The News Agency that Dare Not be Named reported that Gillette’s new toxic-masculinity ad caused an "online uproar." "Gillette Ad With a #MeToo Edge Attracts Support and Outrage," claimed The New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
. "Gillette faces backlash and boycott over ’#MeToo advert," ran a typical headline in the BBC this week.
Outrage? Uproar? Backlash? I’d say it’s more like a hacklash. It’s journalists dealing out pretend outrage.
Lazy media news hounds who are too lazy to even actually speak to people anymore are instead constructing Potemkin Villages of fake hate, fake disgust and fake outrage. They’re Contemptkin Villages. No one really lives there. The laziest hacks can build them using tweets, even tweets from anonymous Twitter accounts. Somehow these hacks are employed at places like the BBC and the Times.
The instantly infamous Gillette ad calling out "toxic masculinity" that painted males as bullies and sexual harassers certainly spurred a lot of conversation. But were dudes outraged or did they just think the ad was misguided and wrong? Men aren’t going James-McAvoy-in-"Glass" Beastmode on Gillette. They’re just saying, "I’d rather not be lectured about what a bully and a creep I am, especially by my toiletries." The New York Times quoted an obscure Irish deejay calling the ad "condescending" on Twitter as an example of "outrage," alongside the British chat-show host Piers Morgan saying the ad was "pathetic." "You’re pathetic" is an expression of outrage?
The BBC claimed breathlessly, "There have been calls for Gillette to post an apology video." There have? Click through on the source for this tidbit, and it turns out to be a Twitter user with 18 followers who also demanded that everyone at Gillette be forced to read a men’s-rights book. Sure. Later in the piece the BBC cites another supposedly angry party to the controversy. That turned out to be an anonymous Twitter user with six followers.
(Most observers readily grasped that Gillette is desperately using cynical marketing ploys to make us remember they exist. "Gillette, Bleeding Market Share, Cuts Price of Razors" ran a Wall Street Journal headline in 2017.)