I will never understand why some people choose to be massive POSs. And then whine when the consequences of being a POS hit.
I found the ad moving in part because it was all everyday stuff, relatively low-stakes, yet the guys standing up seemed, you know, heroic and all that good stuff. Just goes to show how low the bar is, I guess.
I expect some people are throwing around the term “white knight”, and it got me to thinking – what the hell is wrong with being a white knight, anyhow? Especially if the alternative is being a POS.
And I’m sure another objection is that women can be POSs too – sure we can. Sounds like another ad to me.
I appreciate that this company which has many products aimed at men, and has messages that hit men on the cusp of adulthood, is taking responsibility for those messages. I see this as an opening salvo in a longer campaign; I look forward to seeing what more they do with this.
As a creative professional, I think this ad is a hot mess. It introduces a bunch of different ideas and it’s not clear how many of them relate to their own product, their advertising, and them taking responsibility for those messages. Was there some point in time when Gilette advocated for dads to watch their male children beat the tar out of each other? Did Gilette underwrite The Honeymooners? The specific messaging that Gilette has been responsible for is about masculinity as it relates to women - the ads where the man’s face is baby smooth and now a lady is all hot for him. Yet, I don’t see much referencing this at all.
I know how corporations work and I get that they couldn’t get the sign off on this, but why are there no references to their own ad campaigns of the past? Certainly there must be a few that are easy pickings for them to point to as part of their own responsibility for toxic masculinity?
There are so many different style ideas happening here - the viral videos, the fake sit coms, the fake stock videos, the more realistic videos - visually I find it so confusing.
I’m eager to see where they go with this. I’m glad they are taking part of this conversation. This particular ad doesn’t thrill me for many reasons but if they keep going with it, and if other products aimed toward men join in, then I’m excited. I particularly liked how they referenced shaving as a right of passage to adulthood and that tie into the responsibility corporations play in shaping our image of manhood.
As I’ve been saying for almost my entire life, all you have to do is say “not cool” when someone starts punching down. It doesn’t fix the problem, but it does break up the momentum that doing nothing would simply add to.
Yes, I’ve lost friends by saying it’s “not cool” to punch down, and no, I don’t regret it at all. But hopefully it made them think about their actions and whether or not everybody agrees with them. If I alone say “not cool” they might think I’m being overly sensitive, but the more people do it, the more they realize they’re not just saying what everybody’s thinking.
It’s not white knighting or grandstanding either. It’s who I am. I don’t like people being assholes to people who have no power, and it turns me off to the extent that I don’t want to associate with anyone who is like that.
I would argue no. A white knight is a Good Person™ and a Nice Guy™* when looking out for his public image (e.g., trying to impress a girl) but turns back into a raging asshole when he’s with his buddies and nobody else is around. I would rather have someone be an asshole and own it rather than pretend to be minimally decent just to work an angle.
See: neckbeard, or someone whose neck boycotted Gillette before it was cool
Because you don’t get a cookie for being minimally decent. You don’t even get the crumbs for just pretending either.
Pretending to be decent is like the so called moderate Republicans. In the 90s, every Republican I met was a moderate Republican, even though statistically this simply could not be. It turned out that they were just claiming to be moderates to take the heat off them and put it into Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms or whomever, when really they agreed with those people. Now that trump is in power, their public selves match their private selves. They didn’t change at all, they just hid who they were around certain people.
As the hot dog vendor told the Dalai Lama when the Dalai Lama asked for “one with everything” and handed him a $20 etc etc: “change must come from within”
Absolutely. It’s an important thing to say. And its hard. My professional society is doing bystander intervention training at a conference this summer. It’s really necessary to practice that skill!
What comic-book universe did you grow up in? And what age? I mean…a lot of social stuff was included in the late 1960s…both Marvel and DC. Even “Wonder Woman” of the Golden Age was more than the things you listed.
I grew up reading Silver Age, and later, some Golden Age comics. I don’t think Susan Storm Richards was motivation (she snuck onto the damned rocket!) or just to be admired. For Spider-Man, his motivation was guilt brought on by the murder (which he may or mayn’t have prevented) of this Uncle Ben.
But the 1990s…dude, I gave up, for women with bodies like that…I mean, did Howard Hughes design those costumes, because how they don’t get black eyes every day of the week is beyohd me!
I grew up in the 90s, and was only peripherally exposed to comic books (I’ve always preferred full-text stories).
And, yes, I know that I’m oversimplifying the genre, that there’s a lot in it beyond what I’ve described. But what I have read almost always turns out to be:
a male superhero as the lead,
with either no women, or women relegated to the love interest, sidekick, or damsel in distress,
those women are proportioned, dressed, and posed to promote maximum objectification, and
the overarching problem is solved by beating someone into submission (and the plot is generally deciding who needs to be beaten, how to find them, and what tactic for “beating into submission” will work given the hero’s and villain’s respective abilities).
I know that in no era was this the entirety of the comic books being published; I have read, and very much enjoyed, Watchmen and Sandman, which have very little of the above.
But even as recently as 2016, I used to go by a comic shop on a weekly basis, and what I remember seeing were covers, posters, and statues with women in costumes that can best be described as “various states of undress,” and, everywhere, images of costumed individuals smacking each other around.
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that comics were entirely socially regressive in content, and I apologize if that’s the message that I conveyed; I simply was trying to point out that the culture of toxic masculinity is just as pervasive there as in other media, if not more so.
Sounds about right. I read conics in the 70s, was forcibly stopped from reading them when I was about 10 by my parents (they thought it would impact my reading level, even though I was also reading novels), and having been dipping in and out of them since the 90s.
I think @Lucy_Gothro is right – they used to be more feminist. Compare 70s Scarlet Witch to 90s Vampirella and it’s pretty clear.
Oh yah, it’s ever’whar; read some Joseph Campbell and his take on the Hero myths. Or read the myths yourself, the ancient Greco-Roman ones, and make your own take, lol!
But the original early 1960s Scarlet Witch…eeeeeeeeeew, she revolted me when I was growing up! Like GIRL YOU HAVE ALL THIS POWER! Same with Marvel Girl. But then…Roy Thomas came into Marvel and things began to change…coinciding with the evolution of 20th century feminism (it’s always been around, but submerged; had Mary Wollenstonecraft lived, things would be waaay different, I’m convinced). And Roy helped, but getting more female staff besides Flo Steinberg probably helped.
However, at DC, Wonder Woman lost her powers (pretty much) in the early 1970s; Black Canary was on the ascendancy, and the ladies of the Legion of Super-Heroes were given some power, particularly Saturn Girl (now I really liked her); Supergirl also seemed to be on the rise, as well.
Yeah, I read a LOT of comics from age five to about age twenty-four, lol.
Could it be like Nancy Drew? The original stories were very feminist, and then they were re-written to adhere to a more 1950s/60s sexist mindset. Maybe early comics were more wide ranging, but then they became more sexist for at least a few decades, which we’re only now getting past? (I don’t know: I can’t read comics, they confuse my brain.)
I hear that; I have trouble picking up exactly what is supposed to be happening in the images, and how they relate to the story, especially when the artist puts a lot of detail into the panel. I just can’t figure out the conventions which should tell me exactly what I’m supposed to be looking at, and what details I should be taking in.
I think so. I know people love to hate on the comics code, but one of the things it enforced that I liked was that women (and men) had to be at least kinda sorta realistic. You can usually spot the bra cup line on women’s superhero costumes up to the 70s, and the men, while muscly, aren’t more beefy than a top-tier bodybuilder.
Then the code was abolished.
The 90s – apologies to those who have fond memories of that era’s comics – to me both the women and men look like they’re constructed as balloon sculptures.
LOL, it really kinda started in the 1980s; look up George Perez, for one example that worked for both DC and Marvel. What I found funny was that in interview with - I think Perez, not sure, - in the Comics Journal, he said that one artist, Carmine Infantino (a Sliver-Ager, look him up - he did some good stuff with “The Flash” and if you watch it on TV, you should try to at least read the Silver-Age stuff, it’s not as “busy”), drew womens’ breasts as eyes on a face; and eyes on a face are supposed to be one eye-length (or is it width?) apart.