Welcome to the first Woke Watch, in which I keep tabs on the weird and not so wonderful things that strange modern people – and corporations and charities – are up to in the name of social justice.
It’s been a big week for woke brands, with Costa Coffee and Dr Martens both under fire (or being applauded, depending on which way you see it) for exactly the same thing.
I can’t get my head around the Costa mural that hit the headlines, probably because it’s usually men wanting to become women who get most of the attention. The Costa pic must show a woman wanting to become a man or who the hell knows what (remember when life was simple? Yard sales? Buckaroo? The Brady Bunch? Anyone?).
Anyway, these people already occupy too much of my mental real estate so I’m going to stop thinking too hard about them. Here’s the original tweet.
Weirdly, also this week Dr Martens got into trouble (sorry, were “celebrated”) for doing the same thing. Feel free to make your own puns about “putting the boot into Dr Martens” if you wish (and please do).
“Popular footwear brand Dr Martens is facing criticism for promoting boots which depict a person with mastectomy scars,” reported GB News.
“The pair of boots, designed by a queer artist, feature a topless cartoon figure with scars under their breasts, as a result of breast removal surgery.
“The colourful boots were given away as part of an Instagram competition, sparking a debate among its customers and social media users about the appropriateness of the design.”
The publicity around Costa and Dr Martens must have been a relief for Bud Light (light relief, gettit? Guys?) and Target, although the storm wasn’t half as fierce. And if you really miss Bud Light, here’s a light appetizer from the Daily Mail to keep you ticking over.
“Anheuser-Busch has lost a whopping $390 million in US sales in the wake of its partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney,” it reports.
“The parent company blamed the ‘volume decline’ of Bud Light for the drop in revenue in its second quarter – with figures showing that total US revenue dropped by 10.5 percent in the April-to-June period compared to a year earlier.
“The world’s largest brewer said Thursday that sales to US retailers had plunged 14 percent, adding that it had been ‘underperforming the industry.’ This was a direct result of the tie-in with Mulvaney.”
It’s been fun kicking Bud Light when it’s down but now I’m a little bored with it. Let me know how you feel in the comments section – is it time to forgive and forget? Or forgive-and-don’t-forget-but-buy-a-different-brand-of-beer?
If you’re still hungry for more transgender news (mmm and who isn’t?) the Black Conservative’s take on an awful Tik Toker’s upset at being “misgendered” (snooze) is brilliant (it’s from last year but it’s so worth repeating).
As he puts it, “The problem with they / them is it’s plural, it refers to a group of people. So you’re changing words to match your reality. So are you really going to get upset because people want to use proper language, they don’t want to use plural pronouns to refer to a single person?”
The Black Conservative’s theory for why all this is happening is beautifully articulate: “They’re being coddled in school and college, they’re being told hey, your ideas shouldn’t be challenged, that your worldview is correct and everybody that doesn’t agree with you is a bigot, racist, sexist homophobe. But when they get out into the real world and realise that everybody doesn’t have to capitulate to their worldview, meltdowns like this happen.”
Well said, sir. As was this comment someone made on the video: “She’s not mad about the word – she’s mad that people won’t affirm her worldview over their own… which nobody should be compelled to do.”
I wish I were that articulate.
Another comment on that video: “What’s funny is she refers to herself as ‘I’ but goes by ‘they’. If she was really convinced she was a ‘they/them’ she would refer to herself as ‘we’.”
Ha!
Also making it on to our woke chart this week are our old compañeros Oxfam (remember when they used to dish out bags of grain from the back of trucks and, like, just do helpful stuff?). They seem to have set themselves up as these philosopher-kings.
Anyway, their gripe is that GDP (gross domestic product) is a bad measure. Here we go.
“[Oxfam] said domestic duties such as cooking and cleaning, which are often carried out by women globally, are also not valued in economic figures and measures such as GDP (gross domestic product).
“Oxfam described the measurement as “anti-feminist and colonial because it sustains a framework of value creation and productivity that only counts what can be monetised”.
“Women are rendered to the ‘private’ sphere and their work is invisible,” the charity added.
Many women might see this as a reasonable point but this is still a good time to remember that this is the charity that made staff fill in that hideous “whiteness survey” in 2021.
Let’s wrap up the first Woke Watch with a quick mention of school boards. I’m hoping to keep a spreadsheet of all their shenanigans and add it to this post each week but it’s a work in progress. Again, any examples welcome.
The nemesis of woke school boards is emerging as Moms for Liberty, which has grown to 285 chapters and well over 100,000 members in 45 states. In 2022, more than half of the 500 candidates endorsed by the organization were elected to school boards. In a nod to Moms for Liberty’s status as a major player in the war against so-called “woke” instruction related to gender identity, sexuality, race and racism, the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination spoke at its annual summit in Philadelphia last week.
I liked the idea of Moms for Liberty when I first heard about them but then I read a comment by someone who said they just want to replace woke with a theocracy, and it made me think. We are free in this country to go to church / not go to church, believe in God / not believe in God. I don’t want a militantly enforced religion. But if they give the wokeys a bloody nose, is it the lesser of two evils?
I’m not massively familiar with Moms for Liberty so any opinions below are welcome.
Hope you like the new format. Please send me any examples of wokery in the comments of email me, jessica@jessicaharper.me.
J x
Jessica Harper Uncanceled 
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