Gillette Ad | Gender Quotas | School Freedom | March for Life - EP4 - The Truth of It

Good morning, I'm Martyn Iles and this is the first episode of 2019 of Truth of It. Welcome back. This is a weekly newscast about politics and current events and you might be wondering why cut out the fake news and give you what it says on the tin, which is the

truth

. Today is Thursday, January 24, 2019 and we start with the big news of the week: Gillette, the leading manufacturer of men's razors, caused last week's big controversy by releasing an ad on January 13. An ad that begins with the words: bullying, toxic masculinity, the Me Too movement and then poses the question: "is this the best a man can be?" Before you show men engaging in a whole range of bad behavior: sexist behavior, misogynistic behavior, mansplaining and that sort of thing towards women, at its heart is the refrain that boys will be boys, boys will be boys.

But it is interesting and about halfway through the ad declares, says the narrator, but something changed and you could well say what changed that turned the men of a tribe of misogynists into something different and the change is accompanied by newsreel images about MeToo. Movement, for those of you who remember that, that emerged from Hollywood against so-called toxic masculinity as if it were that defining moment when men of the past began to have an epiphany, but the announcement is very nuanced. He says that some and I quote, "Some men have begun to do the right thing." he says, "but something is not enough because the boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow." Now, there is a major sexist element, a major

gender

-based element in this ad, but there is also a race-based element.

This is worth noting: of the 43 examples of bad behavior depicted, 42 of them are from white men and only one is from a black man. Turn it around and look at the seven examples of good behavior that the ad includes because of course there have to be many fewer because only some men have started to do the right thing because thanks to MeToo Of the seven examples of good behavior five are by black men and only two They belong to white men. So far on YouTube, that ad has gotten 700,000 likes and 1.2 million dislikes. It's caused a lot of division, a lot of controversy, but here's the difficulty of dealing with this, and as I was thinking about it, I was also wondering about this.

A lot of people will see that ad and say, well, is there really anything that important? What is wrong with saying that it is bad for men to behave badly towards women? What's wrong with saying that today's boys will be tomorrow's men? At least those point to a reasonable right and you know what? There is some

truth

in that. Absolutely. I'm not going to begrudge that point, but there are many others, since those numbers indicate who is seeing that ad and knows that something is not right. They know this well, apart from the fact that it is a lie that some men have started to do the right thing since MeToo.

That's just not right and it's a very sad and low view of men in the world right now, but other than that, people know that something is happening here and also that's right, it's absolutely right because let's deconstruct what really is said and from what ideological basis does this announcement really come? Well, you know, let's look at the company itself. Do they put their money where they say? Do they live...lead by example if you want? Are they really trying to protect women from the evils of sexualization? And bad behavior from men. Are they really trying to help men be better and become the men of tomorrow for the boys of today?

Well, you know this company, it's the same company that widely advertised their brand by putting models in extremely tight leather suits at motorsports events and literally writing Gillette on their butts, so women's bodies, their butts on In particular, they are used as advertising billboards. For the Gillette brand, these are promotional girls at motorsports events frequented by men. Now I'm a white man who was completely unaffected by the MeToo movement and I'm here to say that that is absolutely categorically incorrect and I raised that issue because I want to say what's really going on here in Gillette's brain box. marketing team.

You know, it's the same thing we saw last week at the American Psychological Association, it's what the American Psychological Association said that traditional masculinity is harmful; they made that statement and some of the things defined are traditionally masculine because of that. Partnership is things like competitiveness, risk-taking, stoicism. So they are attacking what it means to be a man, they are attacking masculinity in general. **Turn on the audio**