I've always found it funny when conservatives make fun of liberal "snowflakes" the get offended by everything only to burn their Nikes when the company ran an ad with a guy they don't like. Another example of this hypocrisy happened just this week.
In case you've been living under a rock for the last week or so, the razor company Gillette, also the namesake of the New England Patriot's stadium released an ad that has divided the internet just as effectively as any blue and black dress...or white and gold...whatever. How were they able to accomplish this? All it took was a simple advertisement.
The ad played on Gillette's famous slogan, "The Best A Man Can Get." It went on to show casually sexist men catcalling, stalking, and silencing women, an experience that I'm sure any woman can relate to. The men in the commercial responded with the age-old excuse of "boys will be boys" and dismissed these events. However, as the ad progresses other men begin to intervene on the women's behalf and basically saying that this crap ain't right, which it's not. The ad ends with a text saying "It's only by challenging ourselves to do more than we can get closer to our best."
Personally, I thought nothing of the ad. To me, all it was saying was "please don't be a dick to women. Women are people too." I found these positions to be pretty reasonable, and the advertisement left my mind completely...until the next morning. Remember how I thought the ad was reasonable? Yeah, not everyone else thought so.
Social media was inundated by those who hated the ad, and many were calling a boycott of Gillette in response to it. This, of course, started another one of those respectful, thoughtful and nuanced conversations that the internet is known for...I'm kidding.
It was a bloodbath with accusations of sexism and toxic masculinity and toxic femininity and Nazism and communism and so many other political buzzwords that even Fox News would've had an aneurysm.
As I read as many comments and tweets as I could (as much as I could stomach anyway), I found that the vast majority of negative responses boiled down to two basic complaints. The first of these is the accusation that the ad paints all men as rapists and woman-haters, demonizing an entire gender. However, if you actually watched the ad for more than thirty seconds, you would see that this is bullshit.
The ad doesn't paint all men as trash, just the ones that are acting like trash.
In fact, there are even men in the ad holding other men accountable for their actions. In my opinion, if you think that the ad is treating men like trash for no good reason, then you probably see yourself in those trash men, which probably means that you are, in fact, also trash.
The other large complaint was that they saw it as liberal propaganda, with a lot of comments reading something along the lines of "keep politics out of my razors!" This of course, is only said when you disagree with the politics being pushed. If Gillette had run an ad with a more conservative angle, the same people bashing it now would have had no issue. Whenever someone says "I don't want politics in my [insert thing here]," they really mean "I don't want politics that I disagree with in my [insert thing here]." This goes for both sides of the political spectrum.
All in all, Gillette made a reasonable ad that promoted the idea that maybe we shouldn't treat women like objects that are meant to bring us pleasure. Unfortunately, Gillette underestimated the unholy amounts of sexism and right-wing hatred on the internet, which is only allowed to escape 4chan when something is about to utterly destroy the fabric of society....like a football player not standing for a song and other such world ending events. I find the ad pretty tame and harmless, but always remember that in the era of social media, the standards for outrage are extremely low, and only getting lower.