© Procter & Gamble Co.
Gillette’s ill-judged ‘toxic masculinity’ ad.
I'm always greatly amused when I hear people saying things like, "I can't stand being preached at". What amuses me is that the same people who say this with a straight face tend to be completely oblivious to the fact that they are being preached at day in day out. If they are aware of it, somehow it never seems to bother them.
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.
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