“Woke” Capitalists Need to Stop Using Victims as an Excuse to Attack Men
Kaya Jones
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“Woke capitalists” are at it again! This time they’ve hijacked Procter & Gamble’s century-old Gillette razor brand to insult and demean their own customers — normal men — in pursuit of accolades from the socialist progressives who hate them.
Someone, somehow, convinced P&G’s executives that the best way to sell razors to men would be to make a “short film” about how awful manly-men are.
“The Best Men Can Be” opens with ordinary-looking men staring forlornly into their shaving mirrors as unseen voices berate them for their “bullying,” “sexual harassment,” and “toxic masculinity.” But these mirthless men are not the victims of the story — oh no — they are the villains!
Cut to a scene of beardless youths tearing through a projection screen showing Gillette’s famous “The Best a Man Can Get” ads — you know, the ones showing masculine men in moments of athletic triumph, professional achievement, and, most prominently, in loving relationships with their wives and family.
What sort of offensive, patriarchal image could drive these androgynous-looking kids to such destructive rage? A man, freshly shaved, smiling as his adoring wife kisses him on the cheek.
What follows is even more ridiculous. Images of young boys doing normal guy stuff like wrestling and playground name-calling are recast as some sort of crime against humanity. Teenagers being attracted to scantily clad women on television is portrayed as some kind of perverse atrocity.
The movie then cuts back to the adult world, where a man touching a female co-worker on the shoulder is implied to be sexual harassment, and fathers uttering the age-old truism that “boys will be boys” is portrayed as tantamount to condoning rape.
All the while, liberal media personalities like The Young Turk’s Ana Kasparian continue bleating on in the background, telling Gillette’s customers just how responsible they are for the ills of the world.
“Say the right thing…act the right way. Some already are,” the narrator informs us as newly introduced “hero men” are shown intimidating smaller men over their choice of words and a plump, dough-faced dad stops some kids from wrestling in their backyard.
“There will be no going back!” the narrator concludes ominously.
As a young woman in the music industry, I was sexually harassed and sexually assaulted repeatedly. I am a supporter of the #MeToo movement. And yet this advertisement makes me sick.
I am tired of victims being used as an excuse to browbeat normal men, and I cannot imagine what would make business leaders think this is good for their brand.
The overall message is pretty clear: you’d better raise your sons to be gutless, trembling beta males who take exaggerated offense at their friends’ “toxic male” behavior…or else!
Women don’t want neutered, emotionally weak men who would rather be offended for us than protective of us! I, for one, am far less horrified by the bucolic traditional marriages and smiling husbands portrayed in the old 1980s Gillette ad, than I am by the humorless scolds in this new one.
What are we supposed to take away from this video? That women are so weak that we can’t handle perfectly natural expressions of masculinity?
At least the social justice-oriented ad team at Procter & Gamble is so lacking in self-awareness that we can get some laughs out of their self-righteous virtue-signalling.
Someone running the company’s YouTube account kept “liking” obviously sarcastic compliments in the comments section. The woke capitalists at P&G eventually got wise and started mass deleting these comments making fun of them for their stupid ad, but they couldn’t change their customers’ reaction. The video had about four times as many dislikes as likes a day after it dropped.
Ultimately, ads like this aren’t for women like me any more than they are for the normal men they demonize. They exist because corporate executives with brains full of social justice orthodoxy left over from college want to feel good about themselves and please their like-minded friends in the liberal media. I only wish there were some adults in the room to remind them that insulting your customers usually isn’t a good business plan.
Kaya Jones is a Grammy-nominated singer, and a former member of the Pussycat Dolls.
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