It’s a close shave, but this advert is fit for a new era
Gillette’s new social media advert is not about shaving or beards but, boy, has it made a lot of blokes very prickly for being, as Piers Morgan fumed on Twitter, “absurd virtue-signalling PC guff ”.
The ad shows boys and men leering at girls at a pool party, patronising a woman in the boardroom, getting ready to pounce on a waitress as well as cruelly bullying each other.
“Boys will be boys,” chants a long line of barbecuing males, until they’re interrupted by another voice: “Isn’t it time we stopped excusing bad behaviour? Rethink and take action by joining us at Thebest Mencanbe.org.”
Many women have applauded Gillette for adapting its famous slogan, The Best a Man Can Get, for a new era. By and large, though, the ad’s target audience hates it.
One man posted a photograph of soldiers on the Normandy beaches with a bitterly ironic hashtag, #boyswillbeboys. Another suggested cautiously: “I think some men lack the ability to see how their innocently intended neanderthal behaviour can be perceived.”
Fair comment. I had mixed feelings about the advert because, far from showing all males as predators, it displays many as kind and respectful to the opposite sex. What does irk is the lazy trope of “toxic masculinity” – demonising men isn’t especially helpful to the cause of female equality.
But when I asked my 19-yearold son what he thought, he said that he and his mates were only discussing the other night how lucky they felt to be free of “the laddish culture”.
One of their friends took his own life not long ago, and my son believes that men becoming more able to express their feelings is an altogether good thing.
So, that was me told! Boys will be boys; and if what that means is shifting, let’s celebrate.