Last week, Gillette was met with praise and backlash when they released a new ad focusing on improving negative behaviours for men.
While the ad is in no means saying men are bad, it’s noting some of the ways men have acted are wrong and these behaviours should be addressed.
While the #MeToo movement sparked outrage about this topic, it had been happening for a long time beforehand.
The ad tackles the concept of learned behaviours, and touches on the fact that children tend to learn what’s okay to do by watching their parents. Specifically, it focuses on boys learning from their fathers how to act.
Gillette threw a lot of topics into the commercial, and they all fit together greatly to show there’s clearly something wrong with the way society addresses these issues.
‘Boys will be boys’ really stood out to me, which is included in the commercial when two young boys are fighting, and this phrase seems to follow men throughout their lives.
Somehow, violence is excused because the social construction we have of men means they should be violent. The argument could be made that some men assume violence is the answer, because no ones attempted to correct their behaviour.
One of the topics the commercial addressed was the idea of toxic masculinity, which a lot of people assume means that all men are inherently bad. It more so means that the social construction of masculinity has bad traits, which shows that men can only be masculine if these negative stereotypes, and this has been accepted as the normal way for men to be.
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For me, toxic masculinity encourages these negative stereotypes and allows bad men to get away with it because it’s excused for one reason or another.
What really stood out to me in the commercial was when they encouraged men to hold others accountable, and to call them out on their toxic behaviour, not to treat women like objects, and to let others know it’s not alright either, not to encourage violence, but to stop it and explain that a situation can be handled differently.
This can change the way these topics are handled, and can change future generations for the better.
Similar to the Nike campaign with Colin Kaepernick, Gillette’s advertisement is meant to sell products and to get people talking about them. They chose a current social problem to do it, and I honestly think they did an amazing job.
Some gender roles are negative, and we need to address them. We can stop these negative, learned behaviours at the source and have real conversations about the type of men we want in the world.
Instead of focusing on the fact that this conversation was ignited by a company trying to sell a product, I think we should focus on the fact that people weren’t willing to discuss it before.
