By David Futrelle
A couple of months ago, Gillette infuriated Men’s Rights Activists and other terrible people with an ad challenging toxic masculinity and suggesting that maybe it wasn’t such a good thing for men and boys to go around bullying and harassing people.
Now Gillette has a new ad out that seems designed to enrage, well, pretty much the same exact mob that came after them then. The ad, promoting Gillette Venus razors for women, features Internet-famous model Anna O’Brian — a.k.a Glitter and Lasers — posing triumphantly on a beach in a two-piece swimsuit, arms raised to the sky.
This isn’t the first time a Gillette ad has featured a woman in a swimsuit. But this particular woman happens to be fat, and so a vast horde of angry men (mostly) have gone online to attack Gillette for “glorifying obesity” and surrendering to the cuck soyboy hairy feminist woke SJW overlords. These health-conscious gentlemen and ladies have also mocked the model herself, calling her a predictable assortment of names, suggesting that she smells, and predicting that she’ll die soon.
On Twitter, quite a few decided to play the role of a “concerned” doctor:
Never mind that fat does not automatically mean unhealthy. Never mind that thin people can be unhealthy. Never mind that diets can be so unhealthy as to be dangerous. And never mind that fat shaming is not only not an effective way to inspire people to lose weight — and often causes its targets to gain weight — it’s also a threat to their health, both mental and physical.
Of course, quite a few of the commenters didn’t even bother to pretend that their complaints had anything to do with health. Most were not terribly original with their insults.
Other commenters pulled out all their favorite right-wing buzzwords for the occasion:
Some thought that this new ad, like Gillette’s “toxic masculity” ad in January, was really just a sneaky way to attack … men.
Over on the always despicable Breitbart, which noted that in addition to Anna, Gillette has also used trans activist Jazz Jennings in recent ads, the commenters were a bit blunter.
Well, I guess Gillette has started another “conversation,” as they like to say whenever they do something they know will provoke an angry mob. So sad that all it takes is a picture of a fat woman unapologetically wearing a bikini to unleash a wave of hate.
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I like how that one guy specifically mentioned feminists with armpit hair, as if they’re the ones trying to sell razors to women
Also while I’m glad to see more bodies like mine being unapologetic, I can’t help but feel like gilette is using obese women to poke a hornet’s nest just for attention. It’s not gonna be helpful in humanizing us.
If a woman in a swimsuit who isn’t a size zero in an ad upsets them wait until they hear that Casimir Pulaski, Polish hero of the US Revolutionary War, was apparently not a cis man. I’m sure they’ll rant and rave about it being part of the plot to destroy masculinity.
I wish these douche bags would stop pretending their fatphobic attitudes have anything to do with health. They’re mad because Gillette hired a model who doesn’t fit their standard of beauty or get their dicks hard.
@phillyguy:
I … I …
Remarkable.
A giant megacorp spends on an advertisement in order to sell stuff, turn a profit, and make investors and shareholders filthy rich, and this is your response? Do you even know the meaning of the word “communist”?
Meanwhile, you’re playing right into the hands of the very corporation you hate. Obviously they’re saving on advertising dollars by making ads that will trigger right-wing snowflakes so that you lot will froth and foam all over the Internet generating tons of link traffic and extra publicity for their ad. So they get to spend on a small ad campaign but get the attention of a large ad campaign, saving a buttload of money and turning the lot of you into unpaid volunteer publicists for their brand. “There’s one born every minute”, according to the saying, and the right wing especially seems to be full of gullible easily-manipulated people.
Just out of curiosity, I looked up Gilette’s stock. I know very little about stocks logistically (haven’t thought about it much since an 8th grade social studies project), but fortunately Google is kind to people who don’t follow economics particularly well and has a variety of charts. The stock is going up and has been steadily for a while, with a few dips that look fairly normal for comparable stocks that soon go away again.
Not that Gilette suffering financially would make these guys right, but I do like fact checking these things periodically, just because they tend to assume they’re right about such numbers and proceed as though they were. That’s why we’re still hearing that the yucky girl Ghostbusters failed even though it did perfectly well for a goofy summer action movie.
@Surplus to Requirements
In a word, no. In the same way that most people in the US don’t seem to know what “socialism” means, beyond “I heard it was bad!” Hence why they’re willing to agree that all sorts of socialist ideas sound great, so long as they don’t have to hear the word.
I think in the US it’s come full circle. The right has called the slightest bit of regulation and any government program that helps people “socialism” for so many years that young people have positive associations with the word. For people too young to remember the cold war, red scares mean absolutely nothing. By hyping up the fear of “socialism” long after the USSR broke up, the right has inadvertently made socialism popular.
After the original toxic masculinity ad, one asshat threw his gillette razor down his toilet, took a picture of it, and posted it.
I really can’t wait to see what they’ll do to protest this time. Throwing themselves down the toilet would be a nice start.
@tim –
Thanks for sharing the article about Casimir Pulaski. I never knew this, and between Pulaski County smack in the middle and Fort Pulaski at the mouth of the Savannah River I know a big swath of mid/south Georgia that won’t be happy about it.
those user names, oh my
“Autism Caliphate”
careful there, lad – you’ll cut yourself on all that edge
@fiercebadrabbit
On the topic of movies – you mean like the bad horrible terrible brie larson-lead captain marvel that they were crying about a few months back making an utterly surprising billion of dollars? Even though nobody in their right mind would want to see such feminist trash with its sjw-agenda! And clearly those super rational and not emotion-controlled men are the majority, so they constitute people in their “(alt)-right mind” and that’s why it hasn’t made any mon…. Wait. Oh.
They aren’t the majority? Most others people are actually somewhat decent at the very least?
Nah, can’t be right.
That being said – I like how one of the tweeters is so, so fucking close to the truth. “men – change, you’re a bad person, women – obese? You’re perfect”.
It’s almost like your body weight has nothing to so with being a good, worthy person with inherent value and instead it’s your personality that counts.
And it’s not like the last Gillette ad didn’t show men being kind. But of course they see it as behind “you’re bad”, because it’s their own behaviour that is being shown as bad.
Would a little bit of introspection be too much to ask?
@Zaunfink
I had similar thoughts on reading the Breitbart comment from “Chip”:
We know, Chip… that’s why we say toxic masculinity? Did you not notice this use of modifying adjective as you were typing?
You wanna bet Bezzi stole his line from That Mitchell and Webb Look?
Gah.
Intentional weight loss is impossible, not matter what you do.
Your body doesn’t know and doesn’t care that your calorie deficit is intentional and will do whatever it can to reduce energy expenditure.
And it’s known that there is a weight homoeostasis, and that each individual has a weight set point. And we have about as much control over this weight set point as our height. The weight we end up, barring disordered eating or metabolic diseases, is mostly genetic with a bit of environment thrown in.
The reason public policy is the way it is? The BILLION dollar weight loss industry. They do their damnedest to suppress the actual scientific findings in order to sell their products.
And they are killing people in the process.
Well I mean, depending on if a whale is someone who is obese, it’s 32% of the population. If a whale is someone who is merely overweight, the figure balloons (hah!) to 64%. Thems not bad demographic numbers to be targeting!
If we assume that soy boys do not overlap with whales, that just adds on even more, a full 22% of US men qualifying as soy boys. (source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/225074/conservative-lead-ideology-down-single-digits.aspx)
There may be some overlap between whales and soy boys, of course, but still, we are talking in the 100 – 200 million range for number of people in the core demographic. I’d take it, were I Gillette. 🙂
@ mish
Adjectives! How do they work?
So sweet of these fascists to be concerned about a woman’s health.
I’m sure they were just as concerned when the California wildfires were raging a few months ago and my lungs were suffering. No, they didn’t rage about my health on Twitter. But they sent me positive vibes and vitamin C, and texted me encouragement. Ha, ha.
@KnittingCatLady That’s so true, all this stuff is incredibly profitable. These guys tweeting about the Gilette ad, while believing they are so edgy and fighting against the times, think exactly how they have been told to think – but with perhaps a more extreme lack of basic human politeness.
I forget which huge corporation it is but one conglomerate owns both a major ice cream brand and Slimfast. “Enjoy food your evolution has defined as irresistible and then starve yourself in shame!!” It’s all so depressingly cynical.
Slightly off-topic, there is a group of street performers called “Ladies against Women”. They appear to be mostly men in drag, a la Monty Python’s “women” in their sketches. They satirize the anti-feminist rhetoric by taking it to its logical conclusion, organizing absurd “protests” “demanding” the repeal of votes for women, etc.
In Strang’s “High Weirdness by Mail” they are mentioned as a satirical group, and are now found on the internet. Like Stang’s own “church of the subgenius”, they are a joke – but they are not ONLY a joke. Their serious point is pro-feminist, of course.
Incidentally, if you don’t know, the whole “women’s razors” thing is a scam. Women can use “men’s” razors just like they can use “men’s” pens or legal pads. “Women’s” razors wre regular razors, at three times the price of the already ridiculously overpriced men”/ razors.
AWWWWW!
Human Body!
Bhwaaa!
It is sad that there are so many people with nothing better to do than be enraged about a woman being fat in public.
@kat
The wildfires have already started up again. It’s going to be a hazy summer.
This is a great move by Gillette. Guess what guys, surprisingly they aren’t selling women’s razors to you paragons of masculinity. They are selling women’s razors to, gasp, women. Women, who because of social pressure like the kind you put out, are conditioned to think anything over a size 2 is monstrously overweight, so this would appeal to them even more. You caused this add to be extra effective, and your screaming about it means even more people will see it. Good job helping them out guys…
Pretty sure that’s a great big yes.