There has been much hubbub over the Gillette commercial in the past week.
Everything from bloggers, to news outlets, and anyone with hands, a keyboard, and an internet connection have been throwing their piece into the fray. Depending on whom you read, it’s either an inspirational commercial or an outright attack on manhood.
I think, like most polarizing current events, the answer lays somewhere in-between. I don’t mind the commercial itself, other than being a bit pretentious. With a few qualifications, Gillette speaks a good message. What I find interesting with the commercial is that it’s geared at normal, everyday fathers. It tells them to be better. An admirable encouragement, even if mingled with an accusatory tone.
The use of the nebulous “toxic masculinity” is troublesome, mainly stemming from the fact it’s never been properly defined and every group has their own definition of the term that ranges from the helpful to the patently absurd. It’s difficult to have fruitful discussion on a large scale when dealing with a hotly debated term with no generally agreed upon definition.
And the solutions to “toxic masculinity” are just as diverse, which prove to be unhelpful: from encouraging positive masculinity to complete emasculation of all that it means to be a man.
Once again, other than an unhelpful example of kids roughhousing in a normal way, the examples were not contestable. Men should step in when they see a kid being beat up on the street. We should stop our friend who makes unwanted sexual advances toward a woman. Those should be common sense.
The problem with the ad isn’t the content or the message, the problem is its intended audience. The Gillette message is aimed at men who are already active in their children’s lives. But it’s not them the ad should be aimed toward. It’s the absentee fathers.
It was the right message – at least, not the wrong message, just aimed at the wrong audience. Forty-three percent of male children grow up in fatherless homes. Nearly 80 percent of public school teachers are female. These boys spend most their waking hours surrounded solely by female authorities, whether parents or teachers.
So, from where are these impressionable boys getting their idea of masculinity? The same channels they see the current advertisement on. Entertainment media has been preaching the message of sex without consequence or responsibility for decades. Examples abound in music, television, video games, and movies of “protagonists” treating women as nothing more than conquests or prizes to be won and soon discarded.
Out of the same channel comes treat women with dignity and sex without consequence or morality. You can’t bemoan when men treat women as objects yet venerate the founder of Playboy. To quote Saint James, “Brothers, these things ought not to be so.”
The only male influences in their lives are the ones they find on the television, in music, or at the movies. Those are the same ones preaching cheap sex, stripping sex from morality, and turning women into objects.
A naked body is always a channel or click away.
If the media preaches those two concurrent message, which does a boy listen to? A commercial? Or their favorite music artists surrounded by scantily clad women throwing themselves at him while he drowns in cash?
Thankfully, the media seems to be slowly waking up to the fact their message they preached for the past five decades is toxic.
If women are portrayed as objects and sex has become so cheap and separated from commitment, marriage, morality, and responsibility, why are we surprised when boys who grow up fed on nothing but that become what they see?
In his great essay, “Men Without Chests,” C.S. Lewis makes the same observation much more eloquently:
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
This raises a great conversation starter for those of us who are Christians. We must ask why this is bad. And as Christians, we want to get to the root issue of why it is wrong, then go from there. We can say it is wrong because women have value and sex is still a moral act. They have value because as men, they also are created in the image of God and sex is sacred because it is the union of two in the covenant of marriage.
People can use this ad as a helpful springboard to start conversations as to why the media has portrayed a version of masculinity that is toxic for so long, and given women nothing but sensuous roles to fill in music, films, and TV. People can also use it to encourage fathers to be active in their children’s lives. Until the media stops presenting toxic versions of masculinity as virtues, and women as nothing but sexual objects, the burden is laid on the good men to go beyond their normal duties of fatherhood and donate their time to boys and girls centers, after school programs, and becoming mentors for those without fathers.
Men, we can always be better. And we can do this by being fathers to the fatherless.
Check out the original Gillette ad here!