Gillette. You’ve heard this name before. That nostalgic smell of Gillette aftershave that reminds you of your father before he left for work. That faint memory of the first time you shaved using the Gillette razor. That routinely groove of watching your partner use Gillette shaving cream while you get ready for work. Gillette has been a common household necessity for decades.
On the 13th of January 2019 Gillette released its most recent project titled ‘We Believe: The Best Men Can Be’. Showing a line of men behind their grills chanting the worn-out excuse ‘boys will be boys, boys will be boys’, the latest Gillette advert explores a miscellany of misbehaviour: sexual harassment, bullying, fighting, discrimination and more. The short clip ends by presenting its viewers with the question – ‘Is this the best a man can get?’. Not only does this spark debate about extremely prevalent social issues but it also takes a stand against the topics of catcalling, #MeToo and challenging the primitive rationalization of ‘boys will be boys’.
In an age where offense spreads faster than flu, Gillette faced a large amount of backlash on all social media platforms with #BoycottGillette becoming a popular topic on Twitter and Instagram. As of 1st February 2019, three weeks after the video first went live on Gillette’s YouTube page, now has 749K likes and 1.3M dislikes. But why?
We Believe: The Best Men Can Be scrutinizes the narrow-minded interpretation and conjecture around the word ‘masculinity’ – which fails men as much as it does women. The portrayal of men in advertising has for decades been very consistent – the well-built jock to whom all girls are attracted to, the father who pays the bills, the laid-back husband that sips his beer on a Saturday morning. We need to acknowledge that men are more than that, that the previous depictions of men are exaggerated, limiting and outdated. Gillette on the other hand, sets it’s focal point on the real men, the good men, like the ones I have come across in my life, those men that fit under a wider umbrella of masculinity.
Gillette highlights instances where men are behaving disrespectfully and in contrast, we also see men that somewhat counter the harm by calling their peers out on their misbehaviour and treating each other with respect. The backlash received on this short video seems irrational to me, it is baffling how something as simple as a video requesting men to be respectful to each other and to others can cause such a stir and threaten the masculinity of such a vast majority. I even got into an argument with a close friend who said they wouldn’t take “moral lessons” from a company like Gillette which has its own “controversial history”, a response like this is exactly what is part of the problem, it is tragic that people choose to pay all their attention to the “snowflakes” whilst missing out on what the project actually implies and the positive stand it takes on common social issues. It is dismal how a large majority of men are brainwashed by the need to be utterly “masculine” that they fail to recognize the underlying issues. I hope that one day people are able to set their bigger-than-life egos aside and are able to watch a simple commercial with an unbiased mind and identify what it is actually trying to convey.
What Gillette intended was not an attack on the entire population of men but to divert attention to pressing social issues but obviously and most unfortunately, the audience focussed on the background noise rather than on the advertisement’s central idea. If these issues aren’t addressed, discussed and brought to the limelight, they will never be solved. And Gillette took it upon themselves to put the message out there.