Why your (misplaced) outrage is personal and doesn’t really matter to the rest of the world.
So by now many of you will have seen the Gillette commercial that focuses on toxic masculinity. Social media would have you believe that the spot has been “polarizing”, or “divisive”, and your daily stream on Facebook, Twitter, or other media outlets was probably, at least minorly smattered with outrage.
Mark Manson, in his work The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counter-intuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, tackles this subject and is definitely worth the read if you’re at all interested on outrage culture — with the added bonus that if you totally hate it, books are super flammable — so, win/win I guess?
Here’s my TL:DR version of the problem though: That outrage? Meaningless.
It’s as meaningless as people who post videos that go viral about Starbucks cups, and call for boycotts; it was meaningless when people posted videos burning their Kaepernick jerseys, and boycotting the NFL; and it’s equally as meaningless now — If you are ready to throw your Gillette products away or go one step further and boycott Procter and Gamble.
Here’s why:
Nike stock surged 36% when Kaepernick was added to their Just Do It! campaign, adding nearly $6 billion to its market value; so yeah, burn those jerseys if it makes you feel better, but don’t think you’re actually affecting anything other than possibly the ozone layer?
Public relations firm Edelman released a study in October of 2018 that reported that consumers around the world would rather spend money on brands that take a stand on issues over companies that avoid controversy. According to the Edelman study, 64% of consumers buy from or boycott brands based on the socio-political stances that company displays.
They’re dubbing them “belief-driven buyers” and it would appear that brand loyalty is as profitable as ever, assuming you’re doing what it takes to earn that loyalty. In the survey results Edelman found that 67% of respondents actively went out and bought from a brand for the first time due to their “controversial” position on and issue, and 65% indicated they would not buy from a brand because that brand had remained silent on an issue they believed the company had an obligation to address.
Still, if you really feel boycotting Nike works for you, that’s a personal choice I guess, and there are plenty of comparable options out there if you need new shoes — boycotting Gillette, or rather their parent company, might be a little bit harder for you, however:
…Because their portfolio is so diversified, they’re not likely to see any financial impact whatsoever, regardless of how many people throw their razors in the toilet and film it for YouTube — in fact, according to the Edelman study they’re only going to see an improvement due to their stance demonstrated in the “controversial” commercial. I say “controversial”, because honestly it’s not all that controversial to say “hey, don’t be a toxic dick”.
If you feel like this is attacking you, well either you *are* a toxic dick and probably shouldn’t be, or you aren’t and are feeling needlessly persecuted. If I stood on a soapbox outside a grocery store and ranted about what terrible people rapists are, would you be offended? Rape is almost exclusively perpetrated by men (over 90%), but when you hear someone “ranting” about how terrible rape is, you don’t get upset and assume they’re talking about you, do you?
Now, there’s really only two possibilities there: Either you don’t think rape is an issue, so you don’t have an opinion on it, or you’re not a rapist, so you know I’m not talking about you my speech…
So I offer you this as one possible reason for the disconnect here:
Is it, perhaps, the case that while we live in a society that largely, mutually agrees that rape is bad — the same cannot be said for “toxic masculinity”?
While we have successfully, though not successfully enough, established in our society that rape is illegal and immoral, the behaviour and actions that the Gillette commercial calls out are ones that, more than likely many men who have watched it still engage in, think are harmless, or think are meaningless.
I’ve seen several people try to dismiss the commercial as just another ploy from a company that doesn’t really care about social issues, and are only trying to cash in on, what we now know is called, “believe-driven sales”, and perhaps that’s the case; only the marketing firm who created the bit and Gillette/P&G know for sure — but I’d offer a big, “So what? Who cares?” to that nonsense attempt at devaluing the importance of the message.
You probably shouldn’t be surprised to find that there was a very similar campaign against “negro suffrage” as well — and we see similar campaigns to these not only in Canada and the United States, but in many countries all over the world — discrimination and resistance to change certainly aren’t a “western” thing, they’re a human quality on a global scale.
Some 60+ years later, similarly dismissive comments and full-blown media campaigns were launched to oppose allowing women the right to vote, ranging from implying that women’s brains had no room for politics, to accusing women wanting equality of being like crying children, to equating women wanting a vote to the same as household pets wanting a vote.
You can see over a dozen more samples of these kinds of actual adds here.
As Marshall McLuhan once famously said, “The medium is the message” — the prevailing, increasing frequency in which messages like this are appearing is indicative of a shift in the culture. (See, also: #MeToo).
I can’t be the only one who has noticed an awful correlation between people posting support for things like #MeToo, or social justice, or diversity in representation or advertising, and then being immediately accused of “virtual signalling”, or “white knighting”. The implication therein is that the person raising a flag, or showing support for these subjects is doing so for self-promotion, for non-legitimate reasons, or simply to try and get themselves laid.
I’ll offer one theory as to why this seems to happen so frequently in conjunction with posts of this nature and that’s simply this: because that’s the only situation in which the people making the accusations would engage in that kind of behaviour. It’s no accident that people who lie all the time are paranoid about being lied to — I would offer the same suggestion here, that the notion of doing something supportive, selfless, or fundamentally constructive never occurs to people who would never have those kinds of inclinations themselves.
The people dragging their heels, harkening for the good-old days, and lamenting why people insist on trying to change their “perfectly good” culture, are completely oblivious to, well honestly, the entirety of recorded human history. Change happens. Digging your heels in rarely, if ever, works when it comes to progress and social change, and thankfully too.
McLuhan’s message is simple and accurate: simply put, people focus on the content of a message, the bright and shiny object that dangles and distracts, but in doing so they miss the structural, societal changes that occur at the underpinning level, or generationally. Societal norms, values, and methods change with each generation, and some people, perhaps even many people, get too distracted by the content of the message that change is occurring, to notice the actual change all around them.
So history tells us that people are going to dig their heels in and be resistant to change, especially if they view said change as putting them in some sort of position of disadvantage, but it also tells us that eventually these same people end up on the losing and wrong side of history.
