Parody Woman

Dylan Mulvaney is an offensive ‘role model’

WHO is Dylan Mulvaney and why does there seem to be no other model up for the job of marketing products from leggings to bad beer?

Mulvaney first hit prominence doing what appeared to be sketch comedy but actually wasn’t: a TikTok series called “365 Days of Girlhood” in which the biological man Dylan transformed himself into a girl.

Mulvaney kicks off the first video of the series saying, “I’ve already cried three times. I wrote a scathing email that I didn’t send. I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford. And when someone asked me how I was I said ‘I’m fine!’ when I wasn’t fine.”

Pausing to reapply her lip gloss, Mulvaney asks the camera, “How did I do, ladies? Good? Girl Power!”

It’s like asking ChatGPT to write a script on womanhood — sorry, girlhood — that is deeply offensive but also unfunny.

In another video, Dylan shows off a pair of pleather shorts and expresses surprise that people stared “directly at my crotch. Oh, I forgot that my crotch doesn’t look like other women’s crotches sometimes because mine doesn’t look like a little Barbie pocket.”

Women, we cry all the time, spend too much money and have a . . . Barbie pocket, is it?

We should accept this mockery of who we are because Girl Power, right?

For this caricature of womanhood, Mulvaney has been rewarded with endorsement deals from brand after brand: Kate Spade, Ulta Beauty, CeraVe, Instacart and recently Nike and Bud Light.

It’s the Bud Light deal that caused the first real backlash, likely because Bud Light is a product traditionally marketed to men and it was the first time they saw Mulvaney inserted into advertising aimed at them.

“Bud’s audience are 64% male on Instagram and 68% male on Twitter,” per influencer-marketing website Influencer Intelligence.

What’s the big deal about watching a parody of a woman sell products? If you don’t like it, just ignore it!

But ignoring it is what the large majority of the country were doing before women were recalibrated as “birthing people” and suddenly no one could define “woman” at all. In the era of “Representation matters” we’re supposed to just accept that women are being erased from society and replaced with someone who claims to be us but also full-on ridicules us.

We’re called transphobes if we think that obviously biological men shouldn’t be competing in women’s sports and, yes, women should have the right to not encounter penises, no matter the self-identifying gender of the person with that penis, in their locker rooms.

And we’re not supposed to notice transgenderism has become an ideology that’s being aimed at children.

No one cared when it was grown adults who changed their pronouns or presented as the opposite gender.

The transgender-youth population has doubled in the last five years. That’s a startling number of kids who suddenly believe they were born in the wrong body.

Mulvaney is an activist for this cause who famously sat down with President Biden to complain about states cracking down on automatic affirmation and transition for questioning children.

When Mulvaney asked him his thoughts on this kind of “gender-affirming care” for kids, Biden answered that no one should have the right to ban access to hormones and surgery “as a moral or legal question.”

But it is actually very much both a moral and legal question.

Writing in these pages in January, experts Dr. Stanley Goldfarb and Dr. Miriam Grossman pointed out, “England, Sweden and Finland have largely abandoned gender affirmation for minors in the last three years. Others, such as Ireland and Italy, are raising concerns, even with approaches already more restrictive than America’s.”

Trans people have always existed, and everyone was fine with it. The criticism of Dylan Mulvaney is about something else entirely.

Women deserve more than to be lampooned and have an array of brands celebrate it.

Bud Light has lost at least $5 billion in valuation since its marketing blunder. Brands that continue to push Mulvaney on us do so at their own risk.