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Anger Over Gillette Ad Reveals How Much People Hate Having Their Complacency Over Our Male Dominated Culture Revealed

A columnist friend of mine told me he was going to write about the intense blowback Gillette was receiving for its commercial calling out toxic macho male culture. We had just traded some Twitter messages about it after I responded to a post from noted TV host Piers Morgan, who called a woman defending the ad “a man-hating imbecile” who was “driving a war against masculinity.”

Let’s be honest: If Morgan was an example of the kind of masculinity under siege, I’d sign up for a foxhole beside her in a heartbeat. 

Still, I wasn’t going to write about this ad, until I saw a column in the Washington Post titled: “What Trump’s fast food feast and Gillette’s woke razor blades have in common.” The author, Sonny Bunch, described “woke” Gillette – quotes around that word are his – and Trump’s decision to offer $3,000 worth of fast food to national champion Clemson Tigers as two media figures playing to their base supporters.

The money quote: “Of course, both the Fast Food Feast and Woke Gillette are explicitly designed to inspire mockery and, therefore, implicitly designed to encourage the us-vs.-them dichotomy that defines modern American life.”

This made me very mad. Equating a passionate plea to help ostracize bullying and sexual harassment with our truth-challenged president rolling out a fast food buffet for a bunch of athletes in a cartoonish nod to his supporters? Really?

All Bunch saw in Gillette’s ad is politically correct posturing. Because, presumably,  he isn’t on the business end of our society’s persistent sexism, hoping for the moment when a major corporation might risk its standing with millions of male customers to speak for what’s right.

It reminded me of how tough it is to convince people of how deep seated our prejudices and “isms” really are. And how complacent people can get, when they believe it’s all been handled, already.

I remember feeling that attitude from people in the weeks before the last presidential election in 2016. As someone who travels the country lecturing on race and media issues, I could sense that audiences were getting impatient with the topic.

We’ve had a black president, they seemed to be thinking. We’re about to have our first woman president. America is past this stuff already.

And the Trump happened. And Charlottesville happened. And people began to realize: There’s a lot more racist/sexist/homophobic people in this country than some are willing to admit.

A book I’m reading right now, Robin Diangelo’s excellent White Fragility, centers on a simple but important concept. America is a country whose social mechanisms are deliberately calibrated to advantage white people. But, because the classic civil rights movement did such a good job of revealing the brutality of racist oppressors, mainstream society equates open racism with evil.

So many Americans indulge a rhetorical two-step, where they condemn open, obvious racism, but remain blind – sometimes, willfully so – to the mechanisms which enable white oppression in everyday life. Because, to them, the only people who enable racism and white privilege are evil people, and most people in their lives aren’t evil.

I’m seeing the same thing happen now around the Gillette ad and the way it tackles toxic masculinity. In the debates on my Facebook page and on Twitter, I haven’t seen anyone say that such attitudes don’t exist. Instead, they say the problem is obvious, not many men are affected by it, they don’t need to be “lectured” about how to handle it, and Gillette is bringing it up mostly in an attempt to look “woke” for millennial customers.

Which is odd. Because I rarely hear people complain that car companies are trying to look falsely “patriotic” in those truck commercials with big American flags filmed in the heartland. It’s often accepted that, even though there is a commercial component to the message, the nod toward “traditional American values” is one of respect and admiration.

The fact is, America’s social fabric advantages men systemically in many of the same ways that it advantages white people. It’s not so much about what individual people do, as it is about living in a tilted system we have all been socialized to accept, from our earliest days (this is Diangelo’s argument about racial oppression in White Fragility repurposed for sexism.)

Resisting that socialization requires constant reinforcement and effort. Because the ways in which we echo society’s systemic male dominance can be surprising and subtle.

The fact that so many people seem to have gotten so angry about this ad, tells you its message is important. If Gillette’s commercial really was speaking to an issue that was mostly solved, its appearance would have been greeted with the ultimate killer in our modern media world: indifference.

Instead, there’s a sense that people’s complacency has once again been challenged by a corporation that dared to tell its customers America still has work to do in dismantling the most obvious forms of toxic masculinity in our culture.

It’s a message that’s tough to hear. And it may feel like an insulting challenge to some. But it’s also a welcome reminder that, no matter how much progress we think the country has made on its “isms,” more work remains.

And denying that truth by getting angry at a TV commercial from a razor blade company just might be the silliest reaction of all.