Gillette and the rise of woke capitalism

The politicisation of consumer products is one of the weirder developments of recent years. First, Oreos came out in support of gay rights. Then Nike extolled us to ‘believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything’, in its multimillion-dollar campaign with controversial former NFL star Colin Kaepernick. Now Gillette has launched a new advert calling on men to be ‘the best men can be’ and shed the nefarious habits of ‘toxic masculinity’ in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

The two-minute advert-come-public service announcement argues that men, in the words of actor Terry Crews, taken from his testimony on #MeToo in the US congress, should hold one another accountable for their behaviour. The clip shows some boys trying to hit each other at a barbecue, while their dads look on, tongs in hand, saying ‘boys will be boys’. A sitcom character ogles and grabs a woman, while blokes in the studio audience jeer in support. Bullying, violent would-be abuser is presented as men’s factory setting, and these instincts must be resisted by the intervention of more enlightened friends. One is shown stopping his mate from following a woman up the street.

The ad is aimed at updating the company’s 30-year-old slogan, ‘The best a man can get’. Images of its old ads, showing chiseled men shaving as women swoon, are spliced in — as if they, too, have been part of the problem. But the key difference between the old ads and the new is that the former were aimed at flogging us razors, rather than telling us how to live. The ‘best a man can get’ was always, presumably, an endorsement of Gillette products’ quality, rather than a call to unabashed chauvinism. But perhaps we consumers were just too dim to notice.

Unsurprisingly, the backlash to Gillette’s new ad has been swift.