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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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The boycott worked this time because Bud Light is completely interchangeable with other products and they attacked their core audience. For the same reasons, the Gillette boycott had a real impact.

Other companies, like Disney or Apple, can get away with woke signalling because their business has a moat.

What was the Gillette thing about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_Men_Can_Be

"The Best Men Can Be" was a corporate social responsibility advertising campaign from the safety razor and personal care brand Gillette of Procter & Gamble. The campaign launched on January 13, 2019, with the digital release of a short film entitled We Believe: The Best Men Can Be, which played upon the previous slogan ("The Best a Man Can Get") to address negative behavior among men, including bullying, sexism, sexual misconduct, and toxic masculinity. The campaign includes a three-year commitment by Gillette to make donations to organizations that "[help men] achieve their personal best".[1]

The initial short film was the subject of controversy. While it was praised by some, such as Bernice King, and defended by others, such as Mona Charen, it was generally received negatively by various online commentators, particularly males and conservatives, becoming one of the most disliked videos on YouTube.

Wish I could find the ad itself. Gillette appears to have scrubbed it. It was pretty offensive to men, if I remember.

Here it is from Gillette's official account: https://youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0

Thanks. I wonder why this wasn't the first result when I searched Google? It's getting harder and harder to find things these days.

Google search is almost entirely SEO blogspam for me in the last year. I've started using Yandex.

It was pretty offensive to men, if I remember.

It was, and I swore off Gillette for life as a result. Doesn't really matter since P&G owns so much.

There's value in changing brands as a result of controversy, even if the company getting your money remains the same.

If Gillette sales suddenly dip by 50% and Braun picks up those sales, even if P&G ends up with the same number of sales, there are a bunch of factories that are going to be retooled or closed, a bunch of people that are going to be hired and fired or moved to different divisions that may have offices in different areas. Those are costs, and those are visible events among the executives of the company. To say nothing of the cost of running the ad in the first place: while marketing has some issues with showing its actual effects, the underlying theory is you increase your sales.

Yes, it's technically possible for them to just repeatedly bait and switch you: once you're established with Braun they do something exactly as controversial. But what then? You're not going back to Gillette. Maybe there's a third P&G brand that makes razors that you go to, but sooner or later you'll move outside P&G's ecosystem for your razor, unless they're spending even more money to set up new brands as fast as they collapse. Maybe you still buy their shampoo, but it's not like there's a binary "yes they're our customer/no they're not our customer" thing here where once you buy one P&G product they've won. They want your shampoo money and your razor money and your lotion money and every other bit of money they can get from you, and insofar as you move away from that that's a failure of their profit-seeking goals.

It probably won't bankrupt them as a company, but that's probably an unrealistic goal in the first place. What it will do is send a clear signal "hey, doing this thing that you thought would make you money is instead costing you money", and that's both attainable and effective for changing behavior.

I also permanently switched away from Gillette. It was a pretty easy choice since I'm also saving a lot of money. I'm sure I still consume a ton of P&G products though.

My guess is that that was seen as less important, because the people who use a product are not necessarily the same as the people who buy a product. This is most evident in marketing to children, but even for adults, there are a lot of households where the wife does the grocery shopping. Thus sometimes you get ads for men's products that are targeted at women - the Old Spice commercial is probably the most famous example.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gillette's theory was that it's an ad for women, who buy shaving cream for their husbands or male relatives.

I've long that that they realized they had lost their king of the shaving market position to cheap Chinese razors (like dollar shave club) and their best bet was to lock up a smaller but hopefully loyal core of customers.

Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.

Perhaps I'm out of touch on this one, I'm pretty price sensitive on razors, I bought a case of razors from the company that supplied DSC for less than a pack of refills from Gillette cost at the time and I'm still not half through with them a decade later.

The razor wars are so confusing to me because I'm out of touch in the other direction. I'm 0% price sensitive on razors, I bought a pack of Gillette refills like maybe two years ago? I don't get much facial hair, and my hair is very soft and fine, so I can use the same cartridge for months at a time. I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive? I spend like $40 every 3 years.

I assume that for someone with more/thicker/coarser facial hair it's a different animal.

I find the whole discount-razor universe incredibly confusing, like, who worries that razors are too expensive?

You don't until you do. I only started using a safety razor as opposed to disposable for body hair cause I randomly saw a suggestion that it'd be cheaper in the long run. It was a negligible amount of money in the short run yet/so I still tried it out.

Now it's my go-to.

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You can see it here. (It's kind of weird that the Guardian has a video which is just Gillette's video, but it has 4.4 million views, so they're probably making some money off of it)

Did this ad come out before or after YouTube hid dislikes? Any way to see the ratio on the original ad?

Youtube started hiding dislikes in November of 2021, so this was before. There are plugins that will let you see the dislikes on a video, since they're only hidden, but are still there.

Thanks for the tip.

Nowhere near as skewed as I was expecting, although this isn't the original ad.

Watched it again. What a trainwreck. Can you even imagine the shit storm that a gender-flipped version of this would launch?

Big culture war battle from the antediluvian year of 2019.

New Gillette ad shows father helping transgender son to shave

I thought it was the toxic masulinity ad?

It definitely was.

I wonder about Disney. I have no idea how many people are like me, but all they've done is motivate me to stop watching TV and movies, period. They've motivated me to not let my kid watch TV, period. If they own all the media, I stop consuming all the media.

Instead I've been woodworking. My wife has been gardening. My daughter has been getting super creative with art supplies, crafts, playing pretend and running around outside. We're probably all better off with less consoomer media, regardless of the fact that Disney has been pushing an odious agenda. If anything I should thank Disney for becoming so awful it finally got me to touch grass more.

To be clear, the Disney boycott is also hurting them, they just haven’t acknowledged it.

Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.

This is a reasonable counterpoint, but it seems like they’d been making terrible products for years and only started suffering with the boycotts.

Or it takes a while to degrade a brand.

The MCU had a lot of good will to burn through post-Endgame. The Sequel Trilogy...not as much but even then it started at $2 billion with an incredibly unoriginal work and still ended up at $1 billion for an awful final installment in a cursed trilogy.

The MCU was legitimately great. The problem is that the main story ended with Endgame.

Problem? I'm thankful every day Endgame gave me a perfect place to get off the consoomer train I'd found myself trapped on since my early 20's when Robert Downy Jr swept us off our feet.

Are they severable? if you remove the girlbossing, male dumbification, mary sueisms, "deconstruction" and forced diversity, you don't get quantitively, but qualitatively different products.

It's hard to sever, that's for sure. But there are aspects of many modern Disney films that are bad regardless of those stuff. Rise of Skywalker wasn't helped by Rey continuing to be a Mary Sue, but the entire plot point of Palpatine somehow returning and bizarre plot contrivances like the dagger shape matching up to the Death Star ruins (just one example among many) by themselves were enough to make the film awful. Doctor Strange 2 wasn't helped by Doctor Strange being a supporting character to his own film, but the utter lack of internal logic and bizarre plot contrivances by themselves were enough to make the film awful. I've heard Peter Pan and Wendy is quite woke, but also it's been heavily criticized for awful acting, awful color grading and set design for Neverland, and awful combat choreography. Perhaps a lack of focus on the messaging would have allowed Disney to put some more focus on these other technical and fundamental script writing aspects, so I agree that it's hard to sever, but at the least, these films didn't seem to have some salvageable, worthy core that would have been fine but for the woke messaging.

Their films with less woke messaging don't seem to be particularly better, either. The Lion King remake did make a lot of money, but arguably that was riding the coattails of the original masterpiece, and it did turn off a lot of fans for being a near-shot-for-shot remake but with a lot of the soul ripped out due to the hyperrealistic style and bad voice acting. We'll see with the upcoming prequel CGI film about Mufasa if this was a one of those "fool me once/fool me twice" situations, I suppose. The Pinocchio remake has been criticized for missing the point of the original story, making the titular puppet a complete goody two-shoes from the beginning who is passively pushed into bad situations rather than making bad decisions, along with the lying-causing-nose-to-grow being used to help him get out of a sticky situation rather than punishing him. I heard that film had some woke messaging with some casting choices, but those weren't the downfall of the film, from what I understand.

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And they didn't really establish how they could be sure he was really gone, either! What's to stop Palpatine showing up again? In the EU series the heroes used various tactics to establish how he was capable of resurrecting and then how they could defeat him.

The EU series itself also had a lot of drek it and the good stuff(like thrawn etc) was much more popular than the generic schlock.

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Yeah, but several of those things aren’t gendered. Mary Sues, despite the name, are universal, as is deconstruction. I have faith in Disney’s ability to dumb down a story using those two alone.

Mary Sues aren't gendered at the core, but end up gendered in woke works because writing the female characters as having few limits and as being stopped by external oppression rather than internal flaws is encouraged by wokeness.

the term does have gendered forms (Mary Sue/Gary Stu), and one might argue that some of the specific tendencies are also gendered...

I mean, on the one hand you're quibbling over the different between the product being terrible, or being terrible and offensive.

On the other hand, we're all being gaslit about the product being terrible or offensive, and everyone who doesn't like the product is accused of being all the "-ists". They keep trying to guilt us into continuing to consoom.

I keep imagining it like some terrible MLM pitch, where some awkward, kind of aggressive, and frankly desperate salesman is making his pitch. He puts his foot in his mouth about men, so a few men get up to leave. Maybe he says something bafflingly retarded as a persuasive speech. Like "Women have always been the primary victims of war." As they walk out the door, he starts shouting at them angrily that they are missing the opportunity of a lifetime. They'll be on the wrong side of history! But it's so aggressive the a bunch more men are off put by it and leave too, and maybe a few women. When the last one leaves, he turns to the women, and the men with little enough self respect to stay, and doubles down instead, going "Fucking men, am I right?"

I think this phenomenon happens because many marketers take their ideology seriously. Based on my own experience as a believer in its predecessor ideology, woke ideology is both moralizing and totalizing (AFAICT, it's only gotten worse since I quit around a decade ago), so it has answers to questions of "right" and "wrong" in every possible context. The point of making a film isn't to convince the audience to give you money in exchange for entertainment, it's to make the world a better place by subtly manipulating the audience through social messaging (if they did otherwise, since everything is political, their works would, by default, have messaging that reinforces and upholds the current oppressive status quo). And if the audience dislikes that, that means that they are morally wrong, and it isn't our job to convince them, it's their job to see the rightness of our ideology and come around to it. And we'll bully and verbally abuse them until they do so.

I think a lot of the decision makers in media, likely including in Disney, have experience in seeing this work very well - very very well - in sociopolitical contexts. Often they might have been subject to such "marketing" themselves which led them to becoming true believers. I've seen and experienced this directly plenty, again, for the predecessor ideology. And they might be inferring that they can use similar "marketing" in a commercial context. I don't think I've seen it have much actual success there, though; in sociopolitical contexts, bullying and coercion is the norm and can get good results; in commercial ones, people tend to just walk away instead of handing you money in the face of bullying, and you can't legally coerce them.

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3rd wave feminism/identity politics/SJW. Arguably it's just the same ideology just with less time in the oven and less widespread acceptance.

Isn't the standard dismissal of that Disney+ subscriber numbers dropping because they no longer bundle HBO in India and dropped one of the major cricket channels?

To be clear, their movie release revenue has also dropped a lot more than their competition.

I would mostly blame it on oversaturation and a reversion to the mean after Endgame (how long could they have kept it up?) but some of the newer Disney+ products definitely feel more "woke". This speech is the apotheosis of a particularly "woke" view of politics. I think he actually literally said "do better".

Perhaps it's them targeting segments of the market in a more granular way than you could with Avengers. But obviously there aren't silos so people - the hardcore MCU fans who'd want to watch everything, which I'd bet lean more male - see that stuff and may get turned off even more.

The day after the Daily Wire made some sort of indication they were going to develop kids programming, I bought an annual membership. I've only watched a DW movie/show a couple times since then, but I've renewed the membership once already. It doesn't matter that they don't even have any kids programming yet, I want to encourage them to make it.

Angel Studios has three kids shows, one for the preschool age and two that are probably TV-Y7. They aren't religious in nature, one teaches civics from a right wing stance, but the other two are non-political. They just don't include anything that would have been objectionable to a Republican 20 years ago. These shows are free to watch, but new episodes are crowdsourced (so if you want to see what happens next, pay up!)

There aren't many options, but the Right is starting to wage the culture war, in the sense of changing the culture kids are exposed to.

Disney plus includes shows and movies from more than 15 years ago. If a parent controls the remote, they can show their kids more wholesome programming. There's even ways to block specific shows in the parental controls. A truly dedicated culture warring parent could probably manually block all new shows every morning.

These shows are free to watch, but new episodes are crowdsourced (so if you want to see what happens next, pay up!)

Do you mean crowdfunded, or are they soliciting scripts from random people?

You're correct, I meant crowdfunded. Though they also have a system to submit projects for funding and distribution.

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