Elton John, after calling for a boycott against Dolce & Gabbana, was photographed carrying a Dolce & Gabbana shopping bag into a Los Angeles recording studio March 16, according to CBS News. John was spotted with the shopping bag after he had sworn on his Instagram account that he’d never wear anything from the designers again, blasting them for their comments on gay couples adopting and babies born by in vitro fertilization.
(Inquisitr, March 22, 2015)
Therefore, John’s a hypocrite? Not quite.
Elton John and his partner David Furnish have two children who were born through surrogacy. Dolce & Gabbana dismissed children born this way as “synthetic.” Naturally, John found this slight so unforgivable, he called for a boycott against them. More to the point, I am convinced he will back up his hashtag protest with real-life action, the shopping bag notwithstanding.
By contrast, far too many people, especially celebrities, make a show of joining online protests, but show no interest in how those protests play out in real life.
Remember when the #StopKony2012 viral campaign made expressing concern for the “invisible children” the LRA kidnapped an article of our shared humanity?
Invisible Children’s entire campaign smacks of little more than a feel-good PR stunt (perhaps even a misleading ploy to raise funds for administrative rather than charitable purposes). In fact, I would wager a fair amount of my pride that if you were to ask Rihanna or any of her followers a week from today who Joseph Kony is, they would react as if you asked what the Higgs Boson is….
(“Tweeting the Genocidal Joseph Kony to Death,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 8, 2012)
In fairness to viral poseurs like Rihanna, no less a person than Michelle Obama has participated in equally flimsy, fleeting hashtag protests.
Remember when the #BringBackOurGirls viral campaign made expressing concern for the schoolgirls Boko Haram kidnapped an article of our shared humanity? Well, Michelle figured as prominently in that campaign as Rihanna did in #StopKony2012. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find a single real-life utterance from Michelle demanding their return since making quite a show of tweeting her support almost a year ago.
Sadly, we live in a world today where social media have made imaginary friends and hashtag protests like the real thing. Which is why, apart from losing a few celebrity clients (who probably never paid for their stuff anyway), I don’t think #BoycottDolceGabbana will have any real impact on sales for fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana….
Of course, even gay men are entitled to hold traditional views – no matter how seemingly hypocritical or self-abnegating:
‘You are born to a mother and a father — or at least that’s how it should be. Dolce said. ‘I call children of chemistry, synthetic children. Rented uterus, semen chosen from a catalog.’
(NPR, March 16, 2015)
But we are equally entitled to boycott Dolce & Gabbana for holding such views. And I would, if – for some unforeseen reason – I were ever inclined to buy their stuff.
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Tweeting Joseph Kony…