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First they burned their Nike trainers . Now conservatives are taking their rage out on razors.
Gillette has been bombarded with footage of angry men throwing away their shavers in response to an advert warning about toxic masculinity .
The campaign, which references the #MeToo movement, workplace sexism and male violence, has been praised by many for its message.
But it has also triggered indignation among some men, who have accused Gillette of “virtue-signalling” and threatened to boycott its products.
In scenes reminiscent of the backlash to a Nike advert featuring Colin Kaepernick last year, angry Gillette customers have been filming themselves throwing away razors and shaving foam in protest.
“We don’t need politics with our shave gel,” tweeted Art Tavana alongside a video of him dropping a bottle of shaving gel into the bin.
Others posted pictures on social media of receipts for razors made by Gillette’s rivals.
“Out with the old, in with the new,” wrote one man.
Another prompted ridicule by tweeting a picture of his razor apparently discarded in the toilet.
“My man here ruining his plumbing because a commercial suggested that maybe he should be nicer,” mocked one Twitter user.
Comedian Tony Posnanski added: “You paid for that razor. You now have to put your hand in the toilet to throw that out. You literally owned yourself.”
Television contrarian Piers Morgan is among the men who have threatened to boycott Gillette over the advert, which he denounced as “virtue-signalling PC guff which may drive me away to a company less eager to fuel the current pathetic global assault on masculinity”.
The campaign plays on the brand’s 30-year tagline, “The best a man can get”, which it replaces with: “The best men can be”. It contrasts footage depicting sexual harassment and violence with images of men intervening to prevent inappriopriate behaviour and fights between boys.
The actors fighting against sexism in HollywoodShow all 12 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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."
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The advert quickly went viral and has been viewed more than 10.7 million times on YouTube in three days.
Bernice King, daughter of civil rights champion Martin Luther King, is among those who have praised the campaign’s message.
“This commercial isn’t anti-male. It’s pro-humanity,” she wrote. “And it demonstrates that character can step up to change conditions.”
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