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Piers Morgan and men's rights activists upset at 'emasculating' new Gillette advert

The advert has been labelled as 'emasculating' and 'repulsive'

Tuesday 15 January 2019 14:17 GMT

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Piers Morgan on Gillette ad GMB-

Gillette has come under fire from Piers Morgan and men’s rights activists for a new advertisement that challenges toxic masculinity and sexual harassment.

The advert plays on the brand’s 30-year tagline “The Best A Man Can Get”, asking instead: “Is this the best a man can get?” in a bid to tackle sexism.

However, the campaign which features news clips of reporting on the #MeToo movement as well as sexism in boardrooms, and violence between boys, has prompted an angry backlash, in part, by TV contrarian Piers Morgan.

The Good Morning Britain presenter tweeted: “I've used Gillette razors my entire adult life but this absurd virtue-signalling PC guff may drive me away to a company less eager to fuel the current pathetic global assault on masculinity.

“Let boys be damn boys. Let men be damn men.”

Morgan, continued to berate the progressive ad on live TV where he claimed it suggested all men were “evil”.

“What Gillette is now saying, everything we told you to be, men, for the last 30 years is evil,” he fumed.

“Now you’re all evil people, you’re all toxic with your masculinity.”

The 53-year-old’s rant ended with him labelling the ad as “repulsive” and telling Gillette to “shut up”.

“If we did this to women, if I did a commercial tomorrow that showed the worst of women, all hell would break loose…” he said.

“I think it’s repulsive…the implication we all have something to apologise for? Shut up, Gillette.”

The advert has also enraged many men’s rights activists who have interpreted it as anti men.

Among the objections circling on social media are that the video is “emasculating”, “virtue-signalling” and that it implies most men are harassers.

“What a f***ing emasculating, humiliating ad. Talk about being bullied...most offensive thing I've seen in a long time,” one person wrote.

Another added: “Spare me your virtue signalling. I am NOT part of the problem. That ad IS offensive because the underlying message is that ALL men behave like this. WRONG!!”

The comments which insist that not all men are harassers call to mind the viral hashtag #YesAllWomen, which seeks to highlight that sexual harassment is a problem that all women encounter, whether or not all men are responsible for it, and encourages people to realise that sexism is not an isolated problem.

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

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1/12The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Anne Hathaway

The 32-year-old actress said she has already experiences job rejections because of her age. “Now I'm in my early thirties and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part? I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it, it's the way things are,” she told Glamour.

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Helen Mirren

On news that Maggie Gyllenhaal had been turned down for being ‘too old’, aged 37, to play a 55-year-old man’s partner: “It’s f***ing outrageous. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s so annoying. And ’twas ever thus. We all watched James Bond as he got more and more geriatric, and his girlfriends got younger and younger. It’s so annoying.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Gyllenhaal revealed she was told by a Hollywood producer that she was too old, aged 37, to play the love interest of a 55-year-old man. “It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made feel angry, and then it made me laugh,” she said at the time.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep has helped fund an all-female screenwriters group called The Writer’s Lab to encourage more women to pen Hollywood scripts. She previously told Vogue in 2011: “Once women pass childbearing age they could only be seen as grotesque on some level.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Emma Thompson

The actress said she thought Hollywood is “still completely s***” when it comes to treating women equally to men. ““When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world. And when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women, and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

EPA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Elizabeth Banks

Banks said she was driven from acting to directing due to the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood. “"[Industry sexism] drove me to direct for sure. I definitely was feeling that I was unfulfilled and a little bit bored by the things that were coming across my desk. I mean look at Gwyneth Paltrow who has her Oscar [for Shakespeare in Love] and played fifth banana to Iron Man,” she told Deadline.

PA

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Viola Davis

“I had never seen a 49-year-old, dark-skinned woman who is not a size 2 be a sexualised role in TV or film. I'm a sexual woman, but nothing in my career has ever identified me as a sexualised woman. I was the prototype of the ‘mommified’ role,” she told The Hollywood Reporter.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Liv Tyler

The Lord of the Rings actress said she only get cast in roles where she is treated as a “second class citizen” at the age of 38. “When you’re in your teens or twenties, there is an abundance of ingenue parts which are exciting to play. But at [my age], you’re usually the wife or the girlfriend - a sort of second-class citizen. There are more interesting roles for women when they get a bit older,” she told More magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett

The actress famously called out sexism on the red carpet at the 2014 Screen Actors Guild Awards. When a camera operator scanned her up and down, she said: “Do you do this to the guys?” In her Oscar acceptance speech for Blue Jasmine, she reminded the film industry that movies with leading women can still be successful. “And thank you to... those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films, with women at the centre, are niche experiences. They are not -- audiences want to see them and, in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

Gareth Cattermole/Getty

The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Ellen Page

Asked if she had ever encountered sexism in Hollywood, Page told The Guardian: ‘Oh my God, yeah! It's constant! It's how you're treated, it's how you're looked at, how you're expected to look in a photoshoot, it's how you're expected to shut up and not have an opinion, it's how you... If you're a girl and you don't fit the very specific vision of what a girl should be, which is always from a man's perspective, then you're a little bit at a loss.”

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Zoe Saldana

The actress says she refuses roles where she has to play the generic girlfriend, wife or sexy bombshell. "It's very hard being a woman in a man's world, and I recognised it was a man's world even when I was a kid. It's an inequality and injustice that drove me crazy, and which I always spoke out against — and I've always been outspoken,” she told Manhattan magazine.

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The actors fighting against sexism in Hollywood

Charlize Theron

The actress spoke to ELLE about negotiating equal pay for the Snow White and the Huntsman sequel: "This is a good time for us to bring this to a place of fairness, and girls need to know that being a feminist is a good thing. It doesn't mean that you hate men. It means equal rights. If you're doing the same job, you should be compensated and treated in the same way."

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

The New American also attacked the advertisement saying it “reflects many false suppositions”, adding that: “Men are the wilder sex, which accounts for their dangerousness – but also their dynamism.”

Released on Sunday, the film’s YouTube page has already had 252,000 dislikes and 36,000 likes.

While some reactions see the advert as jumping on the bandwagon to sell razors, others have praised the intention of the advert. Responses to comments that the campaign is 'emasculating' have argued that these negative comments only serve to show just how necessary its campaign against toxic masculinity is.

“Any man who thinks the Gillette #MeToo ad is emasculating is proving the point,” one person tweeted.

A recent report from the American Psychological Association (APA) argued that men were being damaged by what has been labelled toxic masculinity.

Developed by several experts between 2005-2018, its guidelines defined traditional masculinity as “a particular constellation of standards . . . including anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence”.

The APA said this was linked to higher rates of suicide, drug abuse and violence.

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