Nick Millward

Photographer of interesting things, aspiring polymath, eternal optimist. Pronouns (Bond/James Bond)

[Ani O'Brien @aniobrien]

As a lesbian, I am so tired of this nonsense. I am tired of corporate Pride and activist Pride.

This week HelloFresh decided that the best way to celebrate Pride Month was to post jokes about preparing for anal sex and offering high-fibre recipes to help people "prep". They then doubled down with a discount code called BOTTOMSUP.

Inclusion! WOO! 🙄

The thing that frustrates me is that people like me have spent years defending gay rights against accusations that we are hypersexual, inappropriate, and incapable of ordinary family life.

That was one of the central prejudices gay people faced. For decades, opponents portrayed gay men in particular as sexually obsessed and depraved. They argued that homosexuality was all about sex rather than love, commitment, relationships and family. The fight for equal rights was partly a fight against exactly that caricature.

And now here we are. A major multinational company has decided the best way to celebrate Pride is to publicly discuss anal sex. What an achievement.

The same-sex marriage movement wasn't about sex. It was about love, commitment, and the ability to build a life with the person you love. It was about family and equality before the law.

Most gay people are not what the weirdos in the HelloFresh marketing department think we are. We go to work, pay bills, walk the dog, argue about whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher, and try to build a decent life together.

You know... Normal things.

The overwhelming majority of gay people just want to be accepted and left alone. We want the same freedoms, responsibilities and opportunities as everyone else. We don't need multinational corporations making dirty jokes about us to feel "included".

What makes this even more ridiculous is that HelloFresh's core market is clearly not radical "queer" activists with blue hair and septum rings.

Their customers are overwhelmingly middle-class couples and families. Busy parents. Professionals. People with disposable income who want convenient meals after work.

How hard would it have been to make a genuinely wholesome Pride advertisement?

Two mums cooking dinner with their kids or two husbands hosting friends. A same-sex couple just making dinner together or flipping a coin to see who has to cook. A simple message acknowledging families and love. Instead they went with rectum jokes.

Somewhere along the way after the TQ+ hijacked our movement, Pride stopped being about acceptance and started being about performance. A small but influential group of activists have convinced themselves that being as shocking, vulgar and sexually explicit as possible is somehow brave and intrinsically "queer". They think boundaries of any kind are oppression including standards and decorum. They think manners are censorship.

The result is campaigns like this one and somehow people are shocked when there is backlash against us all.

I actually feel really sorry for gay men in particular because one of the oldest stigmas they have faced is the idea that they are dirty, promiscuous and defined entirely by sex. This campaign reinforces that stereotype.

If you wanted to design an advertisement that would make ordinary people roll their eyes and think Pride is ridiculous, or shield their children's eyes in horror, you would struggle to do better than this.

The irony is that HelloFresh's marketing department thinks this is progressive. It's regressive and distasteful. It takes decades of work by ordinary gay people who want to be seen as neighbours, colleagues, parents, partners and family members and reduces all of it to a crude sexual punchline.

The people who fought for our rights wanted dignity, but the people most enthusiastic about Pride today seem determined to turn it into a fetish convention with corporate sponsors.

[Nick Millward @NickMillward]

@aniobrien I suspect Hello Fresh’s goal was to get people taking about Hello Fresh - in that they have succeeded.

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

“Sacking thousands of workers who currently work in the North Sea is economic madness," a trade union leader has claimed.

Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB, one of Labour’s biggest union donors, said that the Government’s energy policy was not only hitting jobs but also driving his members to Reform UK

🔗: https://t.co/ZPokSFnwGJ

[Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy]

We have lost our moral compass.

We can no longer tell right from wrong.

Where this leaves our children, God only knows. 😳

[Hazel Appleyard @HazelAppleyard]

I thought there was no way this was real… it had to be parody… so I looked it up myself.

It’s real. @HelloFresh are advertising their product as being good for clearing out your rectum in preparation for anal s*x during Pride Month.

I’m so done with this timeline.

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

This is ridiculous now. How many times has the Government briefed it's going to announce a tech ban for under 16's, then at the last minute bottled it. If you believe in it, do it. If you don't, shut up.

[Hugh Laurie @hughlaurie]

Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.

One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what??

The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.

Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!

[Sir Lewis Updates @LH44updates]

Martin: Kim, Martin Brundle, Sky F1. How, how are you today? [...] Are you enjoying F1?

Kim: 🤔⁉️❓️❔️🤨

😂😂😂😂 #MonacoGP

[Nick Millward @NickMillward]

@GeoffBuysCars

[Nick Millward @NickMillward]

@PhilipProudfoot Calling it a genocide over and over still doesn’t make it a genocide.

[GB Politics @GBPolitcs]

🚨NEW: Latest Brexit/EU polling:

Stay out: 55%
Rejoin: 33%
Don't know: 12%

[@OpiniumResearch]

[Nick Millward @NickMillward]

@AntonioSabatoJr Looks like a 9 year old old wearing his Dad’s suit.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

A new poll shows that, by more than 2 to 1, British voters would rather keep the right to set their own regulations than have greater access to EU markets.
That is the only question that truly matters, and is why talk of joining the EU is for the birds.
https://t.co/PjnS9oP8MU

[Tom Tugendhat @TomTugendhat]

This is a man-made tragedy all down to energy policies that have pushed prices higher in search of a carbon ambition at home and simply pushing businesses to the wall.

[Nick Millward @NickMillward]

@F1 Looks like he’s about to deliver sermon.

[Charlotte Gill @CharlotteCGill]

Spanish sociologist awarded £1.5 MILLION in UK taxpayer funding to research LGBTIQ+ asylum policies

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

This was brilliant. Trevor Phillips played a clip of what Keir Starmer said about George Floyd and displayed how Labour MPs expressed their “anger”.

David Lammy said it was fine because they were in opposition.

But not fine for Nigel Farage to use the term “rage” like they did.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Worth watching. Proper, measured, thoughtful response.

[Sky News @SkyNews]

Sky's @TrevorPTweets, a former head of the Commission for Racial Equality, says he feel "rage" because the Henry Nowak case is one of many examples of "misjudgements about people based on their race leading to a young life being cut short."

He shares three other examples ⬇️

[Robert Colvile @rcolvile]

'Labour has left a novice to manage yet another NHS reorganisation, started then abandoned by Streeting. A new PM and health sec are almost certainly en route with a completely different vision. And the rest of Westminster is staring politely at its shoes.'