Woke Twitter: 1, VS Angels: 0
There once was an annual event that brought together all Americans. The event was a two-hour made for TV spectacle in which women with transcendent physical beauty stalked a catwalk for two hours selling expensive lingerie.
In its own silly way, this event – the Victoria’s Secret Fashion show - was the crowning marriage of Western capitalism and fashion – driving almost $7.7 billion in annual sales at its peak in 2015.
If you had told me back then that a few years hence this event would be cancelled and that the popular press would be universally applauding that cancellation as a moral victory over oppression (see NY Times editorial) – I would have thought that somehow in the future ISIS managed to expand their Caliphate into America (in 2015 we were all terrified of ISIS).
But men in white pick-up trucks never conquered the Eastern seaboard. Woke Twitter did.
What is Woke Twitter?
A study of American Twitter users from the Pew Research Center found that 80 percent of all tweets come from just 10 percent of users. These users tweet 50X more than the median user.
These superusers in turn fit a certain demographic - they are more likely to be rich, they are more likely to be women and they are more likely to lean far left. They are “woke” (see here).
Despite being a clear minority within both Twitter and the US, Woke Twitter can make it seem like they are an overwhelming majority as they lever hashtags to create viral memes that take over collective consciousness. When they do so, politicians and companies have no choice but to kowtow.
As a result, Woke Twitter is now in firm control of our culture (just as ISIS was in firm control of a vast swath of territory in 2015).
Over the last few years, Woke Twitter has decreed many things and canceled many a person, including the VS Angels.
The VS Angels sinned by being sensationally attractive – so attractive that they foisted an unfair standard onto the broader female sex and became oppressive symbols of sexist male fantasies.
To boot, they were owned by Epstein’s patron Les Wexner.
The campaign worked.
Sales suffered and in time VS’ management team had to react.
So what did they do?
They purged.
These beautiful women are gone.
And have been replaced with a new crop called the Collective.
What is the Collective?
Well, we have a transgender model and a few women with BMIs that would qualify as obese as well as various activists like Megan Rapinoe with strong social justice views.
In other words, we have the identity groups that Woke Twitter celebrates.
VS is not just selling fantasies anymore – it is selling politics – at least a certain spectrum of politics.
But is that what the aspirational consumers in Columbus, Ohio want?
This is going to be a key question for VS and for all American companies going forward.
On the one hand, consumers do like knowing that their products are ethically sourced. Brands that tell environmentally conscious stories have been secular winners.
Consumers also like feeling good about themselves, so companies that sell more realistic beauty standards like Fenty have done well.
So clearly some type of signaling works.
But that doesn’t mean it always works.
Gillette decided that they would no longer celebrate masculinity with their razor ads and instead ask that their customers, men, “do better” (see here). This woke signaling on the issue of toxic masculinity was met with an 8-billion-dollar write-down the next quarter.
Hollywood’s decision to celebrate left wing causes with The Oscars has been met with a collapse in relevancy and ratings.
The NBA likewise saw massive ratings declines when they went all in on social justice slogans in 2020 (other leagues also saw declines but by significantly smaller amounts). The NBA has yet to recover while other leagues have.
What this shows is that companies have to start differentiating between what people actually want and what the cultural elite want them to want.
Yes, there is room for some do-gooder signaling but that doesn’t mean you need to go all in a set of political principles that are anchored within a certain part of the political spectrum.
Very often the orthodoxy of the cultural elite is opposite of the masses. Not everybody for instance is on board with concepts like toxic masculinity or critical race theory or the notion that gender isn’t a thing – the new core tenets of the cultural elite.
You can see how divided the cultural elite is from the rest of America by just looking at the delta between audience and critic scores in Rotten Tomatoes when films tackle such topics head on.
Take Dave Chappelle’s comedy special Sticks & Stones that discussed LGBTQ issues in a flippant manner. The critics universally condemned it because it violated their political sensibilities.
Audiences on the other hand thought it was hilarious, giving him a 99% score.
Now compare this to how critics and audiences responded to the lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby. She tells jokes that celebrate these orthodoxies and she is universally applauded by critics.
Audiences on the other hand thought it was terrible.
There is a nuance to the American public that Hollywood and Corporate America sometimes fail to grasp. Yes, folks care about the social good in certain ways but they don’t always interpret that social good in the exact same manner as the cultural elite would like them to.
The more a particular conception of that social good gets shoved down their throats, the less they will probably like it and the more they will find themselves celebrating those who flaunt that orthodoxy.
We are in the early innings of this pushback but it will only get more obvious in the years to come.
ISIS had a meteoric rise but then fell over the subsequent years as it turned out that the general populace doesn’t like living under their austere orthodoxy.
So it will be with Woke Twitter (hopefully).