GILLETTE ENTERS TOXIC MASCULINITY WARS WITH NEW AD.
For three decades, Gillette promised its customers “The Best a Man Can Get.” An individual. Acquisitive. Assertive. And always cleanshaven.
Now, Procter & Gamble, the maker of Gillette, is out with a new ad, “We Believe,” that challenges the image of masculinity it once promoted. The consumer goods company has ignited a debate about gender and cultural branding, as well as about the power exercised by multinational corporations in shaping evolving ideas about family and relationships in the #MeToo era. “Bullying. The #MeToo movement. Toxic masculinity.” The advertising headlines resound as men — black and white, young and old — peer at themselves in the mirror. “Is this the best a man can get?” asks the narrator of the ad, released Sunday on YouTube and shared Monday on Twitter. The scenes that unfold suggest that the answer is no, and point to a new mantra: “The Best Men Can Be.”
TV presenter Piers Morgan blasted the ad, writing, “This absurd virtue-signalling PC guff may drive me away to a company less eager to fuel the current pathetic global assault on masculinity.” The nearly two-minute spot represents the latest corporate foray into the culture wars. Last year, Nike stock soared after it unveiled a September advertising campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the NFL star whose protest of police violence drew the ire of conservatives who decried his decision to kneel during the national anthem.
Just as the decision by the footwear and apparel company led Kaepernick’s critics to burn their Nike gear, the approach by Procter & Gamble incensed many viewers, but none more so than men’s rights activists who vowed to “#Boycott Gillette.” Christina Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who coined the term “victim feminism,” blamed a familiar bogeyman: the campus left.
The ad was called “hideously woke.” Some found it “smarmy” and “condescending.” By early Tuesday, the video had about 223,000 downvotes on YouTube, compared with about 25,000 favourable reactions. On Twitter, the video had drawn about 70,000 likes and 19,000 comments by early Tuesday. Meanwhile, even some who praised the company’s intentions warned that the ad unwittingly reinforced the idea that bad behaviour is normal because all men take part in it.
The fierce reactions may bode well for the success of the message, said Robert Kozinets, a scholar of marketing and consumer culture at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “Advertisers, when they’re lucky and smart, are able to tap into something that’s part of the popular consciousness,” Kozinets said. Procter & Gamble is hitching its wagon to the #MeToo movement, he said, and rebranding to fit a “moral narrative with a lot of energy behind it.”