What the New Gillette Ad Misses About Boys

Recently a flap ensued when Gillette released a new ad campaign pegged to the #MeToo movement, deriding “boys will be boys” excuses for male misbehavior. The ad played off the company’s decades-old slogan, “The best a man can get,” to offer a new challenge: “The best a man can be.” In particular, the ad campaign argues that what older men model for younger ones matters: “The boys watching today will be the men of tomorrow.”

Perhaps Proctor and Gamble, the parent company, expected the campaign would be received with the same praise earned by its “Like a Girl” ads—but things are different when it comes to boys and men. Though the new ad went viral, seen by 2 million viewers in its first 48 hours, it also generated strident opposition. Calls arose for a boycott of Gillette products, led by voices like that of Piers Morgan, the talk show host, who tweeted: “Let boys be damn boys. Let men be damn men.”

Gillette has not backed down, however. Savvy marketers behind the campaign anticipated backlash and obviously calculated that the attention is worth the fallout. Seizing the high road, Gillette has also partnered with the Building A Better Man project, which seeks to reduce male violence, and The Boys and Girls Club of America.

Neither the company’s aspiration nor the backlash should be surprising at this moment of fraught gender tensions. A #MeToo consciousness has seeped into the culture and both men and boys are feeling newly self-conscious, particularly after Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. For many, the behavior of the high school boys described by Christine Blasey Ford was painfully recognizable.

But the conversation about the ad, and maybe the ad itself, seem to miss the most important point. Where, we should be asking, does male misbehavior come from? How are so many boys transformed from innocent, empathically attuned humans to become perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault in later years? One research finding many are still stunned by is that, were they not afraid of getting in trouble, 40% of college males say they might force a girl to have sex.

Under such circumstances, asking men and boys to be “the best they can be” is not an unreasonable demand. As Canadian activist and scholar Michael Kaufman explains in his new book: “The time has come.” And the logic of being one’s best self is not foreign to many boys and men. So much of male conditioning, in fact, involves goal-oriented training and performance. Both my sons spent hours and hours practicing shots on goal, running, and lifting. I spent at least as many hours on sidelines and driving to god-forsaken field locations.

But the concept of “toxic masculinity,” underlying the Gillette ad and permeating almost all discussions of male misconduct today, can confound harmful behavior with male nature and direct attention away from the real source of the problem. After all, what researchers long ago realized about moral behavior, in the words of University of Missouri-St. Louis psychologist Marvin W. Berkowitz, is that “The primary influence on a child’s character development is how people treat the child.”

In the same week the Gillette ad was released, the American Psychological Association received fresh attention for new Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Men and Boys. The APA has issued guidelines for a variety of specific populations – gay/lesbian/bisexuals, racial and ethnic minorities, older adults, etc. – in order to influence not just therapeutic practice but also public policy. In explaining why boys and men are now a focus, the authors wrote that men and boys “demonstrate disproportionate rates of receiving harsh discipline (e.g. suspension and expulsion), academic challenges (e.g. dropping out of school, particularly African American and Latino boys), mental health issues (e.g. completed suicide), physical health problems (e.g. cardiovascular problems), public health concerns (e.g. violence, substance abuse, incarceration, and early mortality), and a wide variety of other quality-of-life issues (e.g. relational problems, family well-being).”

As to why a disproportionate number of males show up on the wrong end of these outcomes, the authors call out “socialization in traditional masculinity ideology.” In other words, each boy is fitted to a boyhood that is dominated by myths, values and experiences damaging to his humanity. In particular, I argue in a new book of my own that the model of boyhood that has reigned forever involves the shattering of boys’ relational connections and the systematic suppression of their self-expression. If the effectiveness of a theory or practice can be judged by the results it produces, it should have been obvious long ago that our ideas about boys are way off. Routine casualties and losses have been an inconvenient truth about boyhood for generations.

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One of those casualties for too many boys is in their connection to themselves. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, also no fan of “toxic masculinity,” has asked young men around the world to describe the difference between a “real man” and a “good man” and finds that the overlay of masculinity, the effort to perform the masculine role properly, distances men from who they really are. As he says, “To prove you are a real man is to prove you exist as a man.” Distinct from as a human being.

The disruption of traditional masculinity caused by the movement on behalf of women and girls can lead to two interrelated goals: calling out male misbehaviors like those featured in the Gillette ad and searching for their root causes. That search should lead us to reckon with a boyhood that was not designed by or for boys.