Family values

[Scooter]

[Bicycle Bill]

OK, J&B, now do one for necrophiliacs.

-"BB"-

[Big RR]

Not for Christmas, but maybe Halloween?

[BoSoxGal]

I see this thread and the responses to it - or lack thereof - as a litmus of sorts for the board.

Test failed.

[ex-khobar Andy]

What's wrong with people who see something evil or creepy here?

See some the comments on the YouTube video - e.g., "I would have given anything to have received acceptance like that when I was growing up. I'm so glad the world is evolving!"

Yes we are evolving. Fifty years ago there might have been those arguing against anti-miscegenation laws. It was only in 1967 - I think within all of our lifetimes - that anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional.

Edited once to clarify.

[BoSoxGal]

Equating transgender people to necrophiliacs is sick and profoundly wrong and reveals a depraved heart. Period.

[Bicycle Bill]

Sorry....

No. NOT sorry.  To my way of thinking, homosexuality, as well as gender fluidity (not sure which this ad was 'celebrating') is an aberrance — just as is coprophilia, urolagnia, or zoophilia... and yes, necrophilia.  

It's just the way I was raised, and at my age it's too late for me to try to embrace whatever new chickenshit comes down the highway.

-"BB"-

[BoSoxGal]

Fifty years ago there might have been those arguing against anti-miscegenation laws. It was only in 1967 - I think within all of our lifetimes - that anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional.

I was born in 1970. In that uniquely childish way, I perceived the world as it was for me as the world, and only maturity and education taught me otherwise. I learned that bigotry was all around me and had been worse in the past - but that led me to have a mistaken impression that things were mostly much better now and of course now we know that wasn’t true. Laws and regulations have changed and some attitudes have, but a much too large number of folks of our generations have not ever changed at heart. A few of them leave disgusting proof of this in droppings all over this board.

The young DO see things differently; I would have hope for the future except they will be surviving in a climate catastrophe hellscape soon enough where identity politics will be off table and likely man will have reverted to basest ugliest survival behaviors with no allowance for higher order issues.

[Joe Guy]

So, drinking scotch turns you into a transgender person? How sad that it took so long to figure out the cause of such a contentious subject.

I never liked scotch. I guess that's why I'm such a macho man...

[Burning Petard]

"Just the way I was raised." Me too. But even more tightly embedded was 'don't get above your raisin'

What a straight jacket. I have not shed it all. I am still trying to forgive my father who would not take me to a Kansas City Monarchs baseball game.

Bigotry in all its forms is just plain inefficient.

snailgate

[Bicycle Bill]

I was born in 1970.

I was probably out of high school before you were out of diapers.  You have no concept — other than what you might have seen on re-runs of "Leave It To Beaver", "Father Knows Best", or the faux-nostalgia of "Happy Days" — of what it was like to be a child in a typical nuclear family in the early-middle 1960s in the American Midwest where Dad worked, Mom didn't, the kids went to school, and the whole family went to church on Sundays, so you have absolutely no way of knowing where I'm coming from.

-"BB"-
  

[Scooter]

[ex-khobar Andy]

It's not so much where you are coming from but where you are now. We all have different backgrounds: and I hope that most of us have had the education necessary to question what was good and what was horrid about the world we saw when we were growing up and what we might do to take part in the evolution of the human race to ditch what was bad and encourage what was good.

I grew up in a world in which homosexuality was banned and active homosexuality was punishable by chemical castration. (E.g., Alan Turing, in some people's estimation the man who singly did the most to defeat Hitler and win the war.). Active homosexuality between two men, providing they were (a) consenting and (b) over 21, became legal in 1967, the year I went to university. The age of consent for heterosexual activity was 16. Among my age group - I was 18 in 1967 - homosexuality was still illegal and I think I knew precisely two people who were semi-openly gay (not a word we used then IIRC) - i.e., I knew but they were understandably not public with it. The point at the time was that there were people - often actors, politicians or aristocrats - whom 'everybody knew' to be gay but who largely got away with it because they had the means or the wit to avoid prosecution. John Gielgud didn't get away with it in 1953, but Joe Orton did in the late 1960s. Times were changing even if the law was slow to catch up.

By the time I was a graduate student I knew far more gay man (I still don't think we used that word) and I realized it wasn't that suddenly there were more of them, it was just that it was no longer against the law. And we've known since Kinsey that something like 10% of males have had some homosexual experience. (Kinsey's methods have been questioned and maybe it should be 8% - but it's not nothing and Kinsey was working in the 1940s.). And we have known for a while that homosexual activity is not unknown in the rest of the animal kingdom: birds, some other primates, dolphins - the list goes on.

The point is, it's commonplace and a normal activity just as red hair is normal. Why is that so difficult for some people to accept?

[datsunaholic]

I was probably out of high school before you were out of diapers.  You have no concept — other than what you might have seen on re-runs of "Leave It To Beaver", "Father Knows Best", or the faux-nostalgia of "Happy Days" — of what it was like to be a child in a typical nuclear family in the early-middle 1960s in the American Midwest where Dad worked, Mom didn't, the kids went to school, and the whole family went to church on Sundays, so you have absolutely no way of knowing where I'm coming from.

Oh, for fucks sake.

I'm younger than you, and I'm younger than BSG. Guess what? I grew up in a single-income family. My Dad worked, my Mom raised us until my youngest brother (who was born in the 80s) started High School then she did a few part-time jobs so that they could pay off the Mortgage. While my Dad didn't go to church, the rest of us did. I sang in the Choir and was an altar boy. We grew up Catholic, went to Catholic school. We got the same "Homosexuality is a sin" BS from the church (where at least half the priests and 90% of the Nuns were homosexual...). Other than that homosexuality was swept under the rug, hidden, even though a large portion of our teachers were living with members of the same gender.

I was well into my teens before I knew that, though. That's how much they kept it hidden. Sure, the school, parish, archdiocese "knew" but as long as they stayed firmly hidden in the closet well they just didn't say anything because if the church leaders DID say anything, it would come out that so were they.

The church taught that sex outside of marriage was a sin.

So I entered adulthood with a bunch of Catholic indoctrination.

Add in family indoctrination too. My Dad's mom being a staunch Bible believer. She said that the purpose of marriage was to create and raise children, and that marrying for any other reason was sinful. My Dad's dad was an old-school racist. I hate writing that but it's the truth. Of course my dad's brother is gay as gay can get. Most of his friends died in the 80s. My uncle never married, because it wasn't legal and by the time it was he had lost everyone. Don't know what my Grandparents would have done if he had... except that when the pastor of my Grandmother's church (who was openly lesbian) married her longtime partner my grandmother stopped going to church. My grandmother "justified" my Uncle since he wasn't a "practicing gay".

So that's the environment I grew up in.

I also grew out of it. Mostly. I'm not perfect. My inner dialogue when I see two guys together still takes a little push to say "that's good" rather than "ew". The same for gender fluidity, because it's still difficult for me to understand how someone could not be what they are genetically. But again... it's none of my business. People can be who they want to be, and with who they want to be as long as everyone in that relationship is in consent. I don't need, want, nor have the right to demand other people be unhappy just because I cannot find love.

For me, moving away from that conservative, conformist viewpoint has taken time.

Step 1 was understanding that people are different. My point of view isn't the only one.
Step 2 was understanding that people's desires should not be limited by religious viewpoints
Step 3 was understanding that just because I don't like something, doesn't make it wrong
Step 4 is accepting people for who they are, not my notion of who they should be. That's the one I still have a LONG way to go on.

It's just the way I was raised, and at my age it's too late for me to try to embrace whatever new chickenshit comes down the highway.

I know people in their 70s and 80s that are way better at being accepting than I am, and I know people on their 20s that are worse bigots/racists than my grandfather ever was. So it's not age, it's a simple fact that YOU want to be a bigot.

[Sue U]

Very well said, Dats.

[Big RR]

Datsun. We all strive to escape the prejudices imprinted on us as kids (and we all have them as baggage).

And BSG, if this is a litmus test, my response is we need to lighten up. The very best way, IMHO, to attack idiocy is to make fun of it, not to make everything into a holy crusade. Of course, others may differ in their views, and are completely free to poke fun at it (or storm my house with torches and pitchforks if they prefer).

And BSG, FWIW I really don't like turning important issues into ads, even for scotch (OK, not great scotch); I think it kind of degrades the discussions and makes them silly (I fully understand that others will say that the ad seeks to make the transsexual more mainstream; I think this may be the case with issues that have become more accepted by the public, but not touchstone issues such as this one). in a time when transsexuals are physically attacked and sought to be outlawed by some, I think the discussion of the issue is far more important than a come-on to buy scotch. FWIW, I wouldn't want to see a Jack Daniels ad involving date rape or a Jose Cuervo ad involving illegal immigration either. These issues deserve a lot more exposure and discussion than can be afforded in a 30-60 second ad about something else. If that means I failed the litmus test, I'll wear the label proudly

[BoSoxGal]

The litmus wasn’t the advertisement, it was how people would or would not react to the disgusting response to it. You laughed, which yes, failed the test as miserably as possible in my opinion- I find no humor in bigotry.

[MajGenl.Meade]

As advised by so many lefties when Joe Citizen points out the degradation of entertainment, "there's an 'off' switch, buddy'. I used it. No need to watch just in order to complain.

[Gob]

The litmus wasn’t the advertisement, it was how people would or would not react to the disgusting response to it. You laughed, which yes, failed the test as miserably as possible in my opinion- I find no humor in bigotry.

You've got me confused again.

Confused with someone who gives a shit about your litmus test...

[ex-khobar Andy]

The ad is not different to so many other ads of the last 60 years or more (that's about my experience of TV) - good people (i.e., people like us) buy Brand Y rather than Brand X. So if J&B Whisky wants people tolerant of gender dysphoria to buy their whisky, is that any different to all those beef ads James Garner did back in the 80s? Real Beef for Real People - i.e., if you don't like beef you must be some kind of sub human type. Or the Marlboro Man? I'm sure there are hundreds of other examples.

Speaking as a Scot who dislikes whisky, does not play golf, eats vegetables and who has no trace of a Scottish accent (and my Scottish friends do not want to be seen with me in public) I probably will not buy J&B whisky because well, I just do not enjoy the stuff. (Except for an occasional dollop on vanilla ice cream.). And I am sure that there are bigots who will no longer buy J&B because of the ad and turn to a more conventionally positioned (ad-wise) water of life. I'm sure that J&B have done the math and concluded that their ad dollars are well spent.

I wondered if Justerini and Brooks (= J&B) sold another whisky and were hedging their bets so I went to that fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia. And found this:

Throughout the 1970s, J&B whisky bottles cropped up with remarkable regularity in Italian poliziotteschi, commedia sexy all'italiana and particularly giallo films as a signifier of sophistication and virility, probably influenced by the brand's popularity among the Italian American celebrities Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.[9]
In the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, the main character Patrick Bateman is a habitual drinker of J&B.[10]
In the 1982 John Carpenter remake of "The Thing", helicopter pilot R.J. MacCready, played by Kurt Russell, is shown throughout the movie drinking J&B.

So it looks as if they are somehow rebelling against that prior 'macho' image which I did not know about. And, frankly, if the brand I sold had been associated with American Psycho I think (hope??) I would do anything to sever that link.

So well done J&B.

And, to echo Sue: well said, Dats.