Joe Otte observed the oddity:
Wow. Could you have predicted 97 replies in 24 hours on this, of all topics?
The “this” of which he writes is the “toxic masculinity” Gillette commercial. As for the specific number of comments, as well as some of the contentiousness, it’s hard to predict, but had I not thought it worthy of note, I wouldn’t have posted it.
But why, as Joe asks, did it generate such a response. Oskar von Aln took his swipe by replying “The frailty of men is hilarious,” a position he first sought to weasel out of until, when pressed, he put on his big boy pants and came out with it:
Yup. Getting worked up about an ad is being frail to me. Should have been more precise though, I should have written;
Men going apeshit over an ad and the attacks on “men” are frail and snowflakey.
Are men “frail and snowflakey”? If not, then why bother with a silly advertisement, more likely proffered to play the social-conscience marketing game than actually make a serious point. After all, the company doing the advertisement hadn’t minded its rather shameless pandering in the past.
My speculation is that this commercial, coming on top of the plethora of op-eds about toxic masculinity, the #MeToo denigration of men for being rapist-lite, if not actualy rapists, building over the past few years, brought the attack into the open with something as banal as a TV commercial. It was too flagrant, too obvious, to ignore.
It’s bad enough that there is a never-ending stream of collegiate coverage of bad man stuff, and the anti-male bias of Title IX convictions and explusions. This shoved it in the face of ordinary guys cooking at grills, and ordinary boys wrestling and roughhousing, directly connecting it to more concrete gender offenses.
So what if we never cat-called, inappropriately touched a woman’s shoulder or raped anyone. Even if you didn’t do it, didn’t someone within earshot? What did you do about it? If you don’t tell your friends it’s “not cool,” then he’s not the only bad dude. You’re a bad dude too.* If we’re not actively defending virtuous womanhood, we’re still rapists, one step removed.
But that doesn’t really answer the question of what makes this “toxic masculinity” attack a bad thing. Some on twitter noted that men are complaining about a commercial that merely tells them to be “respectful and compassionate” to women. What’s wrong with that?
That’s a good question. What is wrong with that?
My answer is that there’s nothing wrong with being respectful and compassionate at all. What’s wrong is being told by self-proclaimed arbiters of moral propriety how to be the way they feel you should be. What touches a nerve isn’t that we should be good people, good men, but that other people believe themselves entitled to dictate what being a good man means.
We may be fine with being respectful and compassionate, but we’re not fine with a TV commercial, or random people on social media, telling us that if we don’t behave the way they tell us to behave, then we’re evil or doing it all wrong.
Is that the problem? Is there some other problem? Or are we, as the intrepid Swede contends, just “frail and snowflakey”?
*As an aside, if the fellow who was told his conduct was “not cool” took issue with his moral interlocuter because he disagreed about what was and was not “cool,” what should happen next?
Looking forward to the replies to this.
It’s von Ahn btw.
The questions you pose are interesting. My perspective might be a bit different than yours as we don’t have same conflicts re Title IX convictions and expulsions (we don’t have those) and our crazies seem less crazy than yours. Will write it up later.
Rather than “announce” that you’ll “write it up later,” why not just either write it up or wait until later? You’re just my rhetorical device here. It’s really not about you at all.
Point taken.
As this comment section has showed the ad can be seen as nothing much, an assault on men or an attack on men by some man hating exec (with an agenda). This ad needs to some commenters to be fought as you will fight for due process, discrepancies in sentencing between men and women and the “cumulative attacks on masculinity” (?).
(Due process is always worth fighting for, as is discrepancies in sentencing, we got that here to. Working on it. Ad’s, nah).
My point, as it was in the beginning, it’s an ad. Some parts of it is stupid, some of it’s fine. We have due process in my cold corner of the world (no Title IX convictions) and maybe I think everything about this is silly because our culture war is not as rough as yours. I don’t read the oped’s. The war on boys (as the war on Christmas) doesn’t bother me one bit. If my son learns from his life lessons from an ad for razors instead of me and my wife then the failure lies with me and her.
I live in one of the most atheistic countries on the planet, is a practicing Christian, an recovering alcoholic and a father of four. People have enough opinions about that, why would an ad for razors even register on the annoyance scale? Why care about what an ad says. Why care about what I say? My morals is different then my closest neighbor. Why is an execs opinion about manhood even registering?
The people screaming snowflakes to someone boycotting products for ‘woke’ reasons are now boycotting, loudly, this product for attacking men. I find that funny. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Stop causing a scene. Do as you would when you pray. Silent and for yourself.
And yes, I know, this is just my opinion.
What many who don’t have to actually deal with consequences of cultural shifts being reflected in legal and quasi-legal consequences is that this is how both laws and people’s attitudes about rights devolve. I appreciate that you only see an ad, but I see the downstream consequences reflected in changes in laws and judges (whether actual judges or faux campus judges) and jurors attitudes toward people accused of wrongdoing.
In other words, I don’t have the luxury of trivializing things like this which I know are having a detrimental impact on law and culture.
Oskar:
This here Hotel is inhabited by lawyers and judges. The long-form of social wars is not our concern. Sometimes, we see things you don’t, mostly because we narrow our vision to how activities affect rights because we’re lawyers and judges.
This isn’t a big-picture issue. On the grand scale, some men do dumb stuff and should do better. That isn’t our concern. Our concern is the ramifications of thinking too simply and spreading both conclusions and solutions too-wide based on simplistic thinking.
In this instance, and understand that phrase, your thinking is too simple. I don’t mean that as an affront. You might want to take a gander at the archives; you might just learn something.
Otherwise, go shovel the snow.
Skink, if you ‘narrow your view’ to the context of this post, you’ll probably notice, by the numbers, this is a post about advertising.
While you may have elected yourself the Sherriff of Scott’s comment section, that doesn’t mean anyone here accepts your feelz on someone else’s comments as anything more than your feelz. Stay in your lane.
Sure friend.
I as I’m just a lowly legal counsel I’ll act accordingly in the future.
Are you an attorney? You say “legal counsel,” but that’s a little to facile. And you’re obviously not an American attorney, so perhaps Skink is quite right and if you plan to drive in the US law lane, then maybe you would do well to show a little intellectual humility.
I need to start writing on a keyboard instead of on the phone. These sentences is an embarrassment.
As I am a lowly legal counsel I’ll try to act accordingly in the future.
Protip: Rather than whine about your smartphone failures, use a computer like a big boy in the first place. Nobody really gives a shit about your excuses. If you don’t want to be embarassed, then don’t do embarassing things. If you want to hang with the grown-ups, act like a grown-up.
As I am not driving in the US law lane, am not qualified to do so and probably never will be I will never comment on how US law works, or doesn’t work, or how the culture which drives it is changing. I do not think I know any better then anyone else here, most definitely I know less.
My comments have explicitly been about the ad and how I see it, nothing else.
And no, not an attorney yet. Becoming a Swedish one.
“Why care about what an ad says.”
When does the cumulative effort become too big to ignore? Like an abusive relationship, it is easy to wave off individual instances as no big deal. “She didn’t mean to slash that knife at me, she was just upset. She’s really a sweetheart.”. It is the apocryphal boiling of the frog. There is a saying that the law is downstream from culture, so if you are concerned about preserving legal freedoms such as due process, a culture that is turning against it should be deeply concerning as politicians will do what is popular. If that means gutting due process, kiss it goodbye. Now the flip side is that it is entirely possible to take this too far and jump at every little thing, or twist relatively innocuous things into something sinister, which is the place that most advocacy groups end up. However, the people that made the ad consider it an act of advocacy, so the ad certainly was not created with the intent to be neutral. To call out intentional propaganda isn’t inherently out of place. Put it this way, if the ad was recast along racial lines, would it be snowflakey to call it out as racist? What about religious lines?
Your whole reply comes across as ‘big man in the room’ posturing, which is the short-term safe play when dealing with the masculine catch-22; acknowledging a threat opens you up to being attacked for being weak (as you did by charging others with ‘snowflake’), while retreating from the threat makes you a coward. So you sit there and passively take the attacks until you can’t anymore. The problem is that by the point you can’t take it, you will be too weak to do anything about it, and you will be branded a coward for not acting sooner. Your only hope with the ‘big man’ strategy is that they will stop before it is too late for you. You are free to pick your poison, but know which poison you are taking.
You presume that what you are seeing in the ad is what is objectively true and then presume to know what intent of the creator.
Jumping of that platform of certainty you then try your hand at psychoanalyzing me and comment on posturing?
You are a bit too certain of things for my taste, friend.
This is curiously stupid. Jason sees what he sees, which is pretty much how everyone works. Is he to see what you see? Are you his moral compass and thought leader? He offers his reasons for his conclusions, and while you can disagree with them, that neither makes him wrong nor you right. That’s his well-grounded opinion.
But it’s not enough for you to disagree. Instead, you attack his position as not merely wrong, but anyone who hold that view as “frail” and a “snowflake” for having a far better argued position than anything you’ve offered. I don’t know that you can dig your hole any deeper, but you’re looking awfully damn stupid and malevolent at the moment.
Yeah. I haven’t been clear, and stupid myself.
And yes, I understand it looks malevolent.
I don’t believe Skink, Jason, you or a anyone here to be frail or stupid. My view was that people going apeshit over it; the people filming themselves torching razors and screaming about Soros while at the same time calling other people anowflakes for boycotting things are frail and stupid. That’s just my opinion.
So, I apologize for being dick.
I disagree with Jason and you about the ad. Nothing less, nothing more. And I don’t presume that my opinion holds any weight when it comes to US law and culture.
“We may be fine with being respectful and compassionate, but we’re not fine with a TV commercial, or random people on social media, telling us that if we don’t behave the way they tell us to behave, then we’re evil or doing it all wrong.”
I don’t have an issue with a call to be “good men.” In this case it’s the insinuation the bullying and harassment depicted is a systemic behavior of men at large in today’s society that necessitates a mass PSA. As if 99% of men out there wouldn’t break up a fight between two children in their presence. Addressing the 1% who wouldn’t doesn’t justify a men-wide lecturing.
Is there a “good man” rule book? What does it say? Who wrote it? You picked two words, “bullying and harassment,” which most can agree are bad things, but they are also two words that evade objective definition. If we can’t agree where the line is drawn, how can we keep from crossing the line? What gives anyone the authority to tell anyone else not to cross these lines that only exist in our own heads?
The good man rule book is a work in continuous process that society authors. The ad isn’t vague about what behavior it is calling out. It depicts boys ganging up on one, cyberbulling, men getting handsy with women, also the narrator calling out sexual harassment. Things that do happen and are excused in certain quarters. I don’t think anything the ad portrays is something that today we’re having a debate over whether it’s proper male behavior.
I think many saw a very different ad than you did, and would characterize what they saw very differently than you do. And they’re not bad men, but saw nothing like what you saw. Are they wrong and you right? Are they bad and you good?
These are the highlights of the ad:
0:10 A scared child running from group of a bigger children chasing him.
0:16 A crying child comforted by his mother as demeaning text messages pop up.
0:20 A man grabbing the maid’s behind while the audience laughs.
0:29 A condescending boss dismissing a female colleagues’ contribution.
0:34 Men standing by while children fight and excusing it as boys’ behavior.
0:40 News clips reporting incidents of sexual harassment.
Who characterizes these as anything other than bad?
You’ve laid your perspective on the table. If anyone wants to pick it up, this is their chance.
But how trustworthy are the reenactments? Plus I heard that the scared kid had just tried to kiss a girl.
Not that I have a horse in this race, but challenge accepted.
Up to about 29 second, it’s all cartoonish crap designed to frame what follows so the watch will impute motivations and assumptions that just aren’t there. And notably, these aren’t normal masculine behaviors. In fact, the internet name-calling is far more likely among girls than boys. Still, you’ve fallen for the bait and let it frame your assumptions, which is what you do with the “condescending boss” and again with the children fighting.
Bosses can’t be condescending, as that’s the nature of a superior/inferior employment relationship, but you assume he’s being dismissive. Maybe she said something completely moronic and he’s deflecting attention away so as to save her from the humiliation of her really dumb idea. Women can be smart. Women can be dumb. We don’t know what it was here, but you assumed. We don’t know if he touches everybody’s shoulder when he talked, or that he has consent to do so. But still, you’ve attributed motive to the boss, as well as negative.
As for the children fighting, were they? Were the just playing? Kids wrestle. Is that inherently bad or have you simply assume it to be more serious, assume fault, and assume the “boys will be boys” to be a deogation of responsibility by the hundred men (see what they did there?) watching. Why not just two boys having fun?
You assume facts not in evidence, motivations you can’t possibly know and ignore that they’ve played your emotions to then get you to shortcut facts for feelings. So no, it’s not necessarily bad, without your projecting your feelings onto it.
“What gives anyone the authority to tell anyone else not to cross these lines that only exist in our own heads?”
What would take it away? That’s pretty much what pop culture is – the collective lines in our heads, hijacked by corporations.
Some years ago, when I was still doing TV regularly, the host asked me to “get into the judge’s head.” I declined. “Sorry, I don’t do mind reading,” I replied. I still don’t.
If only the judge had been given the authority to make a commercial.
This was an ad targeted to women, plain and simple. Gillette did a cost/benefit analysis and concluded that $ from new women buying Gillette products because of this ad > $ lost from men giving up Gillette products because of the ad.
In the current year, metoo sanctimony has the same effect on women as hot chicks in skintight suits has on men.
I don’t see how it would work. There are women who buy products “for the ladies” (more like “for the idiots” ready to pay extra) but it’s not an ad putting “the ladies” in the center, it doesn’t even have a lot of hot pink in it. Making a leap “men->pink razors” isn’t intuitive. And there are those who choose products for practical reasons but the ad fails to advertise the product itself. Those who buy those razors may continue buying them but it wouldn’t increase sales.
(I have a value pack of cheap Gillette razors for all household needs. If it goes on sale again, I buy it again).
I see the ad rather targeting a particular type of (“SJW”) men thinking that they are better than other (“evil”) men by stroking their ego.
I agree with Joe and, to a point, with Oskar. It’s just an ad.
No, the bigger picture isn’t good. Depending on your perspective, the ad either brings home that pandering to progressives is now a viable business strategy (something David French has been very good about reporting at NRO) or that using conservative outrage for viral-marketing purposes is (almost as cynical and distasteful). But the ad itself is just insipid and, I think, surprising for how many smart people have gotten hung up on it. So what if a razor company wants to pirate #MeToo for sales?
Some of the comments yesterday were about the ad. Some were about what the ad represented. Some were about the bigger issue of social vilification of traditional masculinity. What’s the Canadian view?
Haha, well. The view from Greater Ontario is that:
* the ad is dumb, as marketing material almost always is
* the ad is a minor symptom of progressivism going mainstream
* a razor company doesn’t move the needle on social issues… unless non-progressives decide to accept the premise that it can, which I think plays into the hands of, at minimum, the marketers. I don’t understand why so many smart non-progressives have done so.
While I can’t speak for the Law Society of Upper Moosewood or many smart non-progressives, I can say this.
My sister, a huge FatM fan, once met a friend of my father’s who knows Florence well. Asked to describe her, he would only say “She’s a little… peculiar.”
For a finer microgeographical insight, the view from Southern Ontario (i.e. the cul-de-sac I live on) is:
“What? Oh, yeah, that ad. Don’t care. We’re gonna get about 20cm of snow Saturday night, so I’ll see ya shovelling Sunday morning.”
That’s nothing. We get so much snow here that we measure it in inches.
Same thing here. It might be the snow. We got 40cm (but we have barely had any snow this winter). No one much cares here, if they aren’t conspiracy nuts ranting about the shadowy foreign infiltration and takeover.
It is not just a razor company it is Procter gamble one of the largest consumer product companies in the world and it is led by a vicious women using their ad budget not to sell razors but to attack men.
That seems rather cynical, which gives rise to the reaction of fragility, since men can’t take a punch.
Men often take punches, especially in defense of others. They put themselves in the line of fire to protect others. They are fragile when they can’t handle insignificant slights that lack significant consequences. Thus, the fragility accusation implies that the ad is insignificant. To say that this ad is insignificant and has no cultural impact is absurd—as is the accusation of fragility.
Should men just “take a punch” when they lose custody of their children in the family courts or when they receive a harsher sentence than women? Fighting back against the real life-altering consequences of the cumulative attacks on masculinity is not fragility, it is good sense.
Did you just compare losing custody of a child with an ad for razors?
Attitudes (such as whether the father or mother would be the better parent in the best interests of the child) start with ads and end with custody. That’s real world law.
The biggest problem I’ve seen when litigating custody cases (only as a trainee though) is that the fathers hasn’t spent any time with the kids. No time has anything even smelling like toxic masculinity come up. Maybe it’s different in the US but breaking the joint custody presumption takes a drug addiction or worse here.
The biggest problem with limiting one’s grasp to the “biggest problem I’ve seen” is that you haven’t seen enough to be in a position to have a clue what the biggest problem might be. Remember the blind man and the elephant? You’re the blind man and aren’t wise enough to realize it.
“[T]he ad either brings home that pandering to progressives is now a viable business strategy…”
That worked so well for Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Pointing out stupidity and refuting it is not “frail and snowflakey.” If anything it is a hallmark of intellectual masculinity. While the denigration of traditional masculinity has been ongoing for years, this TV commercial was “too flagrant, too obvious, to ignore.”
Would either a Gillette ad or some rando calling men frail change your view of masculinity? If not, then who cares what they have to say?
Sure, if it were in a cultural vacuum, why would anyone care? But it isn’t.* It’s not really about the ad, per se. The ad is representative of the wider cultural trend. It is so in-your-face that it makes a highly visible target. Many of the best op-eds have tied this ad into the recent APA guidelines on masculinity.
This ad provides the opportunity to refute cultural stupidity in a way that a discussion of the APA guidelines does not. Consider that this is your second post on this topic and the number of comments that you’ve received. It’s a popular issue.
* Your first question is logically fallacious. Whether or not it changes my view of masculinity is a red-herring. A rando doesn’t typically garner 16 million views with 400,000+ likes and 800,000+ dislikes. It is having an undeniable cultural impact.
How about if it admonished blacks for theft and murder, or hispanics for illegal immigration, as a class? How about an ad, written by a misogynist, castigating women for abortion, divorce, and welfare, calling them all complicit, that there was something toxic about being feminine?
This wasn’t a “joke” ad, showing men as clowns and buffoons, like a lot of ads and shows are. It was an assault.
Why is it that men are expected to put up with thus, but no other class would tolerate?
Why should I buy anything from someone that clearly hates me for existing?
But not buying Gillette blades isn’t the same as announcing you’re not going to buy Gillette blades. So don’t buy if you don’t want to, but why talk about it? Why would “real men” care what Gillette has to say about them?
“Why would “real men” care what Gillette has to say about them?”
Is that what this is? I don’t care what the company thinks about me, and that surely isn’t my concern. It’s that they take a much bigger and looming problem, the destruction of social-legal rules to satisfy momentary and emotional troubles, and put a twitter-response on it. You’ve written extensively on it; so have others: there is a societal push on to eliminate important stuff, primarily due process.
I travel the country, and I’m a convivial sort. I meet people. I talk to them. Over the last few years, I can’t tell you how many I’ve met that think due process is a bad thing. “Why have trials if everyone knows the guy is guilty?” they posit.
This commercial, and others like it ignore the looming problem. The company effectively sticks its toe in a troubled sea created by movements. Sure, it’s just a commercial, but it’s a commercial that, without addressing anything, supports the denigration of things we should all hold dear. It’s the twit from a fool, but writ large.
I see what you did, slipping due process in there. Very tricky.
John Ringo.
“Get woke, go broke.”
Target, Gillette, NFL, vape store clerk, Red Hen restaurant, Episcopalian church.
SHG,
I am so glad I had the chance to drive my Chevy* to the levee.
I so wish the boys of coming generations have the opportunity for that same lovely experience, but I doubt it. That makes me sad.
All the best.
Rich
* A black ’55 Chevy with a red interior and a 265-cubic-inch overhead valve V8 .
My father used to let me stay up late on Tuesday nights to watch Combat on TV with him.* There was no female co-star with Vic Morrow (unless you thought Rick Jason was a bit on the girly side, officer as he was.
*My mother drove a ’61 Chevy Impala convertile, black exterior, red interior. The back seat footwells were always filled with water because it leaked when it rained.
“Joe Ott.”
No relation.
There’s a family who lives around the corner from me named the “Otts.” Nice enough folks. No relation.
around the corner
So, a couple miles away?
At least.
“oddity”
Relation.
Exactly what one would expect a hipster to say.
I know, off topic once again. So, do you think the Patriots will show this ad on the big screen at their next home game.
If a bear shits in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, is the Pope still Catholic?
I question whether this pope has ever been Catholic.
Hey GUYS! In case you’re having trouble getting through that toothless roster-man, cave dweller beard with our normal products for the standard urban sheep…try our new Gillette “MAN TAMER T-IX” guaranteed to eliminate all traces of that toxic stuff…
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/french-guillotine-440910376?src=i6ZsOSWKsce4yDzAXCrxBQ-1-9
Have you ever considered posting music videos?
i’ll think about it…..meanwhile go back and read my comment in your best George Carlin toxic-y condescending smart-ass TV marketing douche-bag voice…see?…..no? never mind
It wasn’t the comment, but the shutterstock pic.
if there’s a stock jpeg source u like, i can use it..
(for ? it didn’t link to the larger img i wanted…)
Barleycorn is in charge of jpegs.
Like all commercials, this bit from Gillette was an attempt at manipulation. Like many bad commercials, it was a poor and transparent manipulation attempt, in large part because it had nothing whatsoever to do with the product. It is basically the sponsor saying, “Buy my widgets because I am a pompous, self-righteous, holier-than-thou asshole, airing this commercial to show how virtuous I am.”
It is offensive (in my opinion) primarily because Gillette’s underlying premise (that this thing would work) is insulting to the average viewer’s intelligence.
So it’s not a man issue, but an intelligent person issue?
It’s apparently working. Way back in 1979, Nancy K. Fritz found that the best commercials evoked strong emotions. A polarizing commercial that some love and others hate is sheer genius — even the people who were originally apathetic about it now have Gillette on the tips of their tongues because of everybody else talking about it.
Sad, but true. Look at this example of pure annoyance that ran as a television advertising campaign for over twenty years.
[Ed. Note: I didn’t know if I had a line beyond which wildly off-topic vids would not fly. I now know. I do.]
Yes, but having been triggered into the deleting the video, you will nevertheless remember the name of the product when shopping.
Who are you and what are you talking about?
I’m RedditLaw, and I was talking to someone named Edward Note, who deleted the commercial that I had proffered.
Sorry. Nobody here by that name. [click]
Damn spammers.
I’ve known Edward Note since he was just an infant (we called him “Ten-Pound Note” in those days).
But are any of the people rolling money off the tips of their fingers to buy Gillette widgets?
IIRC, Ms. Fritz and subsequent researchers found that the irritation faded well before the name recognition, e.g. short-term pain for long-term gain.
Yet I still won’t buy anything made by Sony after the rootkit 13 years ago.
For that matter, why would anyone sue a baker for declining an order for a custom cake, when they could quietly go to any other business, even though the baker hasn’t made any explicit and derogatory comment about the customer, other than it’s an activity he doesn’t want to participate in, not that they were demanding that his customer change their very nature to please his sense of decency.
That Proctor and Gamble’s ad company thinks masculinity and men are horrible isn’t a big deal. Feminists already do that, and they’re a dime a dozen, yammering away on TV to the point where they all sound like the adults in Peanuts cartoons.
It’s that P&G has gone through the trouble and expense to announce their condemnation, in a vivid graphic format, and paid to distribute it, associating it with a product they expect men to purchase.
The interview with Truett Cathy, where he gave his personal opinion in an interview, then later stood by it, was different than what P&G did. He supported a traditional definition of marriage; they didn’t take out ads condemning homosexuals or homosexual marriage. Eventually he was cornered into admitting he made a mistake, although his business resisted the boycott campaign pretty well.
P&G broadcast their contempt to a global audience, and that audience replied, and aside from people stating they’re no longer customers, that’s the extent. Unlike other groups of “special snowflakes”, I don’t (yet) see anyone engaging in civil disobedience or suing to put P&G out of business over it. I don’t see politicians insisting that P&G be prevented from doing business, or people harassing and intimidating their other customers.
Weren’t they the same ones who had the long-running “Satanic logo” controversy?
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“merely tells them to be “respectful and compassionate” to women.”
Being patronizing isn’t respectful. Moreover, the ad doesn’t care about women and kids at all, but it’s more like “teach men a safe way to feel like a hero”, a little boy’s edition. Talk about frail and snowflaky. It’s not about a man who stands up to a rapist in a dark alley, or the one who tells his boss that his/hers hiring process is biased, or the one who talks against “gender identity” laws as they destroy women’s sports and safe spaces. Those are grownup things. In fact, “progressive” men attack women who have problems with penises in their shower.
Maybe, the ad is just a trigger for people irritated by the petty and sanctimonious ideology. It’s bigger than the ad.
“if the fellow who was told his conduct was “not cool” took issue with his moral interlocuter because he disagreed about what was and was not “cool,” what should happen next?”
The woman whacks him one!
You reckon today’s replies might break yesterday’s record??
And when he files assault charges against the woman, what then?
This brings to mind a recent incident where a man refused to be a bystander to a fight between several teen and preteen girls. It did not end well when he decided to get involved.
Much like biz Real-estate, with product and brand placement, it’s the three “L”s (location, location, location). And the Madison Ave. folks defiitely understand the marketing value of a nice tuchus. (I knew that third photo down would get even you).
As an aside, you can blame Maslow. He was the darling of the advertising industry.
It’s shallow thinking, reminisent of the “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”, 1960s-era Black Power movement.