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This Gillette ad takes on toxic masculinity. Of course the right lost its mind.

Lots of men in front of barbecues.
Photo: Gillette/YouTube

Gillette – the razor company whose slogan is “The best a man can get” – released an ad about toxic masculinity.

The ad shows several scenes of men and boys doing sexist and violent things, like pinching a woman’s butt, repeating what a woman said in a corporate meeting, fighting, and bullying another boy.

“Is this the best a man can get?” the powerful ad asks, imploring men to hold each other accountable for better behavior.

Expecting them to not do things that we all generally agree are bad shouldn’t be too controversial. But this is Trump’s America now.

But the ad was calling out a culture that teaches boys and men to do those bad things. And the purveyors of that culture get mad when someone calls them out.

Consider this reaction from TV personality Piers Morgan.

Morgan, who has a long history of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic comments, claimed in his Daily Mail column that he spent $150 on Gillette products the day before he saw the ad.

And not because he likes them, but “because I like Gillette’s brand and what I thought it stood for.” But now he’s going to, presumably, stop spending that money on Gillette products because they told him not to harass women.

He later claimed on Twitter that he spends $1000 a year on Gillette products.

Fox Business host Charles Payne called the ad “virtue signaling,” which is an expression that conservatives now use to dismiss anyone who tries to be a decent person, because they believe that all people are horrible and no one could possibly be against something like, say, sexual violence.

In 2017, Payne was accused of sexually harassing and raping a woman in a lawsuit against Fox. Payne denies the claim.

But maybe that explains why he believes that men actually can’t better, since he himself cannot.

Anti-feminist blogger Matt Walsh also didn’t like the ad, and he tweeted a joke about how ridiculous the ad is since bullying is never sanctioned by adults, and boys never cheer on their friends when they bully someone, which would come as a surprise to a lot of bullies out there.

Some conservatives didn’t get the memo that the problem with the ad is that it assumes that men are doing the behavior shown in it, and instead wrote that Gillette isn’t for real men… because real men actually do all those things shown in the ad?

There are lots of people who understood the point of the ad, though, and asked, if we all really agree that bullying and sexual harassment are wrong, then what’s the problem?

Others commented on what it says when you get mad that someone told you not to bully or harass people.

This person summed up the controversy.

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