https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0
Gillette is facing serious backlash one day after debuting its “We Believe” ad campaign combating “toxic masculinity.”
Many critics charged it assumes most men are misogynistic.
According to a press release, the ad begins with “a compilation of actions commonly associated with ‘toxic masculinity,'” including online bullying, laughing at misogynistic TV shows and “mansplaining” an idea to a female work colleague.
But “something changed” not long ago, the ad says, referring to the #MeToo movement. It shows clips of men defending others from bullying and hurtful behavior.
A narrator says: “We believe in the best in men. To say the right thing, to act the right way. Some already are. But some is not enough. Because the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow.”
In a London Daily Mail column, Piers Morgan noted the Gillette ad came the same week as an American Psychological Association report that condemned traditional masculinity as “harmful.”
Morgan said that, until now, he was a prolific consumer of Gillette products because of the company’s celebration of manhood in its ads over the years. But no more.
He said the “incessant poisonous war on gender has culminated in the very word ‘man’ being decried as an abusive term, to the extent that Princeton University actually issued a ridiculous four-page memo instructing students to only use gender-neutral language.”
The APA was outdone, he said, by the Gillette ad, calling it an “ugly vindictive two-minute homage to everything that’s bad about men and masculinity.”
He said the “subliminal message is clear: men, ALL men, are bad, shameful people who need to be directed in how to be better people.”
“It’s one of the most pathetic, virtue-signalling things I’ve ever endured watching.”
Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on Tuesday he was being overwhelmed with email “from people who are beside themselves over this new Gillette commercial aimed at millennial men.”
“And, by the way, I don’t blame you. If you are among the crowd righteously offended and indignant over this, Gillette is obviously being run by millennials,” he said. “This is the danger. Millennials grow up and they get management jobs at various corporations, and they become in charge of advertising and marketing, and this is what’s happening now.”
Limbaugh continued:
And now you have a bunch of millennials that are in marketing departments and ad agencies. So it’s a double whammy. The people putting together the marketing plan, the advertising plan are themselves the same age-group being targeted. And they, of course, are the product of a bunch of ill-education and political correctness that they have been indoctrinated with while at college.
And so they really believe that men are bad news as designed; that men in their natural state are predators; that men in their natural state exhibit masculinity that is toxic and dangerous to women and children, and it needs to be erased.
So you’ve had a bunch of people grow up who’ve been taught this and believe this, just like you have a whole bunch of white people that have been raised to believe that they are the scourge of earth and that they and their whiteness have had an unfair privilege and that they themselves have to accept the blame for the suffering they have caused all minorities on earth. And they end up believing it, too, and they end up becoming advertising directors.
Fox News cited a comment on YouTube, where the ad had nearly 3 million views by Tuesday morning.
“As a very successful, loving, and responsible husband (married 32 years) and father of two confident young adults (male and female), I find this ad INCREDIBLY insulting,” the commenter wrote. “Gillette has NO BUSINESS assuming most men are bad and misogynistic. I’m not buying ANOTHER product from these self-important morons. How DARE you, Gillette…”
Another wrote, “How to insult 99% of your market lol.”
Gillette’s brand manager said the company felt compelled to comment on “what’s happening today.”
But some customers, Fox News said, vowed to stop using Gillette’s products, which apparently is benefiting the Dollar Shave Club.
“Welcome to the Club,” the shaving and toiletries brand wrote in a Twitter post.
