It’s getting hard to keep track of the number of American firms that, in connection with Pride Month 2023, are embarrassing the hell out of themselves. Sales of Bud Light continue to plummet because of Anheuser-Busch’s unwise decision to associate itself with the bizarre narcissist Dylan Mulvaney. Target, the family-oriented chain of box stores, had the brilliant notion of selling kids’ t-shirts featuring images of rainbow flags or slogans like “Rebel Girls Celebrate Pride.” One of Target’s major competitors, Kohl’s, decided to market onesies and bibs depicting children waving the “trans- and QPOC- inclusive” rainbow flag with all those extra stripes. And the homey restaurant chains Cracker Barrel and Chick-fil-A have done a terrific job of alienating their largely conservative customer bases by posting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) jargon on their websites.

So strong has been the backlash against these merchants that many of them have backtracked in terror – in response to which, predictably enough, they’ve been subjected to backlashes from the woke left. Even Starbucks, an enterprise that has strained for years to be viewed as a safe space for sensitive snowflakes, may or may not have ordered decorative Pride Month paraphernalia – rainbow hearts, rainbow fists, and the like – to be removed from its outlets (the employees’ union says it did, corporate says it didn’t).

Nor is Pride Month insanity just for America anymore. As Forbes reported recently, the South African apparel chain Woolworths (no relation to the legendary but long-defunct American firm) has ticked off customers with its aggressive embrace of Pride imagery; Glamour UK irked readers by putting a “pregnant transgender man” on the cover of its June Pride issue.

The madness has even reached Norway, where I live.

At the Åse School i Ålesund, on the country’s remote west coast, the principal, Vigdis Rønning, hoisted a rainbow flag to commemorate Pride Month, then took it down in response to a parent’s complaint, then, claiming to have determined that most of the pupils and parents were on her side, put the flag back up again. This wishy-washy behavior was praised by the head of the parents’ council, who called Rønning “brave, tough, and steady.” Monica Molvær, a local Conservative politician and head of Ålesund Pride, was delighted too, explaining that the rainbow flag is “an internationally recognized symbol of love.”

Much the same thing happened at one of the nation’s largest hotel chains. The leaders of the Olav Thon Group sent out a message to hotel managers asking them not to fly rainbow flags during Pride Month. After some Thon employees protested, and got backing from an organization called FRI (which in Norwegian is an acronym for “Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity”), Thon quickly reversed its decision, issuing a groveling statement to the effect that “diversity, inclusion, and tolerance are key values” at the company and that it had “underestimated the power…of not raising the Pride flag.”

So far, however, the dumbest move I’ve heard of is this one. Steen & Strøm is a department store located in the very center of Oslo. It’s the kind of place that deserves the word “venerable.” Founded 226 years ago, and described by some as the oldest high-end establishment of its kind in the world, it’s currently the flagship store of a chain of ten across Scandinavia whose executive director since 2019 has been a British retail genius named David Wilkinson. His big brainstorm: “if department stores are going to succeed in the 21st century, they have to be thought-provoking [tankevekkende], as well as an appealing shopping destination.” Kaia Kongsli, the company’s marketing manager, agrees, bragging that the Steen & Strøm management’s new strategy is to “shake up the old lady,” and that Wilkinson was hired with the express intention of changing the store’s image from stodgy to woke. Not just for the duration of Pride Month, mind you, but for good.

And how does he plan to do that? Simple: by eliminating separate sections for men’s and women’s clothes.

Erling Marthinsen, in a report for document.no, theorizes that Wilkinson is “adapting to LGBTQ ideology” in a desperate attempt to save Steen og Strøm – which has been in something of a slump since early in the pandemic. But Wilkinson insists that the goal of his new policy isn’t “to increase our income” but to “extend a welcome to everybody.” After all, he says, “people get excited about something that’s different.” In a pathetic attempt to flatter the clientele, Wilkinson further maintains that since taking over at Steen & Strøm, he’s learned that Norwegians “are very good at absorbing new ideas.” Kongsli, enthusing over Wilkinson’s approach, quotes a song lyric: “‘Be bold, be beautiful, be free.’ That’s the type of energy we’re trying to create here. Without sounding too poetic, that’s the mindset we’re trying to get into the hearts and minds of Norwegians.”

In other words, it’s not enough for Steen & Strøm to sell people clothes to drape over their bodies. It should also be pushing a mindset into their hearts and minds. Then again, Kongsli explains the new policy this way: “We felt that the way people are shopping now isn’t based on sex but on style.” So which is it? Is Steen & Strøm responding to its customers’ demand or is it trying to force something unfamiliar on them in the name of sociocultural progress?

Who, by the by, is David Wilkinson? According to his LinkedIn page and other sources, he earned an MBA in 2000 from the Henley Business School, about 25 kilometers west of London. At Harrod’s, he worked his way up from sales clerk to COO. Later he spent a year and a half as Retail Director for a chain of upscale clothing emporia based in Doha, Qatar, and still later spent another three years running Au Pont Rouge, a fancy department store in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One wonders whether he ever contemplated eliminating separate men’s and women’s departments in Qatar and Russia. Somehow I doubt it.

By the way, this man who has found Norwegians to be so quick on the uptake is also on the record as being big on Qatar, which, in a 2018 interview with a Russian publication, he described as “a wonderful country.” Of course, it’s also a country where being gay is a capital offense, and where if you wave one little rainbow flag you’ll probably (at the very least) get your hand amputated. What must it be like to be a man like David Wilkinson, who, whatever else his merits or failings, is, quite plainly, magnificently adept at bending to the shifting winds of cultural mores and values? Or, to borrow a line from the loathsome Lillian Hellman that seems eminently appropriate to an apparel merchant of such remarkable adaptability, what’s it like to be so good at cutting your conscience to fit this year’s – or your current country of residence’s – fashions?