Important article by Lionel Shriver

I think this may be true about the advertising agencies having a skewed London perspective as to what is 'normal/average'.
Basically every advert these days seems to feature a mixed race couple/family, when in reality fewer than 10% of the UK's couples are mixed race. I've noticed a bit of a pushback on social media these days with a fair smattering of green 'tick box' emoticons being used to signal that someone thinks the company is 'ticking a diversity box' in their advertising - The National Trust/Woodland Trust/ English Heritage get a lot of this reaction.
The pendulum needs to swing back to something that feels more balanced and representative of the population make-up as a whole.

It's tricky for advertisers because you risk alienating your main customer base. I looked at most of the John Lewis and M&S clothing ads this year and felt they weren't for 'people like me' (i.e. female, white, size 12) as they all seemed to feature 6ft black, masculine/trans models (on whom the clothes looked pretty dreadful!) and yet I bet my demographic makes up 80% of their sales!

What do you mean, @Grammarnut? Could you link the post I agreed with?

Aha! A member of the 'gentrification semantics' group.

Clearly a wrong focus by LS. Those using the Republic of Ireland were France and Germany, in order to impede Brexit. The French premier, who rules places like Reunion, which are so far from France they are not in the same time zone, implied that NI was not the same country as the UK (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) which is legally a lie.

A bunch of unformed thoughts. I think advertising has pendulum swung away from the 'pale/male' being the default person in adverts, to a lot more black actors. It could be argued, that because every agency is working to increase their diversity, that now the 'pale/male' is not represented enough to match demographics (when in England and Wales, black ethnicity represents 4% of the population). I'm not sure how you can divide a cast of an advert sensibly to match demographics though. Also - with asian at 8% of the population, I would say that they are under-represented. So I wonder if this is influenced by London ? If all the advertising agencies are London based, it has a much different ethnic mix than the rest of the UK, and they are reflecting what they are seeing out the window, but we are not all looking out the same window.

It was a genuine question. What is fat phobia? Being fat is bad for your health, is a trigger for cancer etc. Telling someone they need to lose weight is not fat phobia, but good sense.

I'm not a fan of all that Lionel Shriver says, but I agree with her suggestion that we should all take every opportunity to suggest that identity politics are now passé and uncool. I'm always writing 'Sex not Gender' on forms and dropping emails to councillors about money spent on rainbow crossings and police lanyards.

Only by those who oppose women's rights.

Yes, this is absolutely true!
DS2 was up for an award for a post-grad course and was told off the record he was the preferred candidate, but it would 'help' if he declared himself non-binary on his application and that 'it's OK, you won't actually have to change anything in reality'. He didn't want to - feels very hetro/masculine and not ashamed of it.

He didn't get the bursary - it went to a girl who changed her pronouns to they/them and tinted her hair pink for the exact 12 month duration of the post-grad course. Her relationship status with with longstanding boyfriend was unchanged...

I had forgotten that in my disinclination to agree with LS re shareholders. Not sure one can put Thames Water in the same basket as people throwing soup at a Van Gogh. I don't think LS does this either, but she is using a US perspective?

This annoyed me as well. I don't think shareholders' interests should be put before environmental concerns. This is what has happened with the 'water industry' in the UK (the commodification of utilities is one of the worst aspects of free market globalization) where water companies have paid dividends to shareholders using finance intended to repair infrastructure.

Afaik 'retarded' is still around. It means developing later or socially inappropriate. It's medical use as meaning impaired intellectual development is not currently used and shows no inclination for a comeback.
The colloquial use of 'retarded' has never gone away. But LS appears to be applying it to 'woke' ideologues, suggesting that their ideological development is in some way impaired or that they lack intellectual rigour. Not sure I want to use the word that way, preferring 'bloody stupid, ignorant nitwits' myself.

This is a short cut way to close down discussion by using a slur that you beleive concludes just by its utterance that I should not be listened to because I am a bad person.

Very 2024.

But she didn't, she referenced one specific advert, featuring a black family and said it looked like it had been made in Nigeria. This is blatantly racist.

No she didn't. She siad this year's ad didn't look like it was fimed in Nigeria i.e. not mostly black people.

You can decide this means she hates black people and doesn't want them in adverts.

Or,

you could conisder alongside other things she's said, political movemnts, and commentators, that it means she rejects corportations pushing positive discri aination on the electortae, becsuawe she beleives this is wrong.

In one of those scebarios she is racist , in the other CRT and DEI, and you, are racist.

Either way just calling each other racist isn't going to get us anywhere, and so better to agree racism is awful and consider why we have differing views on the way to address it.

Western values, perhaps? Toleration, acceptance of diversity, women's rights (and their right to be protected from harm e.g. sex-based violence, exploitation, discrimination), freedom of conscience?

I would call out both CRT and BLM as racist.

Do you think anything advertised at you has to feature people of the same race as you?? Would you not shop in JL because they feature black people in their adverts?

If she had said this is the 4th year in a row JL Christmas adverts have featured black and brown people when this is less than 25% of the UK population, she may have had a point. But she didn't, she referenced one specific advert, featuring a black family and said it looked like it had been made in Nigeria. This is blatantly racist.

She celebrated the return of the word retarded, so often used as a slur against disabled people. No context here at all. Just pure disablism.

As the pendulum swings back, we can't lose sight of what is just plain wrong. What she wrote was racist and bigoted.

This is a really long winded way to try and justify something that is just racist.

I didn’t get this line at all as my recollection of the John Lewis adverts is that they are all very recognisably in the UK, not set overseas and I came back to the thread to say what the fuck is she in about and then I see this and get that of course, she means there were black people in the ad. So unfortunately I’m out, this is so racist I’m not interested in anything else she has to say.

The point she made was that an advertisement that features mostly black actors aimed at a country 86% white is a bit of an own goal. It's not racist to point this out.

Again I see what you are saying, but again I disagree. Somethings do not need context to interpret. She implied that black families should not be used to represent a UK company. She celebrated the use of a really offensive and damaging term for disabled people. What context explains this away?

Is she wants to make more nuanced points then she needs to spend the time explaining what she means rather than making racist and bigoted comments and leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.

You may choose to read between her lines, I choose to see what is plain and simple in her words. Racism and bigotry.

Being anti-BLM or CRT is perfectly compatible with being GC. BLM is monetized racism against non-blacks and CRT is racist e.g. in suggesting that we group children together by race - how is that not racist? The idea that if you are not white you are a victim is also racist.
NB Calling her stance 'gammony' is both racist (only applies to non-blacks) and classist.

Her comment about Nigeria is not racist, a bit on the nose perhaps as is her style, but would only be racist if you believe that the population of Nigeria is not mostly black, or that saying it is is racist.

Her point is that in Nigeria a majority black representation in advertising would be normal. Here it represents something else deliberate and political.

The point she is making is that it's become apparent that diversity in advertising has disproportionately over represented minority groups in the UK for political reasons. Many are now rejecting of the political beliefs are being promoted by these corporations though DEI, and the implications of that.

The point isn't that she or those who agree with her, doesn't want black people in adverts , she and many others, don't want corporations adopting a political stance the majority reject and forcing it on us.

Calling this racism is as simplistic as calling the criticism of the Jaguar advert transphobic, and fails to understand what is happening culturally and politically or why.

The fault line is that the belief in positive discrimination for 'oppressed' groups, which many here still seem to think is a good thing, is what allowed men who pretend to be women to claim oppressed status and gain special treatment.

You are arguing they are not oppressed, which we should actually be irrelevant, instead we should simply state that they are not women.

They used the left wing oppressed/ victim hierarchy belief to their advantage, and it has had very negative outcomes.

The left feminists still seem to believe that the oppressed/ victim narrative and discriminating based on this is a good thing, it just went wrong in this case.

What Lionel Shriver is saying is that it all stems from the same fault line in thinking: when you view all politics through an oppressor/ victim narrative and believe that discrimination based on group identity is a good thing we get to hell pretty quickly.

All that's left to argue then is who is most oppressed and who can we care less about and discriminate against.

The TRAs used this very successfully for a while.

And many here still don't seem to see the dangers in this approach, or the fact that the back lash against this approach is on, and just saying rit is biogoted won't work anymore, because it's not based on biogtry it;s based on a belief it's wrong: morally and politically and will lead to very dangerous places.

In any case, undermining the principle that you don't discriminate against individuals on the basis of group membership is basic, if you've sacrificed that you are in a whole different playing field, where discrimination is ok, the only question is who it is ok to discriminate against.