Member-only story
Meghan Daum
The Age of Wokapitalism Is Upon Us
The cynical truth about corporate enlightenment
Budweiser, a brand long associated with decked-out Clydesdales and bikini-clad Bud girls, is changing its colors for Pride Month — or at least talking about colors in the wokest possible terms. On May 31, the brand’s U.K.-based Twitter account sent a series of tweets announcing a promotional campaign, Fly the Flag, tied to Pride Month in London. The campaign, according to its website, recognizes that “for everyone at Pride, flying your flag means something different.” It also offers rainbow beer cups designed to resemble pride banners. The tweets amounted to a primer on different sexual orientations and gender identifications (not all of them; by some measures, there are 50 or more) and which colors had been assigned to represent them on rainbow flags and other Pride-themed symbols.
An image of a striped magenta, blue, and lavender beer cup was accompanied by text explaining, “Magenta is for same-gender attraction, blue is for attraction to genders other than your own, and lavender (a mix of the two) represents attraction to your own and other genders, though some interpret it differently.”
We learned from subsequent tweets that “Black is for asexuals who don’t feel attraction to anyone. Grey is for grey-asexuals, who sometimes feel sexual attraction, and demi-sexuals who only feel it if they know someone well,” and so on.
More cups and tutorials followed. A nonbinary Pride cup included yellow “for those whose gender exists outside of the gender binary,” white “for people with many genders,” purple “for those who feel a mix of female and male,” and black “for those who feel they are without gender entirely.”
Commodified wokeness works better in some cases than in others.
(By the way, if you’re confused as to why different identities are sometimes represented by the same color, it’s because Pride flags have evolved over the years, and Budweiser appears to be including them all in an effort to be more, well…
