I take it as Gillette becoming more socially involved in the discourse (as are many other companies).
This still worries me. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson (who I
do not always agree with!) he said the Right is concerned with "Big Government" and the Left is concerned with "Big Business". The real enemy is "Big."
I get nervous when corporations start to act like people and push views. Corporations should not be part of our moral compass. That said, if I see an American company bending the knee to censor things on behalf of the CCP, I will boycott them.
I suppose if someone disapproves of the toxic masculinity narrative, they would probably take issue with how the Ad portrays itself as something arrogant-like.
That's my main problem with, the arrogance.
Sexual harassment is wrong. No problems there. My first problem is that it shows ordinary men looking guilty despite not doing anything wrong.
They list bullying. Also bad. Now granted there is a weird double standard that certain online bullying is encouraged, but that is not a direct problem with the Gillette ad. Then they mention the metoo movement which I agree with their end goal (because sexual harassment is bad) I'm not always on board with their methods, but the next thing they say is "masculinity" in a harsh tone around seven seconds. They don't even say "toxic masculinity." The commercial presents masculinity itself as bad while showing ordinary men looking guilty.
I'm not sure how the running kids thing confuses me because it is so stylistic since it intersects with two unrelated scenes. Are they going to beat him up as a group? It is unclear whether the mother comforting her son is apart of that scene or not. That doesn't bother me politically, it's just bothers me on story terms.
22 seconds in give or take there is a montage of sexual harassment scenes, all fictional, most decades old. I will note that someone made a gender reverse of this commercial on Youtube that was banned quickly and it involved real scenes of women acting badly.
The meeting scene where the man condenscendingly mansplains a woman into silence, I've never seen anything like that my whole life. My mom described similar situations in the 1970s. Granted most of the places I worked, women had more than 50% of the numbers and were not shut out of meetings.
Around 30 seconds, this is where it really sticks in my craw. "Boys will be boys."
Unlike the chase mob, the boys are
clearly playfighting. They're smiling and the little kid has the bigger kid pinned. Playfighting is healthy. Numerous studys back this up. All sorts of benefits. Even with rats and dogs, the bigger rat needs to let the smaller rat sometimes win or the smaller rat won't want to play. Same thing with humans. You learn sportsmanship, you learn to go along to get along so the game continues. This teaches you to let other people succeed in life. It's physical which is exercise. It also teaches restraint. In play fighting it's very important to stop short of causing physical damage. People who play fought a lot as children are statistically less likely to comitt crimes, less likely to be bullies, and less likely to commit spousal and child abuse....exacty the sort of thing that the director of the piece is concerned with.
Then you show a bunch of monotous group thinking dullard men with the camera exaggerating their bellies while a barbecue at crotch level symbolically imasculates them all. It was also sort of a twisted inflection of the 1950s barbecuing dad. Hypberbolic interpretation? Maybe, but I didn't direct the commercial. If you look at the other work of this director she plans every detail of every shot and has an artistic style.
In fact, Gillette was counting on it.
The montage of reporters is started with a closeup of Anna Kaspirian of the Young Turks. She is greatly disliked by the Right wing so this is deliberately provoking them. Not a big deal, but I thought I'd bring it up because it goes along with LizardWizard's point perfectly.
I know that "you should smile more" is considered a sexist statement, but I've seen this applied to men as much as women though I haven't seen a lot of either. Mainly this is something I see applied to teenagers and kids which always bugged me when I was young. "You want me to
pretend to be having fun?" The scene in this commercial doesn't really bother me.
The second scene that really bothers me is when a man is about to approach an attractive women and he's told that is "not cool." He wasn't assaulting her, he wasn't being lude. You see, that is essentially how my grandfather met my grandmother. My grandfather thought my grandmother was attractive, so he hit on her. Granted this was 1946 and they didn't have Tinder back then. I like being alive. If my grandfather did not hit on my grandmother I would not be alive today.
If we want the next generation to also be alive, there needs to be some kind of means that men and women can express romantic interest in each other, at least until science lets us asexually reproduce.
Even after decades of feminism, a majority of women still prefer that men approach them rather than other way around. That means women are going to be approached by men that they are not interested. If she said no and the man didn't take no for answer, that's a problem, but it shouldn't be a problem that he approached her in the first place. Otherwise your only options are for 1) women to approach men and never the reverse. 2) Reinstate arranged marriages or 3) let the human race die out.
The rest of the video didn't have anything controversial or annoying, at least that I could see.
I do not like the article. It used to be if someone wanted to insult someone's manhood they either insinuated or outright said that a man was homosexual. Homophobia is not cool.
Now when someone wants to insult a man's masculinity he is called a neckbearded incel. This is sort of the inverse of slut shaming. Women are slut shamed, men are virgin shamed. That has been the case for centuries. The label of incel being tossed around casually is just the newest iteration.
In both shaming cases, I believe women are more likely to slut shame other women than men are. I believe men are more likley to virgin shame other men than women are. I cannot prove that assertion as I only have annecdotal evidence.
The term "incel" is just overused. Among other things, some critics warned that Joker (2019) was violent incel propaganda which is complete bovine excrement. Arthur Flech did not become the Joker because he was sexually frustrated and even if he did, not every sexually frustrated man considers himself an incel.
"Our product will help you get sex" is what Gillette has made their central focus since the 1980s. My whole life, I have seen very few commercials for a men's hygene product which didn't try to use sex appeal to sell it. The only one I can recall was making fun of the traditional advertising. "What, this body wash will not impact my ability to mate!"
They were doing what Nike, Keurig, and others had done before them.
snip
It has played out several times to pretty much this pattern. Gillette however, managed to get more backlash this time than good will. Not in total, just in their market share. Which is the part they actually cared about.
The primary demographics for Nike are young people and African Americans. These are groups that rarely associate with Right wing politics, so poking a stick at the Right would increase the loyalty of most of their cusotmers.
I don't know what the demographics for Keurig customers, but I bet it would primary young people which kind of goes the same direction.
Gillette's primary demographic is all American men.
If anything, right wingers are less likely to have beards (though my evidence for that is only annecdotal). I would also point out that younger demographics would be likely to use electric razors or the dollar shave club than older men (again annecdotal) but the demographic of older men tends to lean towards the Right.
It does strike me as ironic that these commercials manage to not actually say anything offensive yet still generate such an impassioned backlash.
It's not what is said as much as the tone. Also, as you allude to later, we are seeing a general backlash against political correctness.
Relevant issues to discuss:
Toxic masculinity
So I created a fictional RPG world loosely based off of D&D. I have a big thread
here on Lustria-Online, but I wanted to talk about it on a D&D forum. I created a pantheon of gods and goddesses sort of based on the family dynamic of the Ancient Greek Olympians.
Among other things, I wanted my gods and goddesses to embody male and female archetypes. Since I have Good and Evil balanced like many deity worlds, I wanted gods and goddesses to embody the positive and negative aspects of masculinity and feminity.
For instance Mera is a Neutral Good goddess and Greymoria is a Neutral Evil goddess. Of all my deities, Mera is the most good and Greymoria is the most evil. No one had a huge problem with this unless I used the phrase "toxic feminity" than some people get triggered. There is no such thing.
Now I got some flak saying I was sexist for making most of my Neutral goddesses female, but lets skip to the males. My Chaotic Good, Chaotic Evil, Lawful Good, and Lawful Evil deities are all male. I wanted the Good gods to embody positive aspects of masculinity and the Evil gods to embody toxic masculinity.
If I said Maylar (CE) was a compassionless bully representing toxic masculinity no one had a problem with that. Of course bullying is a asculine trait, but the second I said ingenuitity or courage or honesty was masculinity people got mad at me. "Are you saying women can be creative, or brave or honest!?!" Of course they can. Women can also be bullies. Going back to Mera and Greymoria, men can be nurturing or jealous too.
To make a long story short, I wasn't allowed to associate good things with men without putting a disclaimer that women can also have these good things but I was able to label bad things as being masculine or good things as being feminine.
It may or may not be the intent of most of the people using the phrase but I believe just like at the very beginning of the Gillette ad, the line between toxic masculinity is being blurred. Whenever I read a feminist article talking about toxic masculinity, they don't just say "bullying and sexual harassment are wrong," but they say some variation of "to fix these problems, men should act more feminine and women should act more masculine."
I disagree with that idea, just like with the playfighting example, masculinity needs to be properly channeled, not surpressed. The same masculinity that can potentially cause a man to act like a bully is the same masculinity that can empower a man to rush into a burning building to save a child.
We also need to be able to point out toxic female behavior without immediately being called a mysognist.
When I was a teenager and into my twenties, I believed the best way to advance justice in terms of gender dynamics was to encourage androgyny to make men and women as interchangeable as possible. Now I do not believe this. We need to be aware of how men and women are fundamentally different and be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of both sexes.
.
), I would suggest shifting the talk towards 'Toxic Masculinity.' The Ad's take on it is very nuanced after all.
