Role Models, You Say
And in “inclusive” retailer news:
So says James Bailey, Executive Director of John Lewis & Partners.
Or, as an earlier John Lewis “Inclusion Report” put it, “inclusivity” will result in “a better connection to our customers.” Customers who will learn to “respect difference,” while freeing themselves of “judgement.” The project, it seems, is an educational one, and customers are among those deemed in need of education. And so,
The Identity Project will also “come to life” in “a travelling exhibition on display at various John Lewis locations.” Regarding the project, its creator, photographer Chris Jepson, says,
However, all has not gone entirely to plan:
The chap in question, Marc Geoffrey Albert Whitcombe, now known as Ruby Geoffrey Michael Porcelain Whitcombe, is portrayed in the Identity Project, and presented to customers, thusly:
“My identity is the chance to express my true inner self and be accepted and supported for who I am,” says Ruby. Photographed in a rose-adorned wig and while clutching what appears to be a whip:
In search of further education and deep moral improvement, sceptics unearthed other treats from dear Ruby’s social media presence:
One of the tamer offerings:
Yes, I know. You’re feeling inspired and uplifted.
Presumably, the way to “redress the visual narrative that LGBTQIA+ people look a certain way” is to celebrate the existence of dysmorphic and autogynephile men who are also devotes of bondage and sadomasochism, and who like to share photos of themselves posing with sex toys while flashing their collection of ladies’ knickers to random passers-by.
It also seems that the way to become more authentically “queer” – to express one’s true, inner self and who one really is – is to elaborately accessorise and play dress-up, and to pretend to be something that, by definition, one isn’t.
Other John Lewis employees highlighted in the Identity Project include an in-store nursery advisor and enthusiast of the ‘pup’ and ‘furry’ communities, and who is helpfully pictured wearing a bondage harness. Because that’s the mental image you want when shopping for baby paraphernalia.
This, lest we forget, will “give young queer people role models to look up to.”
Whether female customers, the backbone of John Lewis’ customer base, will be inspired to shop harder and more often by the thought of employees bringing their autogynephilia to work, as Maya Forstater put it, remains to be seen. Ditto bondage fantasies and wearing rubber dog costumes. Perhaps well-off ladies in search of posh frocks and upscale furnishings will be dazzled and enchanted by the thought of sad, cross-dressing men in thigh-high boots who like to share photos of themselves smeared with unspecified white substances.
Also unclear is whether the elevation of employees’ tiresome kinks to the status of unassailable “identities,” and therefore something to be gushingly affirmed, will result in “a better business.” With customers feeling a warm affinity, on account of those “similarities in the identities we share.”
Needless to say, the memes have begun.
Update, via the comments:
Liz notes the unhappy combination of baby products and bondage harnesses, and asks, not unfairly,
Well, quite. I was in John Lewis recently, buying towels, and at no point did I feel a need to know about the cross-dressing bondage activities of the sales staff. Whether the person bagging my towels likes to dress up as a pantomime dame while brandishing instruments of torture was not, it has to be said, foremost in my mind.
The weirdly woke marketing of John Lewis – and the jarring mismatch with the tastes of its customers – has been noted here before, in the update to this.
And the ideological shoehorning currently underway has been explored by James Esses, here.
Update 2:
Following media coverage and widespread customer disaffection, the touring Identity Project has now been withdrawn.
However, rather than acknowledge the incongruity of the project and its dubious conceits, points aired many times by critics, a John Lewis spokesman has claimed, “We have closed the exhibition for the safety and protection of our partners.” Apparently, being mocked on social media by unhappy customers is a safety issue now. One therefore has to wonder whether anything much has been learned by John Lewis executives.
Well, James Esses, mentioned in the post, was alerted to the Identity Project and the store’s wider ideological capture by a disaffected employee. It seems that not everyone who works for John Lewis is happy about the propagation of The Pronoun Game, diary reminders regarding “pansexual visibility day,” or the store’s policy of not preventing strange men from venturing into the women’s toilets.
To be honest, this isn’t as insane as it seems. Having worked with a number of marketing departments in my younger days, the thinking goes something like this:
Put that all together and it’s easy to see how this got started.
Here’s the thing: marketing people are really, really dumb, and they can’t do math. They’re taught to think of demographics as hermetically sealed groups of customers that don’t interact and more importantly, don’t see advertising targeted to other demographics. Which is obviously bollocks, but that’s how they’re taught.
So they’re literally unable to conceive of the notion that advertising targeting one demographic might turn away another demographic, and that they might lose more money from that second demo than they gained by pandering to the first.
You don’t even need “go woke, go broke” to explain this, I’ve seen fantastic missteps by marketing departments in this vein. My favourite was the data storage tape company that produced D&D-themed magazine ads in the 1980s because IT nerds == D&D nerds, obviously. Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of their actual customers were middle-aged IT managers who’d never played D&D in their lives and saw the company as no longer mature/professional enough to trust with their data.
The Translate into English link is a nice touch.
In case it goes missing:
In a word?
No.
Speaking of whom, “trans, bi-gender, and pansexual”, if the latter, other than for Pyramid of Oppression™ points, why bother with the first two, however, if “non-binary” it is impossible to be “trans” unless one thinks one is jumping back and forth like electron states.
I see, comments on blogs, however, if they (that is the actual plural meaning all the alphabet mafia, not just this “they”) raise their voices any more we will all go deaf, which might be a blessing if they just can’t do something original like shut the hell up.
.Meanwhile, via Ace, JP skewers this whole pile of carp.
There is a self-congratulatory imperviousness – a casual and pre-emptive dismissal of pretty much all objections. Such that when people – including staff and customers – aren’t chuffed by the prospect of fabulist pronouns or strange men in the ladies’ toilets – with all that can follow from that – these objections are disdained as hate, or bigotry, or, as John Lewis’ bewilderingly inept outgoing chairman Sharon White put it, going low.
Unlike the proponents of such claptrap, who seem to imagine themselves hovering above us, shimmering with piety.
Marketing: let’s take the Bud Light example. 98% of their customers are straight and heavily male and heavily sports oriented. Making Mulvaney their spokes-thing to cater to the tiny percent who would find that attractive is…insane. A niche beer favored by gays? Sure, knock yourself out. But what % of any group (M/F, gay/straight) find Mulvaney an attractive thing? Vanishingly small. But the mindset is you MUST find such things attractive, just like you SHOULD date a trans person.
I have seen commercials recently for some type II diabetes med where all the people are chunky. This is actually accurate. However, having them all dance around is comical, not inspiring.
At some retail stores (Kohl’s? Target? can’t remember) they started having the pics in the sporting clothing dept be chunky. People buying athletic gear generally are aspiring to be fit, not chunky. And may already be fit. Being “inclusive” in this way is NOT good marketing but it does show off to your peer-group.
TV show or podcast: Absolutely Fabulist.
Surprise, surprise, surprise!
I’ll just leave this here for no reason whatsoever.
“If you are male, please refrain from coming to the events, you are not a lesbian,” of course prompting the usual response from the usual suspects who need to have their voices raised.
Clown World Communion.
“Show some respect! It Black History Month, ho!” shouts the hood rat.
(Link courtesy of CoderDyne.) It’s all so tiresome.
The numinous ain’t what it was.
Some clergy do this because they think it will bring in more worshipers. They fail to realize that they are removing a sense of sacredness from their places and rituals. And without that, the churches lose their reason for being.
One therefore has to wonder whether anything much has been learned by John Lewis executives.
Judging by the “we go high when they go low” comment from that Sharon person at John Lewis, I am going to say no.
To them it was a great idea spoiled by all those evil bigots, and probably their only regret is they couldn’t cancel and punish the “bigots”.
This would be appropriate for every comment thread here.
It’s not drinks at Madame Tara’s House Of Spanking.
Google searched, ahem, for a friend. I’m assuming whereabouts of said establishment are known to the cognoscenti only.
What a thing to say after all David has done for us.
You gotta be cruel to be kind. In the right measure, of course. Speaking of which, kinda…
Yes, a negative on that from here as well. Much like with the Bud Light fiasco, the left slams the Overton Window hard three feet to the left, the right, with all its mights, pushes it back to within an inch still to the left of where it was previously, spikes the football, high fives all around, kills the fatted calf, drinks the last bottle of Dom, and fireworks like it’s 7/4/1776 again.
There is a self-congratulatory imperviousness – a casual and pre-emptive dismissal of pretty much all objections
Most of the marketing people I’ve dealt with do seem to be unable to comprehend that people who buy their product might be distinctly unlike them. They’re either marketing to themselves or to a comical cartoon stereotype of their audience. I’m thinking of the “Chip, Jane and Buzz” personas much lauded by Best Buy’s marketing in the 1990s.
Forgive me. I posted and ran. It was kinda late over here in -0700 land.
O/T Need a light?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1759944985460216178
Google’s answer to MidJourney.
Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.
Morning, Dar.
A few further thoughts. We’re told,
But therein lies a problem, a contradiction. “Celebrating diversity,” as seen above, may exist in tension with a sense of commonality, of shared values, and thus of feeling welcome. And so, for instance, if a store champions fabulist pronouns, strange men in ladies’ toilets, and cross-dressing bedlamites who like to brandish whips, this may well alienate customers who aren’t particularly keen on such things, and who don’t find them appropriate concerns when shopping for baby products, houmous, or a new sofa.
Which is to say, customers who – having been prompted to consider the matter by some bizarrely misconceived marketing – see some of those exemplars of “diversity” and don’t feel that they have “similarities in the identities we share.” And who don’t see the promise of “a better connection to our customers.” And who, instead, may wonder, to quote Liz in the comments, “What the hell were they thinking?”
Customers who may also feel that their “judgement” – say, regarding whether bewigged men should be allowed to venture into ladies’ toilets – toilets that they themselves may use – isn’t something to be corrected.
How did they not run this past a few, er, normal people?
It is worth pointing out that, while all this bullshit is going on, John Lewis is failing miserably as a company. It has closed a number of stores and is planning substantial redundancies. The main concern of its ‘partners’ is what they will do after being let go (on redundancy terms which have recently been changed for the worse).
This is not a coincidence.
It is also not a coincidence that the person running this nationwide retailer, with 80,000 staff, is a former civil servant with zero business experience.
Well, it is a little… odd. A little unmoored from reality. I mean, say you’re out shopping for towels or food or furniture or whatever, and you’re greeted by this image:
And you then realise that you’re expected to feel some affinity with the individual in question, and with others like him, some similarities in identity.
It’s practically a comedy sketch.
The time, attention and resources consumed by such posturing are generally better spent on more pressing matters. And when the chosen posturing actively alienates a significant chunk of your customer base, and not for the first time, this is hardly a triumph.
Clown World Communion.
Jesus wept.
Clown World Communion.
At least I can find hope in my own parish. I do attend a Novus Ordo Mass and even then, the 5pm Sunday at Holy Ghost is always crowded with a lot of young families, quite often with Mom wearing the trasitional mantilla. My parish also hosts a noon Mass on Sundays that is the traditional Latin Mass and it too attracts young Catholics. Almost all of the seminarians now being ordained in the Diocese of Knoxville are conservative. Cassocks abound.
I think the Catholic Church will strengthen as the “Springtime of Vatican II” Boomers die off.
Actually, the Diocese of Knoxville is set in the next couple of years to gain a parish in the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. This Ordinariate is its own diocese in the US and was created by Pope Benedict XVI for Anglicans who wished to “swim the Tiber,” as they say, and become Roman Catholic but retain their litrugy and tradition. I plan on attending their services to experience them. I have friends in Houston, TX – young Hispanic family – who are devoutly Catholic and prefer to attend the services there at Our Lady of Walsingham.
It’s not my usual wheelhouse, but… Were I of a mind to attempt some kind of interaction with The Creator Of The Universe, to sense the presence of some benign First Cause and ultimate source of meaning, I’m not sure that flapping my elbows to The Birdie Song is how I’d go about it.
But Satan scored on the rebound.
The children seemed to be really enjoying it.
Which one would have thought was reason enough to stop doing it.
Heh. I’m assuming it’s a bums-on-seats thing, an attempt to up the numbers, rather than an experience-the-numinous-in-full-HD thing.
Are you sure? I know nothing of John Lewis, but I am aware of various store chains in America which are failing or have failed due to matters other than politics.
Such as this exemplar of “diversity”?
Texas man in kilt arrested after shoving objects in antique store up his rectum and then putting them back on the shelf. Numerous other stores, too.
Understandable, I suppose.
The Birdie Song is looking pretty good right now.
“Texas man in kilt arrested.” would have been headline enough for me!
More Science!™ from Morse Science High School in Ukiah, California;
I guess my imagination is a bit better than theirs, I am not seeing an upside to chowing down on dry aged haunch of grandpa.
There you have it, they just can’t help themselves, All The Things Are Rayciss™
“We have an ambition to become the UK’s most inclusive employer, because celebrating diversity will make us a better business.”
Is it just me, or is the word “because” doing rather a lot of work in that sentence?
Thank you for that.
We didn’t bomb them nearly enough apparently.
The word “diversity” is mouthed as if it were a self-evident good, a “strength,” a moral imperative, a thing of which one could never have enough. But it seems fairly obvious that whether or not “diversity” is in fact a good thing, and a strength, rather depends on the particulars, the context, and the degree.
As I remarked a while ago,
And yet the word is uttered as if it were an incantation, a way to summon magic.
Just because they sell to them doesn’t mean they care to listen to them.
“Soylent Green is people!!” What once was a warning is now a marketing campaign.