If you are one of the few who have not have seen it yet, here is the new Gillette advertisement that has so many people p*ssed off, part of a new campaign they call “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be.” It’s just under two minutes long and before I go any further I’ll mention that this is not a sponsored post, not any work that we’re doing with Gillette or getting paid to promote.
Actually, I think that I may have typed that wrong. What I meant to say is that this is the ad that has so many assh*les p*ssed off. Within 48 hours of its release, the ad had 12,119,434 views on You-Tube. There were 688,000 downvotes to 293,000 thumbs ups and just over 196,000 comments. As of Saturday, the thumbs down were still outpacing the thumbs up by almost two-to-one.
After reading approximately the first 50-60 calls for boycott and complaints about leftist attacks on men and masculinity I stopped reading.
Apparently talk about bullying, sexual harassment and assault, a call for men to try and teach the next generation to be respectful and better than we are, to stand up and hold accountable those that exhibit toxic behavior is somehow an insult to our gender. The always dickish Piers Morgan seems to think that the ad is asking him to cut his off.
Comments that kind of seem to prove why these discussions are necessary.
Maybe I’m not the best person to be talking about this. I’m not known for being overly macho, a probably redundant statement given that I’m currently typing on my dad blog instead of being outside chopping wood or changing the oil in my truck or something. I saw Aquaman this past weekend and thought the love story between his parents was one of the better parts of the movie.
I’ve been called a “cuck” and “soyboy” on twitter, words that I needed to look up but aren’t exactly complimentary. I work in a female-dominated field, have daughters, and this weekend I am one of the chaperones for a bunch of roller skating Girl Scout Brownies instead of watching the AFC Championship game.
Maybe those are some of the very reasons that I should be commenting. I don’t know.
I know that when I talked to my nineteen-year-old daughter last week and asked her how things are going, the two things that she mentioned were that her feet hurt after a twelve-hour shift and that a creepy old man grabbed her “whole ass cheek” while she was working. That isn’t something that I made up to make a point in a blog post, it was something consequential enough that when asked about notable events since we last talked it was one of the first things mentioned. It wasn’t a compliment or “men being men”, it was assault by somebody that might have been swallowing his dentures if I had been there and seen it.
Listen, it wouldn’t take an army of investigators to find women in my past that would say I didn’t treat them the way that I should have. I admit that, I own it, and I’m ashamed by some of it. I’m proud to say that I’m better now and continually try to get better. That’s not because I have daughters, it’s because I’m trying to be a decent human being and not an assh*le. I’m pretty sure that is all that Gillette is challenging us to do and I applaud them for it.
If that makes me a traitor to my gender I’ll take solace in knowing that there is at least one other guy out there that agrees with me, one that I’m not inclined to argue with.
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Originally Published on Thirsty Daddy
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Photo: screenshot from ad