Friday, January 18, 2019
Gillette ad backlash: "An attack on all men"
America’s government remains shut down, Britain is in crisis over the Brexit saga and Australia is in the grips of a relentless heatwave.
But the issue gripping the world this week, prompting an outpouring of anger and calls for a boycott of a men’s grooming brand, is a new advertising campaign.
Gillette released a two-minute video on Tuesday surrounding the contentious topic of ‘toxic masculinity’, calling for men to be the best they can be.
The clip, attacked by male rights activists, media commentators and even a Hollywood actor, encourages men to shrug off expectations of manhood, from not showing emotion to being aggressive or violent.
A number of people are unhappy and have taken to social media in recent days.
British journalist Piers Morgan responded with anger, saying the ad made a generalisation that all men are bad, and led calls for a boycott of Gillette shaving products.
“I’ve used Gillette razors my entire adult life but this absurd virtue-signalling PC guff may drive me away to a company less eager to fuel the current pathetic global assault on masculinity,” Morgan wrote. “Let boys be damn boys. Let men be damn men.”
On Good Morning Britain this week, he said the only people who would enjoy the ad were likely to be “radical feminists who love it because it portrays men as bad”.
Morgan’s fierce criticism prompted a wave of social media declarations from the company’s customers that they would discontinue purchasing their razors, with some even videoing and photographing themselves destroying their shavers.
“It’s hideous, ridiculous and disgusting,” one user wrote on the company’s Facebook page. “Gillette will never receive a damn cent from me. Absolutely dead to me as a company.”
It was one of thousands of angry responses. One man even snapped himself attempting to flush his razor down the toilet, while another smashed his in a kitchen sink disposal unit.
Conservative commentator Paul Joseph Watson accused Gillette of “insulting most of your customers by insinuating they’re all would-be sexual abusers (and) creeps.”
The official YouTube clip has been viewed more than 14 million times, with 726,000 downvotes far outnumbering the 345,000 upvotes received.
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6 comments:
I do not care. I have never used Gillette products.
Tempest in a teapot.
AIB/44
How to kill your business in one easy step. Right up there with dumping the real Coke.
Damn stupid liberals they want all men to be total wimps they want all boys to take up Ballet Dancing or Herb Gardening and be like Pee Wee Herman and ride around on dumb red bicycles and hug trees rather then their Wives and kids yeah never forget that we once had the Aqua Velva Man before they were showing ads for Chirstmas with men in ballet skirts shaking the bottoms and making a Ting-A-Ling sounds and when Campbells Soups made line of soups called THE MAN HANDLERS
Imagine for a minute the same type of ad - but showing women at their worst, black people at their worst, Asians at their worst - and then think how it would be received.
Then think about whether you would like to be lectured by a multinational corporation that has made money for years off stereotypical advertising.
Then you will understand why many men are turning their backs on Gillette.
I have decoded the Gillette ad:
"Women are vulnerable. They need men to protect them."
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