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Marie Kennedy's avatar

My biggest issue with that Twix video (besides the extremely boring plot) is the total lack of candy. How is this an “ad”?? What are they selling besides moralizing? (A habit that, like you, I can only hope to manage.)

I agree w pretty much everything your wrote. What I find interesting about the ad, from a trans/gender ideology perspective, is that the child is not identified as trans at all. No pronouns are used. The bully says “you look like a girl, boys don’t wear dresses.” As far as we know, this is just a cisgender boy who likes to wear a princess dress. Conservatives who are worried about the mental health of children and who are worried about messages to them that their gender identity is some mystery they’ll sort out in time would be much better to lean in to the “if you have XY chromosomes, you’re a boy, but wear whatever the heck you want” approach. The progressive “if you like to wear dresses, you’re probably a girl, regardless of your genitalia” approach is strangely regressive. Can’t we just have a discussion that challenges gender essentialism entirely?

Anyway when I was a kid, the right would have been all over this ad for promoting the occult, so, progress I guess?

On a final note, this conundrum highlights the progressive power problem. Progressives are fixated on theories about power structures, power imbalances, etc. They/we fixate on the political power that the GOP manages to hoard through gerrymandering, voter disenfranchisement, etc. And rightly so. But the left is totally blind to its massive power over pop culture, a million little power moves like this ad. It’s a different kind of power but the right is hyper-attuned to it. Feeling powerless in pop culture is why the right feels justified in hoarding political power. It’s why they get so pissed about “cancel culture” even though they effectively invented it with conservative moralizing. Each side sees the other one’s unchecked power and feels justified in turning the dial to 11 to combat it. Whoever made this Twix ad felt like they were taking on The Man, even though they are The Man(x).

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Dave's avatar

Well stated. They really are a wretched bunch. Like you, I was one of them most of my life (Seattle native with multiple graduate degrees). I once thought the world would be a better place if educated leftists had more power, and that it was only those damn Republicans standing between us and utopia.

But over the past couple of years in particular, I turned in my progressive card and became a libertarian. With the combination of the Great Awokening, "defund the police," the complete collapse of much of the media's anti-Trump narratives under the weight of contrary evidence, absolute nonsense getting published in once-respectable academic journals as long as it advances The Narrative, embrace of authoritarian Covid policies and attitudes, etc., etc., I came to the belief that basically no one should be in charge of anything, ever.

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