Expectations of boys have remained more rigid
Gaby Hinsliff suggests that Piers Morgan is actually part of the advertising campaign.
What would the advertising industry do without Piers Morgan?
Whenever they need a grumpy middle-aged man to be triggered, there he is, reliable as clockwork. He did it with Greggs’ vegan sausage roll, helping catapult their January marketing wheeze onto the front pages by complaining that it was a monstrosity. And he’s done it again with the new Gillette ad targeting toxic masculinity, which twists its familiar “the best a man can get” tagline to suggest that men can do a lot better than Harvey Weinstein and fighting in the street.
It’s true! We’re all pitching in to help sell this shaving cream.
Gillette is solemnly insisting that it’s not just a stunt; that in addition to the ad it will be putting money into projects to “inspire and educate” men of all ages, and routinely challenge male stereotypes in the images and words it chooses. Like all marketing gambits, that should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt.
Now we’re marketing salt. It just never ends, does it.
But seriously.
Feminism has endlessly opened up horizons for girls, giving them permission to be anything they want to be. They are bombarded with messages about how it’s fine to be both smart and pretty, encouraged to visualise themselves in male-dominated careers and to push the boundaries of behaviour considered “acceptable” for women. That paves the way for girls who never fitted the pink princess stereotype to be far more comfortable in their skins.
But expectations of boys have remained more rigid, to the detriment both of those who don’t fit the macho stereotype and of those who will grow up to be the victims of insecure male rage. “Let boys be boys” is an excellent principle. But only if we recognise the full range of things boys are capable of being, when we let them.
It’s a bind. Women are the subordinated half of the equation, so the move for them is as it were upwards; for men it is as it were downwards. It isn’t literally, but it seems that way. Since women have always been figured as weak and subordinate, men are by implication strong and dominant; trying to change that runs into this “You want to make us into cowardly weaklings” problem.
There isn’t ‘an expectation’ for boys. There are floods of mutually exclusive demands made on them. ‘Purity culture’ and 60s ‘swinging’ are dinned into the same heads simultaneously. All with a heave dose of rationalization, evo-psych ‘just so’ stories, and religious dogma.
I always preferred to let my kids be kids. It seemed to work for mine in working out who and what they are.
But we are never bombarded with messages about how it’s fine to be not pretty. Therein lies the problem – they’ll “let us” be “smart” as long as we are also “pretty” (and young). In short, we haven’t moved quite as much as we should have.
Truth.
That’s the problem when being a man is seen as the pinnacle of achievement. Everyone in the lower classes is being ambitious if they want to be (like) a man. Hence being a tomboy is cute because the girl is just striving to be something better, which she can’t ever really achieve. She can only move sideways from the oppression of being a girl child to being an adult woman. A woman can strive to do “man things”, because she’s clawing her way out of the underclass (of course she will also be punished for not knowing her place). A boy can be promoted out of the women-and-children category almost at any point in life by an older, wiser dude declaring “you are a man now” or just reaching the right age, but that status has to be maintained so as not to sully the name of masculinity. Any sign of weakness, man cards are revoked, and the offender is busted right down to the status of “girl”. So if it seems like men are at some sort of disadvantage because they don’t have their own version of feminism opening up horizons for them, it’s because after all this time, feminism still hasn’t managed to get across that the things associated with masculinity are not inherently superior to the things associated with femininity.
But there’s hope. Gillette are on it, and we all know that once men start saying things women have been shouting about for ages, other men start paying attention.