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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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This leads me to one of two conclusions:

  1. Representation doesn’t really matter. “Representation Matters” is something we hear quite often, but the revealed preference of advertisers for not casting white men in their ads shows they know it to be untrue. While they’re happy to parrot “Representation Matters,” they have all the actual data at their fingertips. White men buy trucks and big macs and technology, so if representation actually mattered, advertisers would include them in their ads.
  2. Representation does matter, but those making the decisions are so ideologically committed that they’re willing to hurt their own bottom line in order to “do the right thing.” They’re so committed to their ideals that they’re willing to depress their own effectiveness by more than 30%. And they do so with no guarantee that their rival agency is going to follow the same set of rules, potentially putting them out of business.

This assumes different groups are the same. White men have consistently demonstrated a willingness to put themselves in others’ shoes, to respect their interests and to make concessions to their weaknesses. They tend to dismiss kinship as a basis for solidarity outside of the immediate family, and if they are offended, it is often on behalf of Republicans, Christians or some other universalist identity and not Whites. They are certainly aware of the fact that women want and need to be coddled in a way men would find insulting towards themselves. They are not going to lose sleep over commercials pandering to the fairer sex.

It is simply very hard for White men to see themselves as victims and vice versa. The fact that this division survived the reevaluation of all values it strong evidence of its validity. There are dominant, hyperagent identities confident in their own strength and whimsical, narcissistic ones that derive power from victimhood. ‘Equality’ is a polite fiction that is neither possible nor appealing to any large group of people.