Rainbow Washing Women Out of Existence

Nike and Anheuser-Busch Demonstrate That They Know Exactly What a Woman Is

Athlete and mother, nine-time Olympic medalist and professional runner Allyson Felix, was offered a post-pregnancy contract by Nike offering her 70 percent less than before after she gave birth. Photo credit: Getty Images

In 2017, Serena Williams played a Grand Slam while two months pregnant, and then returned to play—and win—her 24th Grand Slam title, just eight months after giving birth. Many of you will remember the debate on this issue. It triggered a wider Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) debate about maternity leaves because Williams left the court pre-baby ranked number one in the world, only to return to find she was ranked number 451. As a result, the WTA revised its rules regarding players who return to the tour from pregnancy.

In 2019, after having faced intense scrutiny for its treatment of pregnant athletes and following a New York Times exposé on the company’s unethical practices towards female athletes, Nike was pressured to remove its contract reductions for pregnant athletes. Olympian runners Alysia Montaño and Kara Goucher broke their nondisclosure agreements with Nike in order to share their pregnancy stories with the paper.

Facing a similar situation as her two colleagues, athlete and mother, nine-time Olympic medallist and professional runner, Allyson Felix, was offered a post-pregnancy contract by Nike for 70 percent less than her previous contract before giving birth. Incidentally, Felix had to have an emergency C-section following severe, life-threatening pre-eclampsia. And even though she accepted the pay-cut, Felix returned to Nike in an attempt to re-negotiate more reasonable prospects of her performance following childbirth. Nike refused. In a May 2019 op-ed for The New York Times, Felix tells of her experience with the sportswear giant:

Meanwhile, negotiations were not going well. Despite all my victories, Nike wanted to pay me 70 percent less than before. If that’s what they think I’m worth now, I accept that.

What I’m not willing to accept is the enduring status quo around maternity. I asked Nike to contractually guarantee that I wouldn’t be punished if I didn’t perform at my best in the months surrounding childbirth. I wanted to set a new standard. If I, one of Nike’s most widely marketed athletes, couldn’t secure these protections, who could?

Felix’s story, just like Williams’, inspired many other female athletes to apply pressure to the industry which lead to numerous sports brands changing their contractual policies towards pregnancy. After Felix and her colleagues spoke out, there was significant public outcry aimed at Nike. Representatives Jaime Herrera Beutler (Republican-Washington) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (Democrat-California) wrote to Nike chairman Mark Parker, pressing him for details on how the Oregon-based company handles paying athletes “who are pregnant, breastfeeding or in the postpartum period.” Nike then announced its new maternity policy effective 12 August 2019, for sponsored athletes with contracts that guaranteed pay and bonuses for 18 months around pregnancy. Under Nike’s previous policy, updated in 2018, that period used to be 12 months.

The change in Nike’s policy around pregnancy demonstrates that Nike knows precisely what a woman is, otherwise, the company could never have so specifically discriminated against women. Thus, there was some shock last week when Nike announced its partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a twenty-six-year-old bumbling man, naming him the company’s new ambassador for women's clothing. A trans-identified social media influencer, Mulvaney was relatively unknown until last year when he was launched into fame for having “facial feminisation surgery” and for his infamous “tampon TikTok” video. He is now promoting Nike’s sports bras and leggings while offering the world a glimpse of his parodies of women in addition to a plethora of rather inaccurate yoga poses. With the release of last week’s Nike video, Mulvaney prances about awkwardly with moves that would have had him kicked out of my former dance studio in New York. I can still hear my ballet teacher scold us when anyone would make even a minor mistake, chiding, “This isn’t the Tippy Toe Dance School!” I have to wonder what she would say to this clown.

Just a week earlier, Mulvaney procured a deal with Bud Light. Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light’s parent company, sent Mulvaney custom-made cans of Bud Light featuring the influencer's face as a way to celebrate his first “365 Days of Girlhood”—whatever that means. Anheuser-Busch’s advertising history of Bud Light is replete with images of male aggression, brocialism, and sexism from the product’s launch in 1982. Then from 1987 to 1989, Anheuser-Busch ran the infamous video series of commercials featuring its bull terrier mascot, Spuds MacKenzie. The dog spends the entirety of each commercial ad ogling or being caressed by bikini-clad women. Spuds MacKenzie is paradoxically more humanised throughout Anheuser-Busch’s advertising while the women in these segments serve as the aesthetic backdrop for reaffirming that real men, and dogs, enjoy Bud Light. Just as almost forty years ago, women weren’t considered as subjects in these adverts, Mulvaney’s train wreck antics similarly employ women as stereotype while fitting neatly into Anheuser-Busch’s troubling history of misogyny.

On Instagram, Mulvaney badly channels Audrey Hepburn in what can only be described as pastiche-turned-accidental parody of a Hollywood icon. Mulvaney’s tell, however, is front and centre in the video as he taps the can of beer aggressively, dare I say mannishly, before opening it. Mulvaney’s lack of talent beggars belief as he downs a beer in another video while attempting to vogue in a bathtub full of bubbles—as no woman has ever done. His Instagram feed is a nothing other than a photo and video montage of drag queen performances which fall flat, even when Mulvaney is confined to the still image.

Dare you click on his Instagram videos, you will find yourself immersed by unmitigated and copious amounts of sexism. Opprobrious simulations of women are unleashed with his rendition of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz to other clips that boomerang Mulvaney from the kitsch of drag performance into Schadenfreude. It’s painfully clear that the only one who believes Mulvaney is a woman is Mulvaney.

His mimicry of women in photographic poses through various epochs of fashion and cinema history, moves far beyond pastiche and, sadly for Mulvaney, even further beyond camp. It’s undeniable that what Mulvaney thinks he is doing has the diametrically opposite result whereby his only accesses to “woman” is via stale stereotypes: a Disney princess, a 1950’s housewife, an anti-Marlo Thomas from That Girl, his street musical set to Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” or his playing the vixen while claiming that he would never steal your husband, “tearily” declaring, “I’m a girl’s girl.” I look over my shoulder at millions of other women who, like myself, don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

Amelia Strickler, a British shot putter who has won the British title twice and competed in the Commonwealth Games, wrote in the Daily Mail that Mulvaney’s “offensive parody makes a total mockery of female athletes like me.” Indeed, it’s not only that Mulvaney has edged out women for these contracts, but he has zero athletic skill. This is painfully apparent in the videos where he appears decrepit, a kind of human animation, as he flounces about making a mockery of both women and sports. “What were Nike executives thinking?” is the prevailing question among the public.

Felix put her finger on the answer in her op-ed, noting how the company’s treatment of her was merely “one example of a sports industry where the rules are still mostly made for and by men.” Misogyny is alive and well as women and girls have been targeted by a woke-spun invasion of their sports teams and locker rooms over the past decade by boys and men who use gender ideology to their benefit. Mediocre male athletes have been readily taking over women’s and girls’ sports and winning competitions while the neoliberal elite propel this ideology pushing these men further into women’s spaces, disavowing women and girls of jobs, scholarships and awards. Of course, the executive who promote this ideology can afford private clubs where the common-sense rules of sex-segregation prevail.

Nike and Anheuser-Busch are not just pushing their brands, however. They are pushing a dangerous ideology which is now germinating everywhere these men can access, often with women opening the doors for them. Mulvaney has created an army of trans clones who similarly mock women in their commitment to the advertising world and their corporate backers. Waxing lyrical over feminine hygiene last year, he claimed that Tampax had sent him tampons, Mulvaney proved that offensive lies are profitable and that men performing woman-face fits neatly into the capitalist panorama where women’s voices, bodies and realities are negligible. Despite there being a media-driven myth that Mulvaney and Jeffrey Marsh were a official Tampax sponsors, the company tweeted earlier this week that it does “not have a sponsorship agreement” with either of these men.

At the moment of writing this story, I cannot ascertain the money that has been raised by these publicity stunts, but the social media outrage over Mulvaney’s demonstrable sports inabilities has peaked the masses who see the absurdity of Nike’s having made a man it’s ambassador for women's clothing. There’s something addictive about having a tall, lanky man who has zero athletic acumen, performing jumping jacks barefoot in a backyard almost falling over and then doing a quasi can-can, again almost falling backwards. It’s as sad and embarrassing as it is offensive and deeply regressive. And Mulvaney’s pulling in salaries from many other companies from Mac, Kate Spade, Native, Aritzia, KitchenAid, Ole Henrikson, Walmart, Olay, and he is Brand Ambassador for Women’s Wedding Dresses from ASOS!

Who knew that all you had to do to be offered a lucrative contract by women’s fashion, beauty and lifestyle companies was to be a talentless man?

So, how did Mulvaney come to be seen everywhere pulling in lucrative contracts all to advance an ideology? From last year’s Tampax “reveal” to last month’s cringeworthy moment on Drew Barrymore’s talkshow, Mulvaney is a product of a carefully-oiled media machinery that begins with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), widely considered the most powerful talent agency in the world and representing Mulvaney. It also represents Drew Barrymore.

I spoke with a London-based marketing veteran who has experience and knowledge of media acquisitions and how celebrity is created. In order to protect this source I will refer to her under the pseudonym of Zoey. Were she to be publicly named her employment would be at risk.

Zoey explains what she calls Mulvaney’s “straight shot to fame” noting how he has been promoted by CAA, “They recently bought up a few ad agencies such as Droga5, a very successful ad agency that has really pushed woke advertising for brands like Under Armour and The New York Times.” Zoey historicises how Droga5 was eventually acquired by William Morris giving other examples of acquisitions in mergers stating, “I’m suggesting this as a very good example of how different types of media companies, brands and talent agencies are merging. The end result: a made-up character such as Dylan is created. He is the whole package and everyone profits.”

Through her knowledge of talent agencies, Zoey explains how Mulvaney was catapulted into social media celebrity:

I happened to notice Dylan was with CAA when he first got traction. That piqued my interest given he was just some low rent influencer a few months ago. To get signed by CAA is major. This is not the privilege of many much more talented, bona fide actors or influencers. When I first noticed Dylan, I looked into his agent, Stephanie Paciullo at CAA. I thought it was odd that someone with quite a high profile roster would have Dylan Mulvaney as her client. I then looked into her wider remit which is to merge brands, talent, influencers and specific products. As mentioned before, brands do not always want to spend millions with A-listers, but they need a famous face for their campaign. Dylan is perfect—cheap, big TikTok following, shameless.

Hypothesising that Paciullo likely created Mulvaney from a data-driven brief, Zoey speculates, “Her remit covers creative talent and digital advertising. With that context, I am in no doubt Dylan was created in a boardroom. If you look at Paciullo’s clients, you can see why the media is so complicit. The roster touches every area of media and there are a lot of folks like Paciullo at CAA.” Indeed, CAA employs various agents whose client list moves around identity politics  category for “Women’s Empowerment” includes other men aside from Mulvaney, such as Janet Mock and Laverne Cox.

Zoey notes how Paciullo’s client list contains one man who identifies as transgender and many more who propagate wokery, ultimately reading like a Who’s Who of gender ideology within media, advertising and culture. One of Paciullo’s clients is Elaine Welteroth who, while editor of TeenVogue, oversaw the aggressive promotion of gender ideology since 2015. The links between the promotion of ideology through talent and branding has resulted in recent years the phenomenon where the brand is almost entirely ideological.

Take for instance, another of Paciullo’s clients, Jonathan Van Ness of Queer Eye fame, who, since identifying as sic “non-binary,” has been given his own Netflix podcast whose marketing is entirely wrapped up in the promotion of gender ideology. The show is fraught with victimhood narratives and hyperbole where in one episode Van Ness speaks with sic “gender non-conforming” pseudo-celebrity Alok Vaid-Menon about “transgender” and “gender non-conforming” people. Vaid-Menon claims that city and state governments have “tried their best to disappear us” and have made “an orchestrated attempt to literally eradicate us.” This soliloquy is delivered as he and Van Ness strut freely and unassailed through New York City streets while both men are dressed in what can only be described as a garish wardrobe mashup of ABBA meets Grey Gardens. Van Ness promotes himself as the product where gender ideology is the message, the two virtually inseparable.

I ask Zoey how this conflation between talent, brand, and socially woke messaging has become so prevalent. She muses, “Brands are terrified of looking old. Senior executives’ children are Generation Z and they influence their parents who work in marketing. Brands now feel they have to look woke to be relevant. All this plus internal recruitment adds to the wokery. Generation Z care about their employer having the same values as them.” She tells me how brands have to work harder to be heard in order to “cut through the noise of social media” because of consumers having so much more choice while being “bombarded with advertising” from their mobiles. She adds, “No one watches TV with adverts anymore—they are either streaming ad-free content or TikTok. PR is there to be bombastic and get quick headlines.”

The way that brands get past the media noise in order to stand out if they want to “get into culture,” Zoey tells me, is “they use woke culture to reflect back the consumers’ values. I have to assume given the billions spent on researching consumer behaviour and future predictions, brands may feel obliged to put out woke campaigns—hence why they’re often muddled and weird.” Today advertisers are painfully aware that the PT Barnum adage “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is no longer true. Today with “consumers-activists,” a brand can not only be cancelled more easily than ever, but these consumer-activists are quite often the advertising targets for woke branding. This means that companies are now more than ever beholden to their consumer base whose values they seek to emulate while their consumers have the power through social media to hold large and previously unassailable brands or organisations to account.

Zoey explains how these talent agencies merge with media companies “in order to make and own the content to whom they supply it,” clarifying:

Traditionally, talent agencies supplied actors or presenters for a film or commercial campaigns and they would make a percentage of the actor’s earnings. Today they have been branching out by making and owning the content to whom they supply the talent. They've grown the business from just representing actors to creating marketing platforms for celebrities where they are making deals while owning the content. Today the talent agency will work with a brand to develop a product along with an actor.

Observing how the mergers of big media companies and talent affect the messaging and branding, Zoey clarifies: “So these media companies get a product placed in programming or on talk shows like The Drew Barrymore Show where its all about the brand. The Ellen Degeneres Show was basically one big advert where everyone profits.”

As evidence of this merging between talent and brand management, Zoey points to recent mergers such as last years merger by CAA that acquired full ownership of CAA-GBG Global Brand Management Group, an organisation that owns companies including Netflix, Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola. She also points to CAA’s acquisition last summer of its smaller rival ICM Partners which the New York Times announced as “a blockbuster deal set to reshape the landscape for representation in Hollywood and beyond.”

In addition to describing how the merging between talent and production companies has changed the PR landscape, Zoey elaborates how woke advertising has propelled Mulvaney so quickly to fame because of this collapse between talent and brand:

My first theory is that CAA created Dylan to smash and grab during the Zeitgeist. Trans is the deflection du jour—especially since he is non-threatening on the surface. Tweens, his target, see him as asexual—he’s feminine with a lot of help. This is why Jeffrey Marsh and some of these other creepy men don’t land the brand deals. They are too old, undeniably male, and sexual. There is something pathetic and unthreatening about Dylan; yet, he’s annoying and a very untalented one-trick pony.

Speculating on Mulvaney’s celebrity emergence and how companies use distractions like gender to green and rainbow wash, Zoey elaborates how these campaigns are often employed to “deflect from their other bad behaviours,” adding, “As long as we are discussing Dylan selling women’s bras, we are not talking about how Nike employs children to make their shoes or the fact that Nike doesn’t have one single US factory. For instance, Unilever and P&G are probably the biggest polluters on the planet, but who cares when the masses buy into the virtue signalling of identity politics?”

Zoey underscores the history and current terrain in advertising and how this sector creates instant celebrities—even talentless ones—due to the metamorphosis of advertising over the past two decades where social media campaigns are quite profitable within certain demographics:

Everything has changed dramatically in the past 15 years due to social media and big networks are buying up independent businesses from different areas, to merge marketing and entertainment. Clients / brands / advertisers—now the same thing—have to reach their audience across multiple platforms, versus the previous generations where advertising existed solely through TV, print and radio campaigns. Now brands have to talk to consumers across a range of platforms, all with their unique audiences. Speaking to Gen Z is very different from even targeting Millennials. Facebook is now used for 45 year-olds and up whereas Snapchat, Twitch and TikTok are used primarily for Gen Z. Gen X dabble in it all with Twitter and Facebook still in the lead.

But why Mulvaney, who is beyond talentless? It’s almost as if he were chosen specifically because he is so repellent and, as demonstrated throughout advertising history, misogyny sells. Zoey replies:

Nike and Bud Light probably find Dylan appealing as a one off, cheap and fast media PR stunt. He doesn’t form any of the major campaigns, he is limited to TikTok and other platforms that attract a younger audience. Plus, those channels expect the content to look user generated, so the production values are meant to be cheap to be relatable to the consumer. It’s win-win. Dylan has huge followers, Nike and Bud Light can attract a young audiences without have to pay big bucks. Dylan is cheap celebrity fodder with a big social media following. The brands want his audience, but that’s it. Talent agencies can provide cheap but well known talent for one off campaigns that even if unpopular, get the product trending.

Zoey ends her analysis on a sobering note: “Once his numbers drop, his agent will drop him. Dylan will end up on terrible reality shows or worse.”

The outrage regarding Mulvaney’s representation of women is understandably endless. British Olympic medalist, Sharron Davies, MBE hit back at Nike on Twitter speaking out on the need to boycott Nike as she posted Nike’s European Headquarters’ address, writing: “Return unwanted kit to Nike, here is their address. I’ll be sending some…” Many women retweeted Davies’ appeal to boycott Nike like Felicity Cornelius-Mercer who tweeted, “When I exercise I sweat, grimace, swear & dig deep @Nike I don’t prance around like a deranged cheerleader. Ideologies that ‘biological’ women should become a gender sub category of their own sex must stop. I’m with @sharrond62 for fair sport & appropriate product representation.” Then in another message encouraging women to boycott Nike, Davies displayed her photo in New Balance kit and tweeted, “Just off to the gym... make sure you have the right support ladies! #boycottnike #fairsport #SaveWomensSports.”

Nike’s infamous tagline “Just do it!” was inspired by the final words of double-murderer, Gary Gilmore, who killed two people in Utah in 1976 and was sentenced to death the following year. When asked for his last words while facing the five-man firing squad, Gilmore said: “Let's do it.” This phrase was the inspiration for Dan Wieden, head of ad-agency Wieden & Kennedy, who in 1988 launched “Just do it!” into advertising history.

There is great irony as to how Nike’s rise to advertising fame, originating in a murderer’s last words, has been subverted in recent days by the company’s attempt to breath life into its brand by inadvertently handing Mulvaney the role of executioner. Nike’s corporate heads have clearly underestimated their client base: women who know that Dylan Mulvaney is a man. This oversight is also a testament to the company’s internalised misogyny and financial ethos.

While Nike and Bud Light might have thought scoring a wider client base was a price worth paying by sponsoring a creepy man to parody women, emerging evidence indicates that these tactics are failing. Anheuser-Busch stocks have dropped and its sales have plummeted leading to the the embarrassment its executives. Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s Vice-President of Marketing, has come under fire this week when an interview she did for the podcast Make Yourself At Home in March surfaced online. In this interview, Heinerscheid discusses her work in transforming the image of Bud Light, noting how the brand was in decline and how it was her mandate to increase sales among the younger demographic. She rambles on about “inclusivity” and how “representation is the heart of evolution” while basically slagging off the company’s loyal consumer base insinuating that they not “evolved” with their “fratty, out of touch humour.” Anheuser-Busch’s plummeting sales this past week demonstrate that Heinerscheid is the one who is “out of touch” with consumers.

Zoey analyses Heinerscheid’s statements reflecting, “She doesn’t understand or like her core consumer. That breaks a lot of rules for a successful marketing strategy. To be successful you have to understand your base and have a degree of empathy too.” She adds, “They lost a lot of money and the way she’s repeating the woke mantra, it’s clear that she can’t believe her customers don’t ‘understand’ the messaging.”

Meanwhile, the masses are left in an emotional tug-of-war as we are reduced to simultaneously screaming and laughing at Mulvaney. Laughing because this buffoon who represents the world’s largest sports brand can’t physically lift his leg without almost falling over. Screaming because so many of us this past week have discovered how truly hated women are.