Gillette Buys Into PC Culture with Ridiculous Anti-Toxic Masculinity Advertisement
I don’t know a whole lot of people who take their cues on proper human behavior from major multinational brands.
I think this is a pretty solid argument on its face, but if you needed a practical illustration, Proctor & Gamble’s Gillette division just gave you 1:48 seconds of why this is a very bad idea.
Did you know, for instance, that men were all vicious, bullying bro-magnons before the #MeToo movement started?
They chased after other kids not like them relentlessly, groped women at every opportunity, mansplained in boardrooms and engaged in all sorts of foul behavior. All of this would be excused by a chorus of men saying “boys will be boys.”
But lo: The moment the Harvey Weinstein story hit the press and a domino-line of celebrities fell due to allegations of sexual harassment, men began realizing maybe this behavior was bad. They started looking themselves in the mirror, chastised by the monster they see staring back at them.
And Gillette — just coincidentally, the brand with the tagline “The Best a Man Can Get” — wants you to be a better man by not doing horrible things and calling out horrible things when they happen. Things that almost all of us knew were horrible before this advertisement and that we hopefully called out when they happened.
That’s how we’ll end toxic masculinity: by not doing things we generally didn’t do before and stepping up in situations where we knew we should have stepped up in the past. Buy Gillette razors.
Here’s the advertisement, which mixes a very little bit of sexist archival footage with a lot of heavy-handed scripted situations:
“Is this the best a man can get?” the ad asks. “We believe in the best in men. To say the right thing, to act the right way. … The boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow.”
No, it’s not the best a man can get. It’s never been. Bullying, groping, the objectification of women — none of these things has ever been seen as virtuous.
As for a period where we might have pushed them aside, that’s long gone too. Notice how the short snippets of footage featuring misogyny here go back decades. The rest of the alleged hellscape perpetuated by men is all scripted piffle that would have been rejected from a soap opera script.
If you want to see some more recent footage of objectification of women, however, here’s a Gillette commercial featuring models at a pool party talking about how much hair they like on a man and why you should have the appropriate amount of hair because, well, you know:
“It’s time we acknowledge that brands, like ours, play a role in influencing culture,” Gillette said in a statement announcing the new campaign, according to The Hill.
“And as a company that encourages men to be their best, we have a responsibility to make sure we are promoting positive, attainable, inclusive and healthy versions of what it means to be a man.”
That commercial, not too long ago, represented what Gillette found to be “promoting positive, attainable, inclusive and healthy versions of what it means to be a man.”
For whatever reason, that ad didn’t make it into this newer spot. Maybe it would have been interesting to see those bored teens in the 2019 Gillette advertisement staring vacantly at the women in the Gillette ad from just a few years ago.
This is little more than a rebranding of traditional virtue under the flag of political correctness. It’s the best of both worlds. There’s a lot of talk regarding the #MeToo movement and “toxic masculinity,” but beneath that cloak of political correctness what Gillette is essentially saying is, “Don’t bully, don’t treat women badly and don’t rationalize those activities.” And yet, the company acts as if it’s just discovered all of these moral imperatives and it’s here to teach us.
I’m not in advertising, but I can see how this could fail on all accounts. Liberal activists are going to accuse Gillette of appropriating their causes to make money. Those who aren’t predisposed to use terms like “intersectionality” or view masculinity as inherently toxic are going to see the brand as moral scolds. In this contentious age, I can see both sides of the debate finally coming together to condemn a transparently bad advertisement.
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