Dylan Mulvaney, a trans influencer with more than 10 million followers, documented her transition over the course of a year. To celebrate Day 365 of her journey, Bud Light sent her some personalized cans of beer. She unveiled them on TikTok in a partnership with Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch.
This attempt on Bud Light’s part to be forward-thinking about how its customers live and love has been met with a backlash by one group of people who seem to believe that another group of people should not exist. Kid Rock used his gun to shoot several cases of the beer; another guy destroyed a can of Bud Light with a baseball bat in a typical digital tantrum.
For some, trans people represent just the latest Babadook, a complex fear they cannot tolerate.
A note to those folks who are upset that Anheuser-Busch relied on a trans woman as a quasi-spokesperson: Whether you like it or not, queer people have been drinking “your beer” for decades. In fact, as long as there’s been beer, queer people have been drinking it.
Mulvaney’s celebration for some reason threatened the very existence of a whole bunch of guys who aren’t ready for that reality. This will surprise no one who has ever been a small boy. Every boy knows the sting of being called a sissy. Boys are raised to believe that so-called feminine traits represent a danger they must avoid. Boys learn early that they can expect to be punished if they stray in any way into risky, weakening feminine behaviors. These lessons take root deep in our psyches as youngsters, and they stay there forever.
Over a lifetime, the expectations around masculinity are random and often border on the absurd. I once saw a tweet from a woman who suggested that she has no use for a man who orders dessert because eating sweets was feminine. A recent thread from one of my favorite Instagram accounts asked its male followers to name behaviors they’d been told were feminine and thus forbidden from adopting. The list included: wearing sandals, using sunscreen or umbrellas, cat ownership, apologizing, the color pink and — this is my favorite — playing a wind instrument.
Many of the men wrote about what they weren’t permitted to do with their bodies, such as crossing their legs at the knee or putting their hands on their hips. It was all quite restrictive — and if men believe these things, it is partly because of the warnings they heard at an early age from their friends, their fathers and the culture at large.
But the reaction to Mulvaney’s milestone reminds us of how problematic these ideas of masculinity can be. If conventional views of manliness could be reduced to a recipe, I’d guess it would be one part stoicism, two parts anger, three parts lust, four parts control over women. This cocktail can be dangerous, creating men who struggle to process complex emotions, deal with negative feelings in a healthy way, or even express love.
Men need to move beyond the idea that dominating other human beings and engaging in endless emotional barricading is how to show the world that they’re “masculine.” The concept needs a de-gendering. Perhaps to some, masculinity only means that you are self-assured, confident, not easily threatened and won’t be told what to do, what you can’t wear, whom you can love. But there are literally millions of people who possess these traits regardless of sex or gender identity.
If your idea of “masculine” is just a hatred of anything that someone told you is “feminine,” then I don’t know what to tell you except that, as a human being, you are entitled to the whole human experience. Not just part of it.
Anheuser-Busch issued a sort-of apology that seemed to suggest that the brewer just wanted its entire partnership with Mulvaney to disappear. “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” chief executive Brendan Whitworth said in a statement curiously titled “Our Responsibility To America.”
Such a ham-handed surrender may encourage those who find individual difference too much to handle. Some may even imagine they have won an important battle. But all I see are human beings who as children were crushed and replaced with a script, a set of expectations and an endless performance. Because the color pink is for everyone.
