(CONTROVERSY) Also Pretty Political tbh: Gillette Ad

This is more than a little bit political and I'd be happy to break this down.

However there are lots of last minute short story contests for me to deal with, including my own last minute piece, so it will have to wait a bit.

But beyond politics this is just really bad marketing.

"You stink! You're evil! You're toxic! You're backwards! You're weak! No one wants you!.......Now buy our product!"

This is also a radical departure from the old Gillette commercials. Men being strong, men being heroic, men being good, men taking care of the women and children in their life.

I used Gillette for many years. Why? Among other things they gave me a free razor for my seveteenth birthday like they do for many men in the United States. I kept using it out of habit even though Gillette is more expensive than all of their competors.

I switched brands after the commercial. I didn't throw my razors away but when they ran out I switched to a cheaper brand. If I have a choice I'll choose a brand that doesn't insult me. Not that I'm a huge consumer of razors. I observe No-Shave November then keep my beard through May give or take. I was angry enough that I wanted to do a bigger boycott so I stopped buying other Proctor and Gamble products in lieu of other brands, Dawn dish soap, Tide laundry soap, Crest toothpaste. I might actually go back to Dawn. The generic soap is less potent, so I'm going through it about 50% faster for a 25% price break.

 

I understand the backlacks. I disagree with it, but it wasn't unexpected. In fact, Gillette was counting on it.

They were doing what Nike, Keurig, and others had done before them. The goal is to make a commercial whose virtue signaling targets the narrative on the right(far right?) side of American politics. You run the add a few times, then the predictable backlash happens and youtube and instagram are flooded with videos of people destroying their own property and ranting about how x company went too far and we all need to boycott and fight back. In tern, the company generates a massive amount of public goodwill in the center and left while simultaneously getting a spot or two on CCN, FOX, NBC, ect. Maybe even Hannity, Peirs Morgan, or Alex Jones will do a bit on it for a couple weeks in a row and keep the controversy alive and burning.

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.

It does strike me as ironic that these commercials manage to not actually say anything offensive yet still generate such an impassioned backlash. I think it likely does more harm than good to continually poke a large section of the public who are offend by political correctness. If you want to initiate change in society it is best done from the inside out. A one way dialogue from a commercial is not the best platform to do it. We are polarized enough as it stands, imo.

 

We already discussed it shortly in another thread, but why not.

I see several aspects there.

Their message can be interpreted as "don't be a jerk and use your gender as an excuse". I agree with that.
And I know that there are men acting like the bad examples in the ad, and I agree that they should stop.

It can also be interpreted as "most men are jerks, don't be one". I disagree with that. They are exaggerating too much for me to agree with them.

Regardless of which of the above it is:
One could say (and many people choose to do that) that using this topic for marketing razors is cheap, and needlessly polarizing.

I have more thoughts about it but not enough time, I'll come back to this thread later.

 

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.

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.

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!"

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'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.

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 did hear toxic masculinity? I also remember that being the case the first time I watch the add after it made national news. Perhaps it has been altered? Try relistening to the video posted by @Paradoxical Pacifism in this thread. Let me know which you hear, I am curious.

I agree with this. Playfighting was how I played as a child with most of my friends. Well, playfighting and legos. It was also a very positive experience. I am a big guy (6'4" and 250lbs) and I always have been. When I was 4 other parents thought I was 6 ect. Playfighting taut me the value of losing when I could definitely win. It taught me I had to be careful, even in a real fight, or I could really hurt someone.

I think Gillette did a bad job in framing the fight between the kids. I didn't read it as a playfight, there isn't enough pre-fame information to know if it is a playfight or real fight. I have more than once seen an actual fight between kids and the father of one kid tell the parent of the other child that "boys will be boys" as an excuse for his child biting or hurting their child. So, my perspective is undeniably altered by experience of witnessing a father use the phase as justification for assault.

 

There are definitely double standards in life. I use to be upset by them, the damaging and egregious ones still upset me. It is something ingrained into people. Everyone has them and most of us are unaware of the double standards we do hold.

Philosophy is a passion of mine, and I am happy to argue about morals and double standards, but the truth of the matter is that some double standards are dangerous and some are not. If there are double standards that are impacting the living conditions and access to society of a people then those are obviously more consequential than ones which do not. So, before I dive into an argument about any sensitive topic related to implicit bias I now ask myself "what skin do I have in the game." Normally, the answer is none. At which point I leave it alone. Maybe if the discussion is with a close friend or someone with a shared mutual respect then it is possible to have an erudite conversation about the subject.

When I was at University and shortly after leaving it I would boldly broach any conversation and was comfortable playing devil's advocate to any topic. I prided myself as being open minded for the sake of open mindedness and liberal society's free market of ideas. I have never been wealthy. Yet, I still have the privilege of being generally excepted and positioned securely enough within society that I can freely engage in the recreational ponderance of matters that are literally life and death for others. That is the very definition of privilege.

TL;DR: Some people don't have the luxury of seeing their double standards.

 

Oh man, this. So much. So often.

 

This goes into the play fighting more. I don't know if this is conscious or not but Peterson starts out talking about kids in gender neutral turns and ends up talking about boys.

 

Corporations usually support / encourage / go alongside with (basically push) public views. It's useful to sell their product.
They actually do it when present the images of athletic women doing athletic things to sell female pads.
They actually do it when present the images of successful and satisfied people that drive their new car.
They did when they presented images of women as "queen of the kitchen" to sell stock cubes.

We could say that they sense the direction the wind is going, and push the image of their product in that direction.
(which makes sense when you think that commercials don't sell products. They sell emotions. You won't find technical informations in a Nike commercial)

The problem is when they don't understand where the wind is really blowing, and plan the advertising campaign in the wrong way, so they end in doing something that goes against the expectations of their real target.

 

I disagree with the toxic masculinity narrative very much so. To me the term "toxic masculinity" is loaded with misandric implications. To me, it implies that men are biased towards evil deeds and that women are morally superior to men. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have seen very little evidence to contradict my knee-jerk reaction.

Human beings are not perfect.

Either make toxic behavior gender neutral, or also acknowledge toxic femininity. Unless it's couched in entertainment and fiction like the movie Mean Girls, the mere whiff of the phrase "toxic femininity" is taboo and has gotten people banned from social media and academia.

The narrative is that people who criticize female behavior are branded as "hating all women" and meanwhile they are literally people in academy that talk about killing or sterilizing mass numbers of men for the good of society with barely a ripple of controversy.

Part of the Decline of shared myths post I made lamented a lack of positive masculinity in media. Courage, sacrifice, and ingenuity are all positive things associated with masculinity.

Just because I called those traits masculine doesn't mean women cannot demonstrate those traits, much how men can be gentle, kind and nurturing.


Even if toxic masculinity is a real thing that needs to be discussed, there is a time and place to do it. A commercial intended to sell a product to make men happy is not the time or place.

For instance, I think we need to take a hard look at the military industrial complex and the way we, as a country carry out war, but I'm going to bring up my concerns during a Memorial Day parade.


As for the video, I don't really care whether male disposability in the media is the result of feminism, or traditionalism, or evolutionary biology. I want to fix the problem. Pointing fingers at who or what is responsible is unlikely to make things better.

I took a political science course that analyzed feminism throughout the decades and there are a lot of subbranches of feminism. Some are diametrically opposed on various issues. There are LGBT advocate feminists and there are transphobic feminists. There are feminists that want to legalize sex work to "free women" and feminists who believe that would tantamount to legalizing slavery.

Feminists certainly don't agree how men should be treated, so it doesn't accomplish much to blame them for how men are treated.

 

Part of that is that men are risk takers. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein, Tesla, etc. Lots of men advanced society in many ways and men make up the bulk of the homeless and prison population.

But I would say that the prison and homeless problem is caused more by a lack of masculinity than an excess of masculinity.

Boys raised without active fathers are far more likely to have substance abuse problems, run away from home, commit suicide, commit murder, be murdered, fail to graduate high school, and certainly more likely to be incarcerated. Boys (and girls) are at higher risk for pretty much every Bad Thing there is if there father is not around when they are growing up. Add this to how men are underrepresented in day care and early education and the problem gets worse.

If a man even shows an interest in these things there are often whispered accusations of pedophilia. Meanwhile female teachers who abuse their students tend to have these indiscretions swept under the rug or excused.

Cry bullies.

My aunt abused my mom (and everyone else under the sun, but mostly my mom). My aunt would passive aggressive needle her victims constantly until eventually their victim snaps and retaliates. At which point comes the crocodile tears. "Why are you overreacting and attacking me!?!"

When Amber Heard abused Johnny Depp she said "No one will believe you because you are a man." Any time anyone calls out Amber Heard on her egregious behavior she pulls out the waterworks and calls everyone a misogynist.

Karen Strahn said once a girl knocked her son off a snowy hill. If they were a few feet over he could have hit concrete instead of snow and then the girl said "You can't hit me back because I'm a girl!"

The epitome of toxic femininity is to commit an act of violence or emotional abuse and then play pretend to be a fragile flower when the wronged party tries to retaliate.

Paternity fraud and baby entrapment is pretty toxic behavior that men cannot easily engage in.

That's not a universal definition, but that is what toxic femininity means to me. Being a strong independent woman when it's convenient to do so, and being a damsel in distress when that is convenient.

I sort of agree but you have to be very diplomatic about it when you lay blame. We are not going to solve social problems unless men and women work together, and if someone feels put upon (man or woman) they are not likely to want to cooperate.

It's death by a thousand cuts. Masculine behavior is gradually being demonized piece by piece.

https://www.rt.com/usa/448410-apa-masculinity-bad-psychology/

In the APA’s “first ever” set of guidelines to help psychologists work with men and boys, the association states that “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful,” and “causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly.”

But what is ‘traditional masculinity’ anyway? The APA says traditional masculinity is defined by “stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression.” It’s found in men’s resilience in the face of adversity and insistence on “looking tough” despite mental suffering, and in their tendency to handle emotional strain with anger.

I think stoicism and competitiveness are good things. I think dominance and aggression can be good things when properly channeled.

The problem is there are no gate keepers to MRAs or feminists. The only thing a person has to do to be an MRA or feminist is to say "I'm a MRA" or "I'm a feminist." Harvey Weinstein donated a lot of money to feminist groups. It was probably a smokescreen to hide behind but if he can sneak in you can understand it is hard to gate keep out the riffraff.

I support LGBT rights (I'm not sure what the Q means honestly but as long as it involves consenting adults I don't have a problem with it, whatever it is. At one point I saw an LGBT poster with eight letters on it and I threw my hands up in frustration, at a certain point, acronyms stop working). I support men's rights and women's issues. I think it's made it clear that the curtailing the CCP is my number one issue.

Hypothetically, if I was holding an anti-CCP rally or running an anti-CCP political action committee and I ran into someone who is fervently anti-CCP and also transphobic, I would not kick her out of my anti-CCP group unless she used my anti-CCP group as a platform for her transphobic dribble.

Though I suppose if I was attending a pro LGBT rally, I would raise a stink if there was a CCP apologist in the group, though that is a bad example because the CCP is very homophobic.

To get things done you have to deal with political issues one-by-one. If you require your political allies to be on your side on every issue you will not have many allies.

I don't think combating feminism will help men, but many people do and there is not much I can do about other people's opinions.

The MRA movement is dying, most of their major spokespeople are 60+ years old and they are not recruiting young people very fast. I don't commonly see MRA bashing on LGBT people. In fact, many are very pro-LGBT if only from a strategic perspective.

It hasn't happened in the United States but when the idea of a bachelor tax is floated it has been shot down for being unfair to gay men. The fact that same sex couples with children default to joint custody in divorces is causing some to say "Why aren't we doing this with hetero couples too?"

I've seen feminist publications say that gay men are part of toxic masculinity and that transwomen should not be allowed in lesbian groups, but I have also seen feminist groups kick members for homophobic remarks. There isn't a clear consensus in the feminist community whether transwomen should be able to freely compete with cis women in athletic events either. I don't know which side is winning the feminist civil war.

I don't really care very much. I support trans rights, but in my whole life, I have met three trans people. So my support for trans people is in an abstract principle oriented way rather than an emotionally charged way like I am with say...forced organ harvesting. I have met, hundreds if not thousands of people who would like to keep their vital organs inside their bodies.

 

I would like you to show me proof. I only have anecdotal evidence to back this up but most of the single fathers I have seen seem to be doing an excellent job.

My financial situation has changed for the negative even before the Covid, and it is very clear that I cannot afford to be a father by myself, but at one point I was considering adopting or having a child by a surrogate.

I was concerned of the thing you said, that single parent households are high risk. I looked and looked and looked and looked. I could not find any credible anthropology, sociology, or scientific studies analyzing the effects of single fathers. The closest I have seen is general studies about "single parent" households but if you look at the data, approximately 90% of the "single parent households" are "single mother households."

The article you linked is better than anything I found but it's still pretty sparse on hard data compared to what I've seen on single "parents" or single "mothers." I'm afraid in today's academic environment, there is just no funding or support for a study isolating single fathers.

I have no problem with same sex couples raising children, but I think your comment is poorly worded. I really don't like to use the word "always" or "never" likely though I would like to see a study comparing the children raised by same sex male couples and same sex female couples. I looked and couldn't find one.

It does seem clear that same sex male couples have a substantially lower rate of domestic abuse than hetero couples and same sex female couples have a substantially higher rate of domestic abuse than hetero couples.

This statistic usually gets swept under the rug because it flies in the face of the popular narrative that men are inherently more aggressive and dangerous.

In my opinion, this statement is factually accurate but it is not true. Much like how the average diaper wearer is approximately 40 years old.

Saying that aggression and violence leads to imprisonment is fairly similar to saying "Breaking the law leads to imprisonment!"

Aggression is part of the human condition, but I don't think society pushes people in general or men specifically. If anything thousands of years of human civilization is built on restraining aggression, especially with men and boys.

I concur. Russian media is not the most reliable. Blame Google, that was the first article I found, I didn't pay much attention to the source because I wanted to find an applicable link quickly. Regardless, Western academia seems to be trying to pathologize masculinity and I don't think it's a good thing.

I read a lot of psychology and philosophy articles for fun, but I am not an expert. In most cases, I think the middle road is best. Leaning too heavily into any place on the emotional spectrum is a bad idea, but I don't think suppressing a part of the emotional spectrum is a good idea.