Gillette ad contains a whisker of truth...

IWAS getting ready to be outraged, I really was. Gillette, it seemed, had become the latest organisation to chastise men for being male, producing an advertisement in which men were urged to cast aside their neanderthal ways and, er, to man up. Masculinity is under attack again, shrieked a lot of men (but not so many women) and so I tuned in. And was oddly touched. Some bits of it were a little odd (men standing in a row barbecuing, to take one example), but on the whole the message is don’t bully people, don’t sexually harass them and behave like a gentleman. In other words, it was the sort of old fashioned message our grandfathers were taught a few decades ago, before the war of the sexes went nuclear and we all started to hate each others’ guts.

I recognise I am not the demographic this particular ad is aimed at but just what, exactly, is wrong with telling men to behave well? I loathe the way that masculinity is sometimes treated as some kind of evil to be eradicated: it absolutely is not. I, for one, would not want to serve in frontline combat and while there is a tiny number of women who would, that kind of thing is left to brave men. If I were in a burning house I’d rather have a hefty fireman coming up the ladder towards me than a woman. And so on. But while this was all once taken as the norm, men were still expected to treat women with respect. It is ironic that the rise of women in the workplace seems to have aroused a backlash: if a bloke “mansplains” to a woman in a boardroom, as shown in the ad, chances are he’s doing so as he feels under threat. The rise of porn culture and casual misogyny comes from exactly the same source: women have far more power than previously and a certain type of man doesn’t like it and lashes out. It should be said that in the Gillette ad the people calling time on this kind of behaviour are also men: decent types as the majority are in real life. What on earth is wrong with saying that that’s the best a man can get? POUNDLAND is marketing a £1 engagement ring. Is this a sneaky ploy to undermine marriage? I write as someone who was once given jewellery from Ratner’s. The relationship didn’t last.