There are two kinds of men. There are manly men, who are manly and masculine and own four different sets of socket wrenches and who may not be perfect physical specimens of manliness but totally could be, they will assure you, if the need ever arose. And then, there is everyone else.
Or something. I don't know—I have never been able to keep track of the actual details. All I know is that there is apparently nobody on the planet who seriously boasts of their own "masculinity" who is not a god-awful insufferable whining little snowflake of a human, forever trembling at some supposed cultural moment that has wounded them forever by making them feel bad. And now they have the angries at razor company Gillette, which scraped their fee-fees quite rudely, indeed.
The ad states explicitly, “We believe in the best in men.” There are clips of Terry Crews, a sexual assault survivor, testifying in front of Congress that men need to hold other men accountable. The commercial shows men doing just that: holding off a pack of bullies, and stopping another guy from harassing a woman.
You can watch the ad here, and I'm going to be honest here: how anyone could find this this slightest bit objectionable or even out-of-the-cultural-norm is beyond me and then some. But I am not a wilting flower. The notion that we could all of us, once in a while, reflect on whether we are half as good as we think we are does not send me into a cold, loud, and conspicuous online sweat. This is because I have been inside churches, where such talk is commonplace, and read actual books,which regularly dwell on such themes, and have borne witness to manly monster truck hoe-downs, or whatever they are called, in which second-guessing each actor's equipment, acceleration, and life choices is the crowd's principal sport. So what we have here is, methinks, the "outrage" of the already-sociopathic. And it is a good thing something came along to jumpstart their fading hearts. They were in danger of leaving us, with the recent dullness of the current ad season.
It is the same crowd that sees a black face and a white face in the same 30-second ad and gets suspicious the Illuminati is trying to push something on us; it is the same crowd that, long long long ago when megabrand Coca-Cola suggested at Christmastime that our great ambition ought to be teaching the whole world to sing, saw visions of a new world order coming to hand out lyrics and teach people where India was. It is the crowd that gets Extremely Online Angry when an action hero is anything but white, male, and either above six feet tall or willing to use camera trickery to pretend at it. It is the crowd that short-circuits at the thought of a womenfolk doing [whatever their favorite pastime is], and spends a measurable portion of each week analyzing why people they attempt eye contact with on the street don’t seem eager to bed them.
There's no winning with that crowd. Don't try. Just hand them their wee little shovels and hope the hole collapses over their heads.
This is what is known as a flex. There is absolutely no point in attempting to flush your razor down the toilet unless you photograph it. It is the equivalent of breaking your beer bottle over the table at the beginning of what you imagined would be an old-timey bar fight; nobody is supposed to see the far more embarrassing, ten-stitches aftermath.
Then there's Fox News, of course. Wherever somebody is assaulting Christmas or objecting to a grade-school play in Wichita, Fox News is on it.
See, this is the sort of discourse you get when your network bosses hand you a pair of punditry dice and tell you to go nuts on live television. You roll the dice and say whatever comes up: This time it was "disrespectful to the troops," the next time it will be "blame immigrants" or "are we becoming Europe" or "why Martin Luther King Jr., who I converse with regularly, agrees with me."
Every one of those will come up before the sweaty proto-incels have gotten bored of the latest affront to their egos. The only bets to be placed are on the exact order they will appear. And then everyone will forget about it, probably because Starbucks came out with a new cup that Infowars reports tends to tip toward Mecca, and we'll be off again.
There's nothing to be done but watch. Watch, and find out who among the television crowds and your own acquaintances is a weird freak of a person with nothing better to do and an eggshell ego. Watch, and see who you might want to snip from your life now rather than later. Never let it be said that these petty little fights are pointless. They are the best markers we have of who among us is, sincerely, not capable of anything better.