HBomberguy

No it was pointing out that their are ways in which society is unfair to men

Saw your little rebuttal. A lot of it came off as victim blaming and gaslighting

Edited by Invincibleasshole on Feb 23rd 2019 at 8:08:52 AM

Society is unfair to men in some very real ways, but a lot of it is due to toxic masculinity, which the Gillette add tried to address. Getting men to change their behaviour regarding sex will, in fact, help men.

Edited by Kayeka on Feb 23rd 2019 at 5:19:33 PM

Toxic masculinity is just a buzzword

There’s already a term for men being asshole: The term is men being assholes

Edited by Invincibleasshole on Feb 23rd 2019 at 8:27:42 AM

And a lot of men exhibit "asshole" behaviour because of some warped view of what masculinity is. They're doing it because they think they'd be less of a man if they didn't. That is toxic masculinity (somewhat simplified).

One kid calling another kid "gay" because of, I dunno, they enjoy musicals, is toxic masculinity. The other kid is being called gay because he doesn't conform to the first kid's idea of masculinity, judged by a very shallow standard.

Toxic masculinity is absolutely a thing, and it's distinct from simply "being an asshole". And the idea that the Gilette ad was an attack on men is absurd. It's asking men to reflect on their behavior and strive to be better, hell the ad even emphasized that men should treat each other better. Nothing about is misandrist or anti-men. Toxic masculinity negatively affects men too, a lot of the ways men are treated unfairly is due to toxic masculinity.

If we need to go a bit deeper (and I will probably regret having this discussion but internet so sure), there are clearly specific aspects of traditional 'masculinity' that are harmful, either to oneself or the people one interacts with. 'Boys don't cry' encourages men to bottle up their feelings rather than actively deal with them. 'Boys will be boys' excuses arsehole behaviour and kind of suggests men can't help being arseholes, and I doubt I need to point out how that's an issue. It can also intersect with stuff like misogyny and homophobia but that's drifting a bit.

The Hbomb video is exactly about how it's still a marketing tool in the end, but this shouldn't mean we can't use that to address actual issues.

One of the problems with talking about toxic masculinity or masculinity in general is that there's a tendency to dodge absolutely everything, like this "you see there's nothing wrong with masculinity because women can be assholes too!", ignoring the fact you're treating a systematic behavior of society as if it is just a issue of individual ethos. The problems toxic masculinity entails (and what the gilette commercial very lightly addresses) are issues of the values of masculinity our society has established regarding our treatment of one another and of women. One specific that the commercial addresses is one of how we've come to associate masculinity with violence (the kids beating each other up), and that's a very clear problem of toxic masculinity itself that majorly affects men (such as men being both the perpetrators and victims of murder).

The commercial is one of the lightest and most basic takes on the issue of toxic masculinity ever. It's literally "men, the values society instilled in us is fucked up. we can, need and should change that.". The commercial literally has the shot (as Hbomb pointed out) of a bunch of guys ripping through a more backwards and "toxic" old gilette commercial to represent this point.

To construct anything the commercial did as misandrist is completely irrational.

The only way you could construe the Gilette commercial as an "attack on men" is if you think any criticism of the way men act or how they're raised is an attack, which is a fundamentally ridiculous position.

the backlash occured because not a lot of people are fond of being lectured.

It’s become more common to see politically charged ads, the last case I recall was with Nike. Given that they wanted to get attention with controversy, Nike played a better strategy with Colin Kaepernick, because the message was not “here is how everyone should behave to be morally virtuous”, but “screw the authority that is telling you when, how, and where you are allowed to protest”. The Nike message was one of liberty, not one of obedience to authority.

The Gillette message is the opposite. It’s “here is how you should behave, because you belong to the class of people that have penises, and we like telling people with penises what they should be doing.”

My reaction to seeing this ad is not quite backlash. It is more like I react to the church person wearing a funny hat, telling me I am a sinner and I shall be shown the way to salvation; I find it to be self important moral lecturing, and my instinct is to categorically ignore it.

Here is the deal: Most adults do not like to be lectured about how they should behave. While most men are not fond of sexual harassment, and we are all aware that some men are boorish morons. I’m really not sure that a message that says: “it is your responsibility to correct boorish morons, because you have the same kind of genitals they do” will catch on. This message is more popular with women than it is with men. It is common to view one-selves as individuals but others as part of a group. It’s a way for the mind to simplify things and make information more workable.

This is a bit like telling an Hispanic person that it’s their responsibility to get rid of gangs, because they too are Hispanic, or telling a Muslim person that they better keep those terrorists in check, because they are Muslim. If neither of them had done anything wrong or had anything to do with the criminals in question, this sounds quite condescending. It’s demanding compliance and correction from a whole class of people merely because of some identity commonality with the problem in question, and no other evidence of complicity.

If Gillette wanted to ride on the #Metoo wave, they might have been better off showing some men intervening out of their own free will.

In fact, I think this would be a much better video if they just cut the lecturing part out and just left the male role models, which are actually refreshing to see. That message would have inspired liberty through good behavior, not obedience.

Well, your username is definitely fitting.

Anyways moral of the story: Buy an electric razor. I’d reccomend philips. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of mine

I heard the ad's message less as "here's what you should do" and more as "here's the crap society conditions us to accept and justify", personally.

Of course it always seem a little iffy when the message comes from a company like Gillette… It's kinda like hearing about ecology and healthy diets in a McDonald's ad…

Edited by Lyendith on Feb 23rd 2019 at 7:31:57 PM

How the hell did the Gilette ad manage to piss off anyone?

I don't even own a electric razor. I trim my beard with scissors.

I think, Invincible, your post actually illustrates nicely the problem the Gilette ad tried to address. Your reaction to an ad observing modern masculinity has problems that we should change is to deny your personal responsibility in it (rather than tackle the societal problem), and compare straight men, the most powerful gender demographic in the world, to underprivileged, persecuted ethnic minorities (apples and grapes if I've ever seen). Men are not a persecuted, underprivileged minority. Men, for the lack of a better term, rule the world and establish the rules. Hispanic communities and Muslim communities are A) suffering under the bootheel of society B) dealing with hostile criminal factions C) dealing with said problems that were engineered/tolerated by Western/white establishment in the first place. We're talking here about an ad that encourages a privilege group to not repeat/tolerate toxic behavior among their own privileged class.

If men don't fix themselves, who will? Women can definitely try, but our society is horribly skewered to benefit (a mold of) men above women. The oppressed minority should not be expected to clean up the mess of the privileged class, because that's an uphill battle when they already have enough problems.

The ad is about men recognizing their privilege built on the back of oppressing each other and women and doing something about it. This doesn't mean that you, as a person, need to prowl the streets of New York City and beat up men who commit sexism, but simply that you shouldn't repeat, be complicit or encourage toxic behavior. The simplest example the ad gives is two boys beating up each other and a man (implicitly their father) splitting them up to show what they're doing is wrong. That's it. If you have children, don't instill them with toxic behavior that often gets past the radar, if you're friends with people with toxic behavior, don't be (or make an effort to explain to them why that's wrong). That's all the commercial is really asking. The absolute minimum of self-awareness from men like us.

If you want to spin that message as one of "obedience to authority" rather than "basic human decency", that's really on you.

Also, "I don't like being told what to do" is not a particularly sympathetic argument.

The ad's message overall was "Don't be an asshole", not "Go out there and hunt down anyone, who displays sexist behavior", just "Don't be an asshole". And, as someone already told on twitter, if it's enough for you to call it misandristic and "man hating", it's honestly more says about you than anything else.

Especially since if your problem is an ad "telling you what to do", you should also be mad at the Nike ad, since that one's message was also "don't treat sportsmen who protest about racial inequality like they're traitors of their country". It is also telling you what to do. You're just ok with it because you agree with that message.

I mean, you can see the video's "lecturing" as a call to arms, you can consider the video's "commands" to be encouragment, and I'd argue that viewing the video as 'being told what to do' rather than 'inspiring to be better' says more about the viewer than the content.

It also seems like you don't understand what toxic masculinity even is.

To be fair about young boys fighting, Psychologists do note the difference between play fighting and real fighting, and when to act accordingly to break it up and tell them the difference between the two.

I had no problem with the Gillete ad other than that the company uses foreign sweatshops to produce their product, but thats entirely different can of worms in itself.

In the ad its less "kods are fighting each other" and more "a kid/a bunch of kids attack a kid that doesnt want to fight".

Also if your response to being told "dont be an asshole" is "being an asshole is bad but i dont like it when anyone tells me whats right or not" you still end up endorsing being an asshole, if i told you the sky was blue but in a really condenscating way you wouldnt start arguing about how its actually yellow.

The ad in the video that upsets me the most was that Sunny D "I can't do this anymore" tweet, which I think was a downright cruel attempt of mimicking Pete Davidson "I really don't want to be on this Earth anymore" instagram post. I was surprised it didn't got much more hate, though I would love to see some kind of melodrama telenova play out between the brands on twitter. I also absolutely would not start buying their products, so it's a win win.
Another good leftist Gilette takedown I've seen is from Peter Coffin. He had a series about advertisement with his wife, and in the video I think they made some great points about how the ad pushes the "personal responsibility" point instead of how this is a systematic issue as well as how the ad is structured to both be "outrage advertising" in the first half and "woke advertising" in the second half.

And while I do agree that what the ad "forces" men to do is pretty banal stuff, the issue with both genders remain systematic: our patriarchal society that places rigid roles on what constitutes "a real man"/"a real woman" and neoliberal capitalism exploiting workers (of both genders). But people (like that poster in this thread) tends to gets hung up on terms like "toxic masculinity" to ever address it. They want to be told that "men suffer too" and nothing else. Are victims of suicide more likely to be men? Yes, because of toxic masculinity encouraging them to suppress their feelings since "real men don't cry" (but toxic masculinity is considered a made-up term used to suppress men, so.....)

Edited by HottoKenai on Feb 24th 2019 at 11:53:53 PM

In my opinion the ad is ultimatly ok because it forced the issue as a whole into wide public discussion and made the nazis throw a tantrum.

A question that arose is what if a Brand tries to do the opposite and make a reactionary ad (as in, not in literal reaction to another ad like the watch thing), As far as i remember, the last few times anyone tried to do that they were met with actual lpsses in revenue and whatnot so im not worried.

Depends on what you meant by "reactionary". There was that watch commercial that repeats MRA talking point that was mentioned in this thread. The NRA has made a commercial supporting violence against the "liberal elites" and Heiniken made a kinda sorta racist "sometimes lighter is better" ad (both links are to Peter Coffin's video making fun of them). None of them are as popular as the "woke ad" so I think for the foreseeable future, we'll be seeing more of them, since, as the video pointed out, pissed off reactionaries are a gold mine for free advertising.
In the grand scheme of things, though, it doesn't really matter. As you've said, commercials can be good at putting a social issue in the spotlight, but ultimately, if we are to have a honest conversation about said issue, it's better to divorce it from the commercial altogether.

Sorry for the double post, but someone smashed the back window of Hbomb's car (he was fine). Hope it wasn't a targeted attack. I'm blaming Antifa, those god darn real fascists...

Well, good thing the guy himself is okay. Sucks having to pay for that, though.