Gillette

Dear Gillette, I watched your latest advert and I must say, it’s a good start. However, I have concerns that it wasn’t patronizing enough. In order to get through to the majority of men, you need to really talk down to them, treat them as if they were tiny children, incapable of understanding the world around them. Only then will you gain their trust and respect. To this end, I have taken the liberty of writing the outline for your next advert and I am willing to be featured in it (I will send you an invoice along with my PayPal details). Gillette Advert – Men Are Awful (working title) We open on a group of adult men playing some sport or other, Basketsoccer or whatever it is they do. In the corner we see a six-year-old girl looking vulnerable but also brave and defiant.

The first thing that astonishes about Gillette’s effort to alienate an entire customer base in a single two-minute slickly produced virtue signal is the arrogance. The unblinking temerity of a brand believing it’s somehow its duty not merely to make an appeal for commercial inclusion, but rather to instruct millions of people on how to lead their lives. If the ideological vacuum left by the decline of Christianity in the West really is being filled with a rush of competing forces, then surely we can view Gillette’s ad as consumerism’s most blatant effort yet from the pulpit of modernity to claim the hearts and minds (and souls) of the lumpen masses.