audience,” when she said, allegedly, “We didn’t care. We thought that the right reader would come along with us and the wrong ones we didn’t want.”
I can’t find other any reference to that quote or who the speaker was, but the upcoming swimsuit issue sounds like it will certainly consistent with that objective. I guess you could call the strategy a success: circulation of S.I. is about 50% of what it was just a few years ago. And the readers are all woke and wonderful! But what company executive does that—decides that the product has attracted the “wrong” customers and their corporation only wants to get business from the “right” ones?
Well, quite a few companies, at least lately. That is certainly what Disney has done and continues to do, although I still find it difficult to believe that stockholders won’t step in, if belatedly, and force the company back on track, whatever that track is now. The Bud Light fiasco was perhaps the most similar example, even to the extent of a brand leader who stated in no uncertain terms that the beer’s market, though robust, needed to”evolve and elevate.” Victoria’s Secret also abandoned its core market in 2021, bringing in—there’s that name again—decidedly non-sexy Megan Rapinoe as the company’s new face. Shockingly, that strategy didn’t work, and as of 2024 Victory’s Secret is again going back into the sex fantasy market.
There’s a name for this phenomenon other than “batshit crazy.” It’s called “The Burge Effect” after conservative blogger David Burge, aka. Iowahawk. He outlined the process in an immortal tweet nine years ago, “1. Identify a respected institution 2. Kill it. 3. Gut it. 4.Wear its carcass as a skin suit, demanding respect.”
Sounds a lot like Harvard too, come to think of it.
Ethics Alarms 
That is a very interesting name for the woke apparently going Xipe Totec on profitable American institutions. It could also be called the Xipe effect, after the Aztec god who was worshiped with human sacrifice where the priests would peel off and wear the victims’ skin in a gruesome ritual. Supposedly their dripping blood would bring the fertilizing rain. I don’t know what these folks intended to get with this sacrifice, other than making the companies reflect the values of this minority.
This talk of right readers and wrong readers sounds a lot like what the Caliph Omar supposedly said before he burned the library at Alexandria: either the books there agree with the Quran and are not needed, or they do not agree with the Quran and are not wanted, either way, they are not necessary and destroying them is no loss. Of course now the woke historians are saying that this story is all anti-Muslim propaganda. Sure it is, I might actually believe that if the woke hadn’t already thrown so much mud at traditional history that they are suspect.
Some things are just by their very nature not woke and not suitable for being made to go woke. The customer base for those kind of things is usually also not suitable for wokeness. That customer base will disappear if you try to force the issue, and then whatever you have will not be profitable anymore. Business exists to be profitable, not to be a conduit for wokeness.
Somewhere along the line diversity stopped meaning “all different kinds of things and ideas” and started to mean “do what the left says ” What’s been going on the last few weeks on college campuses has absolutely nothing to do with diversity or equity or inclusion. It has everything to do with forcing everyone else to go along with the opinions of a noisy and uncontrolled minority on pain of mob violence. Thankfully this time at least some of America is not up for another summer of Love that is actually a summer of anarchy. Ironically, as happened in 1968, this anarchy could end up being what puts the Republicans back in power, as now they are the chaos rulers.
If Sports Illustrated wants to annoy its readership to the point where it continues to decline, they can do that. It is apparently a long way from football players sitting in front of the Christmas tree reminding viewers about the best thing to get for their sports fan relatives. Disney is a lost cause, although they have now shelved the ill advised attempt at a woke Snow White, which was shaping up to be a bomb before production even started. I don’t know what to think regarding the upcoming second season of Rings of Power, which is due to hit in August, but the trailer, which dropped yesterday seems to imply that there will be much more focus on action and less on annoying Mary Sue-ism. One can only hope.
I believe I recently read somewhere that Disney plans to release their woke Snow White next year, tentatively around March.
That is surely an apocryphal story. Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria. What remained did not survived the destruction of Rome. It is possible Omar never existed, the only accounts of Muhammed and the rightly guided caliphs are in Muslim sources.
Caesar didn’t deliberately burn the library, he set fire to Egyptian ships during a siege, but the fire burned out of control, as was common for big fires then. Yes, there was destruction, but not complete. The burning story has become legend and accepted as fact and typical of puritanical Muslims, who to this day sometimes destroy even other Muslim shrines like the Mosque of Yunus (Jonah).
It also might be an allegory to how Muslims have approached other aspects of struggle – Their writings allow for a very straightforward and uncomplicated approach to conflict: Do the thing, if the thing effected was on your team, it’ll understand, if not, good.
I’ve said this before in the context of Islam being a death cult: When a suicide bomber blows himself up with a busload of victims: If the victims are Muslim, that’s good, they’re with Allah now. If they weren’t, mission accomplished. There’s literally no reason to hesitate or think.
Yep. Some of the extremists have even said they love death. That’s what leads me to make memes like “72 virgins coming right up!” as you stare down the barrel of an American soldier’s gun, and led me to actually post “die, you heathen bastard!” the day the first Boston bomber was shot and run over (political correctness was suspended that day while there was a running battle).
What they are saying is this: “What they want – what they value – is wrong. They do not belong to us. We will not let them play in our sandbox until they accept our worldview and their position in the pecking order. We, after all, know what’s best for everyone.”
It’s promoting inclusion by threatening exclusion. Nobody likes being the odd man out, after all.
I do. Always have.
Martin DeCoder analyzes the interviews, speeches, & public appearances of prominent politicians, celebrities, and other public figures. He has a particular gift for explaining how they manage to say the ‘right’ thing without saying anything at all.
He has done several YouTube-based analyses of Bud Light Executive Alissa Heinerscheid’s role in that brand’s demise – particularly regarding her decision to unilaterally change Bud Light’s brand image. Here’s one such video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFvIzulsZA4
Warning: DeCoder’s analyses are both insightful and highly addictive. AMHIK
Many a truth is spoken in jest; from the indefatigable Babylon Bee:
Bud Light Announces Genius Comeback Plan To Wait Until Everyone Who Hates Them Dies Of Old Age
PWS
And lest we forget, Gillette’s (NSFW) Anna “ALL Beautiful Skin Deserves To Be Shown” O’Brien
PWS
My longtime Usenet ally made this point.
https://forum.pafoa.org/showthread.php?t=380110&p=4515750#post4515750
– Christopher Charles Morton, dba Deanimator
I do wonder if this is some sort of scam.
There is no way for the stockholders to stop it. Most stock is held in retirement funds and the fund managers vote the shares. Even if 100% of the voting stockholders vote against it, they can’t stop it. The professional managerial class and the investment bankers control almost all the capital in the US. For all the complaints about capitalism, there are almost no capitalists left in the US other than the tech giants. This is really a case of the cult members using other people’s money to fund their ideology and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. It doesn’t matter how many people lose their jobs, how much the economy is damaged. It won’t stop until the owners are allowed to take control of the companies and the mandates that competing CEO’s sit on the boards of corporations banned.
Retirement accounts own 40% of the US stocks, taxable stocks (individual ownership) is about 30%, and the rest are nonprofits, insurance companies, and others.
Stevie Wonder?
PWS
Paul, typing what I was initially thinking would have caused the Almighty to bypass judgement altogether and send me straight to the Fiery Lake.
Fortunately, the better angels of my nature won out.
I understand this one.
I can’t always say that; What Disney did was stupid, what Gillette did was stupid, Bud Light self-immolating was insane. But this, this I understand. To an extent. I felt similarly about Victoria’s Secret, although I think that example was doomed to fail.
Sports Illustrated was dead before the woke vultures ever started shimmying around in it’s corpse. It’s print Media in a time where the internet exists. If you were looking for the swimsuit edition, might I interest you in swimsuit porn, 24/7/365 for the next hundred years? If you were looking for Sports news… There are better sources, more timely than SI, even before they fired half their writing team to be replaced by AI.
Victoria’s Secret was doing about the same: The secret was out, and had been for a while. Worse, competitors had finally caught up on underwire technology and blew VS away on pricing, so their numbers were in the tank and had been for years.
If you’re the captain of a sinking ship, I don’t mind the idea of attempting to right the ship by seeking a new berth. Thinking that woke zoomers would start to buy print media en masse if you put enough fat models on the pages is… cripplingly stupid… but if the difference between trying that and not is merely the date your business shutters, at least you can say you tried.
“Get woke go broke” obviously describes some situations, but so does “Gone broke, trying woke” because sometimes woke people actually buy things.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply start from scratch? Why sink all that money into a dead asset? Appeal directly to the desired demographic using modern technology and marketing. If you want to start a new line of cars, why buy the Edsel from Ford? Just start a new car company.
I mean… There’s going to be a whole host of reasons why, but for a good slice of them, I think it’s narcissism. They think they’re better than you.
They think they’re smarter than you, that they work harder than you, that they know more than you. They think they’re right. They think that if they just change the medium to what it really should have been all along, that either the customers they want will materialize, or that the medium should never have existed in the first place.
It’s also hard to start a business, and the kind of people we’re talking about tend to not exactly be entrepreneurial spirits… They cannibalize existing models because they’re too risk adverse to actually start their own. Instead they co-opt the idea of “bravery” to do basically the least brave thing possible and glom onto the success of someone who was actually brave enough to take a risk and succeed.
A theory: It’s angry, non-hetero-normative people exacting their revenge upon a world that simply refuses to straighten up, fly right, and do their bidding. Analogous to a dish throwing fit. Complete, irrational, self-indulgence. If it feels good, do it. Gleefully cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Maybe this is why until the last fifty or so years, societies kept non-hetero-normative people out of sight and away from positions of power and influence. Too many of them are nuts.
Here’s an interesting take on why societies are attacked from within.
Why is Greta wearing a Keffiyeh? – UnHerd
Secularized Puritanism. I’ve contended for years that aggressive liberalism has long since replaced religion as a societal factor. Liberalism/leftism IS today’s religion. What we’re constantly seeing with all these “movements” is simply a sort of tent revivalism focused on liberal politics and policies. Kabuki theater.