It’s June, which means it’s time for corporations all around to try to capitalize on Pride Month with some ill-advised and awkward marketing initiatives, and we’ve got a real doozy for you today courtesy of Burger King Austria. The fast-food chain revealed its new Pride Whopper on Monday, which has ‘same-sex’ buns – two tops or two bottoms. Naturally, this did not go well. According to a Burger King Austria Instagram post, the Pride Whoppers come ‘with two matching buns for equal love and equal rights.’
Burger King Austria made a Pride burger that’s either two tops or two bottoms… what in straight hell? pic.twitter.com/bSl3Cyiq9p
— Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) June 3, 2022
‘We stand for the equal rights of all identities and sexual orientations,’ it says. ‘ A small twist to put a grin on your face and remind us to treat one other properly and peacefully. No matter who you are or who you love.’ That’s OK, but is it really ‘respectful’ to create your Pride burger something that may be perceived as a sexual joke about ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’? (Are we to assume that the generic Whopper is a vers?)
So…who’s gunna volunteer to tell Burger King’s marketing team that’s not how it works? https://t.co/FLFLONRgwK
— ?Witch of Southern Light? (@MarshallWSL) June 3, 2022
Even if we assume that Burger King did not intend to specify whether its cheeseburgers prefer to penetrate or be penetrated by their sexual partners — and that seems like a pretty safe assumption, given their decision to pair two tops together and two bottoms together — it’s still an embarrassingly basic view of what it means to be LGBTQ+.
If the top and bottom of the buns are designed to indicate gender rather than sexual propensity, what type of burgers should bisexual or pansexual person order? We cringe to think what kind of terrible and reductive metaphor the marketing team would have come up with for a trans burger if they had thought to add them.
If you reside in Austria, you may get a same-sex Pride Whopper now through June 20. Fortunately, it’s not available in the United States; Burger King’s American Pride Whopper is simply a standard Whopper wrapped in a rainbow wrapper with the inner packing reading ‘We are all the same inside’. But, if anything, this serves as a lesson that businesses should not try to profit from underprivileged populations.
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