It’s the Straight Pride pin. I am horrified by how boring it is.
This is supposed to represent my sexual orientation? It just makes me look back on my life with regret. Put it away. Honestly, I have no problem with being a straight married man, I just think the symbol for my lifestyle ought to communicate at least a little joy and happiness and enthusiasm, rather than this tepid blandness.
It doesn’t even have any squid on it. What is the point?
Straight Pride. Because cishet people are the really marginalized people.
Anyone know why it has different shades of grey? The gay pride pin is a rainbow to represent the full gender and sexual spectrum. Is there supposed to be a spectrum of CisHet?
I don’t see a pin, and what I do see looks wavy — seasick perhaps — not straight.
How do you know it doesn’t have any squid on it? After today’s Friday Cephalopod showed us what chromatophores can do, can any of us say with confidence that there isn’t a squid in that picture?
Wow, that’s serious ugly.
The people who “designed” it fantasize everything is black & white — that is, as — or were simply stuck for ideas on how to plagiarize the Gay Pride version without obviously doing so. Or they just play records backwards searching for Teh Evil…
As for why it’s bland and tepid, that’s to even things up a bit. Gay people get discrimination, self-doubt and discouragement, so we need something bright and happy to cheer us up. Straight people get privilege and encouragement anyway, so you don’t need anything extra from your badge.
When you find yourself needlessly paranoid that you might have caught a deadly and incurable disease after every time you have sex, then you can apply for something a bit more exciting. But, really, I’d take dull flag over crippling sexual hypochondria if I were you.
People have in fact come up with straight ally flags–to the perpetual consternation of queer people. They don’t look like this one though. I think somebody just made this up and put it on this one pin product, which is no longer being sold at all.
I don’t know what’s up with that color scheme. Looks kinda like ace colors but so faded that you can’t quite categorize the colors. It’s in white/blue dress territory.
It’s actually perfect that the design is just a less interesting and symbolically inappropriate version of the Gay Pride flag. It communicates efficiently that this “Straight Pride” didn’t come about for its own sake, to serve anyone’s actual needs, but only as a mean-spirited facsimile of Gay Pride intended to shout down and undermine the latter.
Compare also: every other adoption of minority rights rhetoric by reactionaries — “Men’s Rights Activists” whose activism consists of loudly complaining whenever a woman speaks up, guys who become intensely concerned with sexualised violence against women the moment they can blame brown people for it, “All Lives Matter”, everyone who observes ‘When’s International Men’s Day’ Day…
I like it.
It looks like a cake.
Okay, I looked around at straight flags, and it seems like there are a few. There’s a flag with black and white stripes. One has black and white stripes with a rainbow A (really an upside-down V). Then there’s a black-to-white gradient flag. And there’s a flag with a depiction of a traditional family, apparently promoted by Vladimir Putin.
I think the pin in the OP is trying to be the black-to-white gradient, but something went wrong and the colors are off. Just as well.
So, the flag by Putin is obviously anti-LGBT propaganda, and the one with the rainbow A is obviously trying to indicate allyship. It’s less clear to me where the others are coming from. Some people say that they’re used by anti-LGBT people, but I couldn’t find any examples.
In any case, one should be careful with any of these symbols, because even if your heart is in the right place, most queer people I know would give it the side-eye. Being an ally isn’t something that really warrants a flag.
My first thought was that the flag was a rainbow of skin color. That lead to me thinking that they were trying to include race somehow to divert the conversation. I’m struggling to find the logic in that thought though.
So, here’s a comment I liked from the linked article:
Indeed.
Honestly it looks like an eyeshadow pallet. An expensive one, like from Fenty or something. You could make a hell of a smokey eye look with those colors.
For a pin, though? Yeah no.
It’s all of the different shades of coffee drinks that bigots might order in the McDonalds — excuse me, “McCafe” — drive-through on their way to work. Misappropriated, yes, but somehow also blandly appropriate.
Ditto blf#3 – the lines are not straight, they’re only mostly straight.
The asexual colors are more interesting! And we don’t give a fig!
Well, I don’t. Don’t wanna speak for everyone. I usually do’t even wanna speak for me…
Bacon?
marinerachel @ 17
If that’s bacon, it’s rotting.
It will look great right next to the White Pride pin, the American flag pin and the Christian pin.
For people who see the world binarially, the choice of fading from black to white with tans in between, is just, well, odd. Additionally, for people who are proud of being members of the dominant (politically, numerically) community, who proud of being straight, the flowing waves, being seriously not straight, is just, well, odd.
Sad. All that money and no one thought to hire a design specialist.
A checkerboard, black and white. Or, more vertically, zebra stripes. Straight, with 90° indicators at every vertex. How hard was that?
Morons can’t even moron right.
The first thing I thought of was “Fifty Shades of Grey”. I suppose that is pretty straight, but is it what you really want to be identified with? OTOH, I never made the connection between the fifty shades and the fifty states of the union, so they there may be some something to it.
I think my parents had those sheets on their waterbed in the 80s.
Cake. Figs. Bacon. I’m getting hungry.
It’s the Beige Pride pin!
It makes me think of a ’70s van, especially the kind with a big panel window on the side. Maybe the designer felt nostalgic for his teen years, when he banged “hot chicks” in his “make out palace on wheels.”
Heh, probably should have put banged in the quotes with hot chicks.
They stole my cranky old fart pride pin.
I’ve always wanted to be represented by an ineptly made layered sponge cake.
Also known as the We Outlawed, Tortured, Imprisoned, and Killed Gay People Pride flag.
At first I thought the white wasn’t pink enough. I though it was was too pale and maybe even offensive. Then I realized it must be for makeup-covered goths so I’m ok with it. Wave on, you crazy flag miscegenation!
Bland, boring, and ugly. As a straight person, I don’t associate my sexuality with any of those things, so this pin fails even on a basic design and colour theory level.
Beyond those basic inadequacies, I just can’t imagine anything so pointless as a straight pride pin. No one is marginalising or oppressing straight people for being straight. I think pretty much everyone accepts that fully consensual straight sex between adults is great for those straight, bisexual and pansexual people who engage in it, with the possible exceptions of the most extreme among the trans exclusionary radical feminists who admittedly do try to argue that all heterosexual sex, no matter how crystal clear the consent of all parties to it is, automatically amounts to rape, but no one else takes their inane blather seriously for good reason.
The truth is that our society aggressively celebrates heterosexuality all the time. Indeed, our culture’s obsession with some very non-functional expressions of heterosexuality is one of the principal problems facing contemporary society. No one’s interests are truly served by reinforcing that mindset.
To be honest, I think Saad has the right of it @ 30 – this pin isn’t so much about ‘celebrating heterosexuality’ as it is about functioning as a dog whistle that allows the wearer to convey to others a deep seated hatred for LGBTQI people in a manner that is not openly bigoted. If they are called on it, they can always try to weasel out of it by saying that they are simply ‘celebrating heterosexuality’, and anyone who criticises them is expressing hatred toward all straight people. It is the usual cowardice of the bigot too weak willed to accept the opprobrium their horrifying beliefs will justly attract if honestly expressed.
It reminds me of Mark Russell’s Republican “rainbow” quilt (during the 1988 US Elections,). It had white, off-white, bone, vanilla, and china.
Okay, I’m feeling weird. Is it really just me seeing them as purple/magenta/pink? Not gray or tan. Even the “white” and “black” at the extremes are a bit cool, like the rest of the image, not warm…. My glasses aren’t doing it, and I’m fairly sure it’s not my monitor.
It’s ugly from a tonal perspective as well. When you have six bars of colour fading from black to white through a range of washed-out purples you expect each bar to be a mid-tone between the ones on either side of it. This example seems to have exactly the same colour in bars 3 and 4, and the jump from 5 to the bottom-most white bar is far greater than in any of the other transitions.
Or is a lack of concern over decorative schemes and aesthetics supposed to be a distinctively straight thing worth celebrating?
@ consciousness razor, #34
To me, it reads (from top to bottom) as: dark grey, mauve, taupe, taupe, light pink, and white, all set in gold. I actually think it’s sort of pretty, in spite of the hideous concept behind it.
However, I’m red-green color blind, and I’m usually told (whenever I describe the color of a thing) that I’m way off base.
…Although it would look much better if the dark grey were dark purple.
consciousness razor #34
Think of it as cake. With icing.
Colour doesn’t matter. Sugar. Butter. Flour. Icing.
Caaaaake.
That’s hilarious. That thing is beige. It’s like a WASP cooking joke, and I’ll admit that there is some good WASP cooking out there. I think it makes its point quite effectively. The heterosexual world is a bland place compared with a more inclusive one.
I’ll be wearing this when I march in the More Rights for the Unoppressed rally.
#34
@consciousness razor
Perhaps the people who did this believed that actual design talent is gay?
cr @ #34:
It’s not just you. I don’t know what people are talking about. I hope this isn’t another dress.
Huh, I would’ve expected such a thing to be half pink and half blue, representing the two (and only two) genders, in their god-ordained proportions (1:1) and color-coding. Obviously the top half would be blue…
/s
Still less bothersome than straight people actually attending Pride.
Isn’t that the Bear Pride flag without the paw print?
PZ,
Whats the record on the greatest number of comments to a post. Here your up to forty five where mine is forty six.
jack16
I suppose they do know that white contains all the colors of the rainbow?
Oh yeah, that will TOTALLY win gay people over to being straight again….
@Chris J. #12:
That was close to my first thought as well. Considering how the anti crowd frequently likes to behave as though queer=white male, it would not surprise me if someone concocted a hetero-supremacy symbol based on appropriation of anti racist themes.
It looks like it was inspired by a pack of Necco Wafers.
@45
It’s not even close. Bear pride is in autumn colors. Orange and black being the main ones.
It’s been good to me so far, but if heterosexuality is in reality that bland, I fear I’m missing out on the good stuff. Maybe I need to branch out.
It might work as an inter-racial pride symbol if they dumped the green and added a few more shades.
I looks like of those paint sample strips showing various shades of ‘builders beige’
We already have a symbol. When you poke your index finger on one hand into the OK sign on the other hand.
:)