I’ve never really thought of M&M’s as having a gender when they disappear from the packet and head straight to my thighs. Sure, I’ve felt sorry for the odd Lindt bunny, sitting there sadly after Easter with its ears viciously chewed off. I have even side-eyed my friend who used to wear the little red Lindt bunny bell as an earring in some kind of sadistic urge leftover from tribal times. But M&M’s?

Well, someone’s been sitting down and meditating deeply on the problem of using chocolate as a vehicle for social justice and decided to ‘celebrate women’ by ‘flipping the status quo’ and turning the female gender into something that men can eat.

Which is a weird vibe, but okay.

To quote People.com:

‘M&M’s unveiled new female-focused packaging with the help of three “spokescandies”. The female M&M characters – and only them – are featured on and inside the new packs for their “Flipping the Status Quo” campaign. The limited-edition packaging, available in milk chocolate, peanut butter and peanut varieties, is designed to honour women changing the world and “flipping” antiquated gender roles and ideas.’

For clarity, M&M’s is representing women by reducing gender to a colour and then flipping the characters upside down on the packaging so that the ‘M’ vaguely looks like a ‘W’. The overall effect is that of a mistake at the printing press.

This is where the virtue-signalling gets a little murky.

The manufacturer was clearly desperate to represent women via colour – but they couldn’t go with the obvious choice of ‘pink’ for fear of being accused of ‘sexism’ by the masses of screeching Wokelings. Instead, they picked purple, green, and brown. Purple is their newest colour designed specifically to ‘represent acceptance and inclusivity’.

Truthfully, the less customers know about the brand’s insufferable Culture War the better. It’s not exactly enticing to know that the bits of coloured chocolate you’re about to eat are designed to have ‘more nuanced personalities to underscore the importance of self-expression and power of community through storytelling’ to transport M&M’s into a ‘more dynamic, progressive world’. We are reminded that they are ‘their personalities, rather than their gender’ while their antagonistic character traits have been white-washed into the chocolate embodiment of ‘yes-men’ that will be ‘kinder moving forward’ by ‘throwing shine and not shade’ on each other. They even (apparently) de-sexualised the female M&M’s after complaints.

Which corporate manual were these exciting phrases copied out of?

The new range was first unveiled in 2022 (I dare you to spot the difference). Given that this is the second year in a row, we might be in for a yearly virtue arms race as M&M’s switches its marketing campaign from tasty chocolate to mouth-watering social credit points.

No, really. A quick scroll through the comments on Twitter shows the social media representatives of each brand clawing to show their approval for ‘the new thing’.

There’s no word yet on their carbon footprint, although they did launch a video on wind energy.

None of us can thrive without a healthy planet. At Mars, we believe that everyone – including businesses and brands – has a responsibility to do their part to combat climate change. And our business and brands are committed to doing our part for the planet and for our consumers.

Today, M&M’S launched a campaign called Fans of Wind energy to engage consumers on how renewable energy can counteract climate change. Given the increasing urgency around climate change, it’s an issue everyone – including Red and Yellow – needs to get behind.

Mars is not stopping there. We’re continuing to seek opportunities to increase our renewable energy usage to meet our goal of eliminating our greenhouse gas emissions from our operations by 2040. This initiative is a part of the newly launched Sustainable in a Generation Plan that outlines our forward-thinking commitment to invest almost $1 billion over the next three years to tackle urgent threats including climate change, poverty in the supply chain and scarcity of resources.

Back to the eating of chocolate-themed women. The chief marketing officer, Gabrielle Wesley, at Mars Wrigley North America said of the release:

‘Women all over the world are flipping how they define success and happiness while challenging the status quo, so we’re thrilled to be able to recognise and celebrate them – and who better to help us on that mission than our own powerhouse spokescandies Green, Brown and Purple?’

If they really wanted to celebrate women, they’d design a calorie-free M&M’s range so that women could indulge guilt-free – which is all they really want. It might not be the ‘Wokest’ idea, but they’d fly off the shelves. I can’t be the only one who finds it – odd, shall we say – for a chocolate character to campaign for ‘body positivity and self-acceptance’.

Really, the whole thing is a way to highlight that Mars Wrigley is donating $800,000 to women’s charities. As everyone in marketing knows, there’s no point handing over a chunk of cash to a good cause if no one saw you do it.

Emotionally manipulating people into buying a product they don’t need so that a fraction of the total goes to a charity (while the bulk ends up with the company) is a tried and true method for the chocolate industry. We used to do this in school, selling giant chocolate Frogs and Caramello Koalas to the stressed-out and emotionally vulnerable Year 12 students near exam time.

Don’t worry, there is definitely an audience for this type of marketing campaign. Comments on M&M’s Australia’s Instagram page read:

‘The bisexuals can have blue along with the gay men. Green can be for aro, Orange for the lesbians. Lstg if they put out a white and pink I’m gonna go feral and buy as much as possible.’

‘Finally, an M&M just for us asexuals… And the bisexuals too, probably.’

Although my favourite comment came from Twitter with one customer begging for them to flip the ‘M’ to a ‘W’ because, ‘That’s true equality my friend! Those two Ms are just really Oppressive to the effort!’ Forgetting, of course, that M&M’s are roughly spherical chocolates that don’t have an ‘up’ to orientate the ‘Ws’.

There is $10,000 up for grabs. People still have time to nominate a ‘woman in their lives who is flipping the status quo’. It’ll have to be the ‘right’ kind of woman. One wonders if there is any chance the recipient might be a conservative… At this point in Western Civilisation’s evolution, there’s no guarantee that the winner of a women’s empowerment award will even be a ‘woman’.