But at least you're here now, talking in circles as usual.

Beer Baron said:

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That's all fine and dandy, but it seems the event at the ski resort was well attended and businesses were willingly participating. Does that not show that the society there has found it to be acceptable? The poster in question is free to disagree with that and go home instead, which he did.

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Again, I cut our trip a day short, so I didn't see anything in person intentionally. Caught some social media videos that made me think it was not a popular or crowd luring event. If anything based on some comments (not all nice) on social media, it was in probably not a great business decision.

My original question was basically not understanding the purpose for it. They obviously know it's gonna rub some people the wrong way and could potentially lose business in the future, so there is a underlying reason for a corporation to sponsor it. And they do have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, but this is the wrong forum for that. The basic answer I got so far was a fun event for people to gather and have fun. Again, a bunch of LGBTQ+ people can go ski, gather and have fun any other time. All fine by me. It just seems to be something that is exclusive when the theme of today's world is all about inclusive. The way to be inclusive is just have a level playing field and not catering to one group or the next.

I guess in a greater context is again, what is the purpose of the whole pride month? There has to be a goal or objective. Not just that its a fun month.

Basically just to be visible and able to participate in the world around us. That may not seem necessary now, but it was pretty revolutionary when it started because gay people gathering in large numbers mostly didn't happen and most people didn't know (or know they knew) any gay people. Then you also had a community that was largely shunned by families and other parts of society, so it gave them a chance to be around people like them and socialize, which wasn't very easy pre-internet either. There's an argument that it's not as necessary anymore, but a lot of the vitriolic pushback it still gets shows that we're not exactly fully welcome in society, or at least in parts of it. But yes, it's also a big event where people have fun now.

Ironically, the fastest way to get rid of things like pride in my estimation is for gay people to be as accepted as left-handed people are. It would be great if I didn't come to Texags and regularly see threads debating my rights, motives, and existence. Things are certainly better than past decades, but we haven't reached left-handed status yet, so things like Pride keep humming along.

If you don't get it, or don't want to participate, that's fine and you don't have to. But a company posting a tweet with a rainbow Oreo or whatever isn't exactly oppression of Christians. As for companies catering to LGBT people, that's what companies do - cater to various audiences, whether it's a rainbow-colored sign at a pride event or Whataburger putting a maroon stripe on their College Station locations or Dove bodywash selling their same product in a black bottle with a manly name like "Rocket Steel" scent. If there's a market with money to spend, companies want that money.

And I don't agree that pride events are exclusive. I'm sure some are, but like I said earlier, many of them are full of straight people.

Zobel said:

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No individual has particular right to dictate to any other what is and isn't normative. That's a collective question in society.

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Well put. Are there any limitations that should be placed on who gets to be a part of that collective?

One of the threads of discussion here stemmed from complaints about LGBTQ representation in tv, movies, books, and other parts of our culture. The objection from me to those complaints is not that I think everyone should be forced to approve of that influence into our culture, but rather that I object to anyone being excluded from participation in the collective. We all get 1/330,000,000th contribution in our culture. Disliking what the sum total of those contributions looks like doesn't justify removing a group of people's right to contribute in order to skew that sum total to something more desireable.

Do you feel like all of the attention on it from across the spectrum is genuine and welcomed or just lip service so companies pander to a minority demographic? Maybe both? Or maybe it doesn't matter?

I guess that's why I was having a hard time getting his point. He kept arguing like we had different positions, and I know we generally do from past interactions, but then he said stuff like this that sounded like something you or I would say.

10andBOUNCE said:

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Do you feel like all of the attention on it from across the spectrum is genuine and welcomed or just lip service so companies pander to a minority demographic? Maybe both? Or maybe it doesn't matter?

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Some of both. Lots of it is just lip service and pandering, and there's a big debate about that among LGBT people actually, about how overly commercialized it is. There are a ton of memes like this one to that effect, and there's a lot of truth in them:




That said, I'm old enough to remember when companies wouldn't go anywhere near gay events, so I take it as a sign of progress that they do now. The recent backlash, while louder than it was a few years ago, I don't think is representative of where the culture is overall. I have nothing really to back that up, that's just my opinion. We've seen a huge leap in terms of minds changing on this issue, and I think we'll see another one when the boomers die off and are replaced with gen-z and beyond. Could be wrong, that's just my take.

Edit: I think one big difference now is the visibility of various companies' support due to social media. In 2007 or so, most gay bars had a rainbow-colored Bud Light tap, and events and rainbow signage from Coors and all the other brands. Straight people just didn't know about it to be upset by it, and everything wasn't so hypercharged to enrage people back then either.

Makes sense, thanks.

Beer Baron said:

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Among those who are upset with pride as a concept, I really do wonder how much pride-related content they see organically vs. second-hand from a source that shows them content they would have never otherwise seen, packaged as something they should be mad about.

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I actually heard someone talking the other day to the idea that we were never designed to have the amount of information we have in today's world. The way we are all connected now all over the world. I think I kind of agree with that. We are all on information overload all the time instead of just experiencing life as it comes to us every day. Obviously there has been some great good that has come from the interconnectedness of life before technology, but it is interesting to think about how much we do have at our fingertips all the time and some of the consequences of that.

Yeah I fully agree with all of that. I was just thinking on my way home that I don't see a lot of pride month content and I'm definitely in the demographic. I do see some, and I realize I probably have a different definition of a quantity that counts as a "bombardment," but I think some on the right may see a lot more of it than I do because they frequent sources who aggregate and package it. I don't really see much secondary pride stuff.

I think it's close enough it isn't safe to say "most" feel one way or another. Just like with everything nowadays.

And I agree I don't get the need for relationships of any kind in tv geared toward kids younger than junior high. I care less about passing references to kids with "moms" or "dads." It's probably mostly pandering but maybe kind of neat for the kids in families like that.

Beer Baron said:

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Yeah I fully agree with all of that. I was just thinking on my way home that I don't see a lot of pride month content and I'm definitely in the demographic. I do see some, and I realize I probably have a different definition of a quantity that counts as a "bombardment," but I think some on the right may see a lot more of it than I do because they frequent sources who aggregate and package it. I don't really see much secondary pride stuff.

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This. I was working in Austin today, and I didn't see anything overt other than the flag at the police station visible from 35. I feel the material is more subdued this year.

Agree, this year is way down.

Quote:

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This. I was working in Austin today, and I didn't see anything overt other than the flag at the police station visible from 35. I feel the material is more subdued this year.

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I haven't really noticed much of a difference. On social media a few accounts I've liked posted something on June 1 like they always do. Local news has run a couple stories. There's a pride section on my Netflix, but I don't know if everyone sees that or if it's custom to me based on that creepy algorithm BS. Pretty typical for me in most years I'd say. As for downtown, you usually see more stuff down there in August because that's when all our events happen - I've heard the reason for that is so they don't have to compete with Dallas and Houston in June.

All those are more what I'd consider "first level" impressions anyway - things I just naturally encountered by proximity or by engaging with something online. I've never really seen much in the way of "secondary" impressions where something I've interacted with showed me what someone else was doing for pride. I think that's more of a rage-bait tactic (that all sides do, the only thing that changes is the topic and the side doing it) to make things seem "bigger" or "worse" than they actually are. Then of course you have the third-tier, Inception-style impressions, where one something you engage with points at the other side's reaction and says "can you believe how the other side is reacting to this other thing?" I haven't seen much of that yet either, but I feel like it's coming later in the cycle.

Zobel said:

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Agree, this year is way down.

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You guys should see Abu Dhabi