NO CHILD-BRAWLS!

Gillette, famous purveyors of razors, have seized headlines with their new advertising campaign. The advert explicitly targets toxic masculinity and how it is perpetuated. This has naturally caused a gigantic bickerfest online.

Note — I am totally opposed to all forms of toxic masculinity. It is harmful to men and women. It is a set of norms and expectations that forces men to capitulate towards some of the worst aspects of their personalities at the expense of some of the most nurturing and positive aspects. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all ‘masculine’ qualities are negative, only the shite ones, like anger, emotional repression, sexual entitlement, violence, and bootcut jeans with brown shoes.

Gilette’s advert has a positive message, but, I can’t help but detect a hint of cynicism behind it. The actors in the ad carefully cast to be attractive yet approachable, make all kinds of principled stands, from intervening in brutal child brawls to physically restraining their slavering goon friend from chasing a woman down the street.

When I see the carefully cast everymen in the video heroically stopping their slavering friend from groping a random woman, or diving in to stop a child-brawl, I can’t help but look past it and see the coven of dead-eyed ad executives glibly directing everything.

Sadly men like Chadwick the Lady-Chaser are disappointingly common.

These executives finely manicure the content of this advert to stay in line with their rigorous market research and meticulously generated buyer profiles. They plot out the condemnations of real and harmful behaviors not to make a stand, but in the hopes that it will ‘start a conversation’ and ‘increase brand awareness’. This advertisement wasn’t created to make a political statement, it isn’t an act of altruism, it wouldn’t exist unless there was some level of certainty that it would create profit for Gillette.

Culture War Profiteering

The advert has caused the obligatory controversy on social media and men who don’t shave often enough to matter to Gillette furiously hammered their disgust into their sticky phone. Notable news-git, Pierce Morgan lead the charge, accusing the razor blade company who want to sell razor blades and LITERALLY nothing else of waging a war against men. He also wants you to know that he’s popular.

On the other side of the ideological divide, the more liberally-minded denizens of the parallel hellscape that is the internet have been supplicating themselves before the wokeness of the focus tested and calculated advert.

Beneath their dank, mossy rock, the Gilette ad team are probably clicking their mandibles in satisfaction. This is just as they planned. Nothing spreads on the internet faster than a controversy, the more the chuds and the liberal bicker, the more exposure Gillette gets, and the more money they make.

The Thing

The Thing is a 1982 film about a creepy alien something-or-other that comes to Earth in a meteor and proceeds to take over and eat everything that gets anywhere near it. It will be serving as our hyperbolic metaphor for capitalism today. Everyone, give The Thing a hand, which it will promptly turn into a gross claw or something Freudian.

The Titular Whatever-It-Is From The Thing

In his book, Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher describes capitalism like the antagonist of the Arctic horror.

‘Like the Thing in John Carpenter’s film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.’

When you see woke adverts treat it the same way you would a member of your team who may be harboring a gribbly alien horror. Sure, it looks like a friend, but is it only doing that to get you to drop your guard?

This is one of the oldest tricks in the book, in fact, it’s literally in one of the oldest books when it comes to marketing. In Propaganda, Edward Bernays details how you can influence the buying practices of a group by appealing to the values that are important to them.

‘A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, not doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment. In actual fact, his judgment is a melange of impression stamped on his mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought.’

This is the rationale that drove Gilette to create their advertisement. They want to subconsciously influence your buying decisions by smearing themselves with a veneer of virtue. Progressive politics are all the rage now, it is a fantastic marketing resource. Each and every advertisement-twat in the world knows this. So should you.

Also, yes, I’m aware that by writing this I have fed into the very process I am critiquing here. What else could I do? Keep my weird rants to myself?