The Man Is Unwanted
A video from the 1980s is currently making the rounds on social media. And people – myself not excepted – are shocked, are wistful, are at a loss.
It is the barely one-minute-long commercial from the razor-blade company Gillette. Here it is, via YouTube:
We see white men between thirty and forty years old. Lean and athletic. In suits, in business, in sport. Successful or fighting for success. In good spirits.
We see their wives, cheering them on. A wedding – including the proud father of the groom. A father playing at the first shave with his son while he shaves himself – it is, after all, an ad for razor blades.
The first car. Swimming in the sea. The wife running into her husband’s arms – uplifting music and slow motion.
And so on.
The re-postings of this video are accompanied by wistful comments like: »It looks like far-right propaganda, but it’s just a perfectly ordinary commercial from the ’80s.«
Far-right is today a speech-code for values that stand outside what is politically desired.
The perfect illustration remains the onset of the Covid panic. At first, warning about it counted as far-right and of course racist, because China was involved, after all. Then people saw what possibilities for deprivation of liberty and destruction of Western society the virus offered, so overnight the turn was made 180°: the dangerous right-winger was now whoever warned against overreacting to the reports.
Yes, it feels as though a man gets branded »far-right« for wanting a happy family. For wanting to grow beyond himself in his job and in sport. For wanting, to put it as old-fashionedly as it is precise, to be a real man.
We have the feeling that this ad would today count as »far-right propaganda«, because higher powers have decided that masculinity is to become politically undesirable.
Yes, the very values and virtues that worldwide civilization invented and built are dismissed by propaganda and brainwashing as »toxic masculinity«.
The white man is soon meant to die in Ukraine or soon in Russia, or optionally have himself surgically turned into a woman, or at least mentally castrate himself and go to the next pro-government demonstration.
The sluggish majority would rather die and leave their children a field of rubble than dare to be branded an outsider.
No, we will not get the ’80s or ’90s back. It was a good time. I have the memory, even as it fades. My children have only YouTube videos and our stories. Our children know the world only as a succession of crises, none of which they caused, but all of which they will have to bear.
Now, shortly before the Corona panic, that same company Gillette put out a commercial in which it railed against »toxic masculinity«:
The good ones in this ad are mostly black men. White men mostly appear only as evil bullies – or as »converted« weaklings who prattle on in the language of Green kindergarten teachers.
So how is a man today supposed to know what a man is? What if his father, if present at all, is no model, because he too is broken by feminism and propaganda, by age or by economic and social reality?
In the search for masculinity we will have to go back. A few decades back. Into the last millennium.
Perhaps even further back, before the 1980s.
Best of all, back beyond 1968.
And then we look at what still and again works today – because it worked over centuries and millennia before.
