When man hating is your marketing plan

Demonising men may be the latest social fad, but Gillette’s jump on to the bandwagon is nothing short of pathetic, writes Miranda Devine.

How pathetic that Gillette feels so embarrassed by its macho image that it’s trying to sell razors by demonising men.

Its new ad campaign “The Best A Man Can Get” portrays males as rowdy, violent and sexist, with blokes standing behind barbecues, arms folded, intoning “boys will be boys”, as various masculine atrocities unfold, from a man ogling a woman to two boys wrestling on the ground.

There is the stereotypical boardroom scene — where the sole woman looks downcast as a man places his hand patronisingly on her shoulder and says, “What I actually think she’s trying to say …”

In the background, a narrator delivers a lecture on toxic masculinity: “Is this the best a man can get? Is it? We can’t hide from it. It has been going on far too long. We can’t laugh it off, making the same old excuses.”

Cue “good men” (mainly non-white) stepping in to stop “bad men” (mainly white) from misbehaving: a man breaking up the wrestling boys, the ogler being restrained on the street, a father teaching is little girl to say “I am strong” into a mirror.

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Gillette’s latest ad takes their classic tagline of “The Best a Man Can Get” and turns it into man-hating. Picture: supplied

For Gillette, it’s only OK for girls to be strong.

“Because the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow”, is the tagline. But if Gillette has its virtue-signalling way they will be the “soyboys of tomorrow”.

Since when did misandry become a marketing tool?

“Just used a Gillette razor to shave off my testicles”, wrote one wag on Twitter, neatly summing up the male response on social media, where the hashtag “Boycott Gillette” has taken off. “No more toxic masculinity for me. Thanks Gillette!”

It’s like McDonalds running an ad telling its customers they’re fat.

‘Hey, you, fatso, your insatiable sugar cravings and hopeless lack of self-control have created an obesity epidemic. We can’t hide from it. Take a look in the mirror. It’s been going on far too long. You’re fat. You’re disgusting. You make us puke.’

It’s a weird way to promote your product by dissing your customer base.

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Gillette has been cultivating a tough masculine image for more than a century. Not anymore. Picture: supplied

The irony is that Gillette has been cultivating a tough masculine image for more than a century, all phallic razors and gleaming blades in dark blue packaging, with tough titles like Mach3 and Vector. Gillette’s razor for women to shave their legs, Venus, by contrast, is pink and as shapely as Jane Russell, packaged up in soft pinks and baby blues with words like “Embrace” and “Spa Breeze”. Sexists!

Gillette must have been taking notes from the Australian government’s anti-domestic violence ads which demonise little boys as incipient wife bashers and features the same “boys will be boys” trope.

The irony is that all of Gillette’s key executives are men, according to Bloomberg, and it has just one woman on the board. Perhaps they thought that a virtue-signalling ad might pre-emptively stave off an attack on their “misogynist” corporate structure from the internet’s gender lynch mob. Good luck with that, but they won’t have any customers left.

The furore over Gillette’s abject gender cowardice comes hot on the heels of the American Psychological Association formally pathologizing masculinity as a health hazard in its first guide to treating boys and men.

“Traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful.”

The war on masculinity rolls on.

@mirandadevine

Originally published as When man hating is your marketing plan