© Procter & Gamble Co.Gillette’s ill-judged ‘toxic masculinity’ ad.
As a culture we are being preached to constantly. No, I don't mean that we sit in a room whilst someone delivers a three-point sermon at the front. I'm talking about the fact that the vast majority of us sit for hours on end in front of a little box, and we let people whose ideas and beliefs would be strange to us if we weren't in the habit of cultivating this practice on a regular basis, preach at us, teach us, and shape our thinking beyond all recognition. It is not a question of whether we'll be preached to; it's simply a question of which preaching we sit under.
This is usually done in very subtle ways. An ideology is presented to us, but it is not done so in the "in-your-face" kind of way that a three-point sermon might be done. No, it is cloaked in the garb of emotive and powerful language and buzz-phrases, deliberately designed not to make us think, but rather to make us "non-think". The aim is to have us look at one side of a particular social issue - transgenderism being the latest fad - to empathise and sympathise with that side, so that in the end we come to look at the issue not from the perspective of an overarching objective reality - XX = XX and XY = XY and never the twain shall meet -, but rather from the subjective viewpoint of the person or people being shown to us and their feelings.
Some of the most powerful ways of doing this are through programming that we are meant to think is entirely neutral - mere entertainment - such as the sitcom or the soap opera. You only have to look at a popular sitcom made in the first few decades after the invention of television and compare it to one made now to see the difference. Those sitcoms of old were not really ideological in any way. Their purpose wasn't to try and sell a particular lifestyle or agenda to the people watching them. They were simply about finding laughter in real life situations. The modern sitcom is an entirely different kettle of fish, and on the few occasions that I have watched one, it is often clear that lurking behind the idea of finding laughter in real life situations, there is an agenda that the producers of the show want to propagate.
As far as preaching goes, it is genius, albeit deceitful genius. If you have an ideology that you want to promote, what more effective way of doing it than producing slick films and programmes that draw people in, and whilst they sit there believing they are watching pure entertainment, all the while the drip, drip, drip of ideas are being slowly poured into their head and - even more crucially - their hearts, so that after years of watching such things, their outlook on life, its meaning and its morality, has changed beyond recognition to line up with the preachers they've been watching. It's all part and parcel of what the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn likened to having liquid manure poured into our minds.
But occasionally the preaching of the ideology of Cultural Marxism - the fanatical ideology whose purpose is to create an entirely new morality and a new humanity through cultural revolution - Is so utterly in your face that even those who are ordinarily unaware that they are being preached to can see it.
Take the new Gillette advert (here), which has provoked a strong backlash. There was us thinking that men need to shave, and that Gillette is there to help men fulfil this need by selling razor blades that enable them to do it (and make a profit of course). Yet there was Gillette thinking that not only do we need to be able to shave, we also need to be taught a lesson in what being a man does and doesn't involve. In other words, we want a shave; Gillette want to preach.
Of course, many of the things that they put as examples of what manhood shouldn't be are objectionable. That men shouldn't be abusive, lechering morons is fairly obvious, I would have thought. Whether we needed Gillette to tell us this just so they can sell more razors and make more money is sort of another thing. And if you can't see the problem, imagine that they'd put an advert out with #TheBestWomenCanBe, and railed for the first part against all the sins and evils that women get up to. Huh? Women sin and do wrong things? You mean it's not just the men? Whodathunkit?
But this is not all they do. They wrap these obvious points up in an emotive sermon about the dangers of "toxic masculinity", including it would seem the dangers of guys barbecuing together - an odious practice that clearly has no place in our society (sarc, in case you needed to know). All in all, one can't help but get the point: masculinity is bad, and it can only be made good by softening up and becoming much more squidgy.
So here's where I get to preach. To the makers of the Gillette advert and other assorted Cultural Marxists, if they're listening.
We're all agreed that men being abusive, lecherous morons is not a good thing, right? But the irony is that since the War on Men began all those years ago, men are now far more likely to be abusive, lecherous morons than they used to be. Did you know that?
They have been taught that faithfulness in lifelong marriage is unimportant. And so - lo and behold - they just happen to be generally less faithful than their fathers and grandfathers. They have been taught that their role as protectors of females (who you may have noted are generally smaller and physically weaker and so need protecting from predators) is redundant, and so by and large they see no reason be protective. They have been taught that sex has almost nothing to do with procreation, and lo and behold they took the message. The porn industry seems to be doing pretty well these days, doesn't it?
In short, your agenda has taken away the manhood of men, and as a result they are less likely to be gentlemen, more likely to objectify women, and more likely to abuse others, whether their wives, partners, children, or children of their partners than ever before.
As C.S. Lewis put it:
"We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."The War on Men has stopped men being proper men, and when this happens myriads of men fall into one ditch, and myriads fall into another. Over here on the left are millions of men who have no concept of a work ethic, who are miserable snowflakes unable to cope with the world, whose main contact with women is done alone, at night, via the internet, and for whom the idea of being productive husbands and fathers is unthinkable. And over here in the right hand ditch we have a growing army of genuinely frightening, thuggish and pitiless goons who have grown up without any idea of noble and honourable masculinity, and have taken the message accordingly. Pity the poor girls and women who end up with such products of the cultural revolution.
Men are designed to be masculine. If it is not channelled in the proper way, yes it can be toxic. But it was the cultural revolutionaries who, instead of trying to channel masculinity, instead sought to malign it, mock it, and break it. And now they stand back and look at their own handiwork and apparently can't understand why the problem of "toxic men" has gotten worse. So much so that we're now being subjected to shaving companies preaching to us from on high.
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