[Bullying.
The #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. Toxic masculinity] Is this the
best a man can get? Is it? We can’t hide from it. [Sexual harassment is taking
over Hollywood] Its been going on far too long. We cant laugh it off. [Whose the Daddy? What I actually think she is
trying to say…] Making the same old excuses. [Boys will be boys. Boys will be
boys. Boys will be boys] But something finally changed. [Allegations regarding
sexual assault and sexual harassment] And there will be no going back, because
we, we believe in the best in men. [Men need to hold other men accountable.
Smile sweetie, come on!] To say the right thing, to act the right way. [Not
cool, not cool] Some already are. In ways big, [Yo man. Don’t act like this] and
small. [I am strong. I am Strong] But some is not enough, [That’s not how we
treat each other ok!?] because the boys watching today will be the men of
tomorrow.
The Best a man can get. It’s only by
challenging ourselves to do more that we can get closer to our best.
-
Gillette Razors[1]
For some time now, a central theme of
our politics has concerned the discourse surrounding ‘Social Justice’. One of
the more recent names to engage with this dialogue has been the razor producer
Gillette. Amidst this discourse, widely gaining mass-attention through the
#MeToo campaign against sexual assault, Gillette made a conscious decision to
underpin their latest advertising with a message criticising ‘Toxic
Masculinity’ and its place in society. Although Gillette has previously
capitalised on a masculine rhetoric in order to sell their razors – as ‘The
best a man can get’ – their new campaign shifts focus to a different rhetoric,
namely: ‘The best that men can be’.
In
response, the campaign befell both widespread praise and condemnation en masse. Some argue that it sends the
right message in creating a more just society, and others that it is another
message of political correctness, assaulting masculinity. Overall, the public
response has been one of micro-controversy, leading to a dip in UK-wide sales
and some division amongst ourselves as to whether the campaign fronts a
positive attitudinal shift, or otherwise[2].
Nevertheless, as interesting and important as this particular debate is, it
seems to have been widely forgotten that behind this advert is a marketing
campaign designed to aid the sale of razor blades. In this vein, Gillette appears
to be the most recent company adding to the tone of the mode of production
defining our socio-economic relations, which, of course, is Capitalism. Thus,
we come to the scope of this piece – to lay out some rather rudimentary
thoughts on the Gillette advert, its place in the contemporary Capitalist mode
of production and our wider political discourse.
Although
a thinker widely criticised for his occasionally vulgar rhetoric and
potentially dogmatic (Lacanian) psychoanalytic focus, the work of Slavoj Zizek may
help us decode something of Gillette’s campaign. In his 2009 work ‘First as Tragedy, Then as Farce’, Zizek
meticulously explains that the ‘New Spirit’ guiding capitalism at the
consumerist level is that of so-called ‘Cultural Capitalism’:
“We
primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status
symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in
order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful…Consumption is supposed to
sustain the quality of life, its time should be ‘quality time’ – not the time
of alienation, of imitating models imposed by society, of the fear of not being
able to ‘keep up with the joneses’, but the time of the authentic fulfilment of
my true Self, of the sensuous play of experience, and of caring for others,
through becoming involved in charity or
ecology, etc”[3].
Zizek’s
commentary highlights a major shift concerning our experiential relationship
with commodities, the atomic foundation upon which the capitalist world appears
as a vast collection of[4].
Today, our fetish for commodities has undertaken a new dimension, as Zizek
explains, to include not only consumption for utility (as was always the case)
but also consumption for a particular experiential utility – to fulfil ‘the
self’.
For Zizek, the campaigns of Starbucks
Coffee are an exemplary case of ‘Cultural Capitalism’ operating at its purest.
Here, it is made abundantly clear that ‘Its not just what you are buying, its
what you are buying into’. For example, after praising the quality of the
product, one ad goes on to declare that:
“But,
when you buy Starbucks, whether you realise it or not, you’re buying into
something bigger than a cup of coffee. You’re buying into a coffee ethic.
Through our Starbucks Shared Planet program, we purchase more Fair Trade coffee
than any company in the world, ensuring that the farmers who grow the beans
receive a fair price for their hard work. And, we invest in and improve
coffee-growing practices and communities around the globe. It’s good coffee
karma…Oh, and a little bit of the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee helps
furnish the place with comfy chairs, good music, and the right atmosphere to
dream, work and chat in. We all need places like that these days…When you
choose Starbucks, you are buying a cup of coffee from a company that cares. No
wonder it tastes so good”[5].
In
this, Starbucks adds value to its commodities in that the consumer purchases a
product from Starbucks specifically. The coffee that Starbucks markets is ‘more’
than just a cup of coffee, but an added set of ethical standards. The commodity
possesses a new added quality beyond its mere usage as the thing itself; one
purchases the ethic that Starbucks adopts. The customer receives an experience
adding to their moral being, which in return, finances the space where such an
experience can be made possible – the ‘Starbucks Aesthetic’.
Zizek
discusses this to critique how charity can become a perversion when adopted by
the machinations of Capitalism itself[6].
Starbucks is willing to market its products through the ethics of the producer,
and thus justifies the added value in price the consumer must exchange to
receive, and ultimately consume, the commodity. Simply put, Starbucks generates
capital by marketising itself as an ‘ethical’ producer, able to generate a
healthier bottom line for its shareholders by tapping into the broadest ethics
of the consumer. In the neoliberal frame of the contemporary world, there are
certain issues that seem to be universally appreciated; global poverty, climate
change and mass-illness are but three examples of this, to openly argue in favour of these would lead to public
moral discredit. In this way, Starbucks tap into the mass-ethics of the time,
using their purchasing and advertising power to stand above other producers as
an ethical producer, manifested clearly in the ‘coffee ethic’ they sell.
Of
course, there is a benefit to this kind of action, and it is of the simplest
sort – these companies bring to light certain issues and use their platform to
address them. This I, and most critics, cannot, and should not, deny.
Nevertheless, the perversion transpires in that it is not for sake of charity
alone, but in the name of Capital. Starbucks, for the sake of continuous
illustration, are prepared to twist production and consumption onto an
ethically experiential plane on the back of systemic injustice, in the process
disseminating its donations amongst its customers as a spectre-like added value
to every transaction posited in the price of its commodities. In return, the
consumer also purchases the ‘coffee ethic’, whereby they are made aware of their
ethical act to ease the mass suffering the commodity is sold to alleviate. Yet,
it does not end here – the consumer also purchases the milieu of the aesthetic
supposedly as a reward for those who buy into this ethic, justifying an even
further added value to the price of a cup of coffee. In short, whether
conscious of this or not, Starbucks are able to profit from such a strategy,
playing on the normative universal ethics of neoliberalism characterising the
epoch.
Going
one-step further than this however, Zizek’s concern is for the consequences of
this, asking the question as to what is actually being commodified and
re-commodified in this process. In short, by adding value for its ethical
approach to the commodities it sells, it is precisely our social guilt which is
subsequently commodified. By buying my morning Americano from Starbucks, as
opposed to an independent coffee shop, I can pay a mysterious added fee to
cheaply address my social guilt in a single transaction. In the act of buying a
cup of coffee, I have, from the ease of a counter, contributed to global social
justice – and it costs less than a single pound. Here, our individual guilt –
something until now thought of as priceless, something money could not buy – becomes
a commodity that can be exchanged and sold on the market in a round about manner.
This requires no stretch of the imagination to envisage. Another coffee company
becomes competitive for our guilt with Starbucks: ‘We go beyond Starbucks in
both donation and impact to address poverty, providing a space for you to relax
or work, and for only a small added fee!’. This justifies an even greater
increase in the price of a cup of coffee and one’s satisfaction with oneself as
an ethical being - attracting custom, and ultimately Capital.
Thus,
Zizek launches a twofold critique concerning the effect of ‘Cultural
Capitalism’ on the commodity form: (1) by suggesting that the charity some producers
employ is only to appear as the ethical choice for the consumer, justifying an
increase in price for this added-utility, and, (2) this results in being able
to commodify social guilt, permitting those who really ‘care’ to easily
outsource this for a small price. In this way, through cultural capitalism, the
commodity takes on an added form; it has a use-value, in the value of an
object’s use, it has an exchange-value, in the innate ‘monetary’ value of the
object itself, and now, it has a
cultural-value, in the value of the object’s contribution to ‘the self’. Unlike
in the past, the consumer can become a moral and ethical being through the very
act of consumption within Capitalist relations, which have now absorbed the
ethical standards that once stood against it; yet again overcoming a barrier
previously preventing the accumulation of further Capital and the reproduction
of its own conditions of existence.
Beyond
this however, Zizek’s most central point is that such a connection between
production and charity generates a veiled ‘Capitalism with a human face’. The
ethical redemption one wishes for as a consumer is absorbed into the economic
relations of the Capitalist mode of production itself – the very cause of the
social injustice companies such as Starbucks wish to rid us of with one hand,
and yet instigate with the other. The perversion we see comes not in the fact
that producers merely benefit through the accumulation of further capital by
aligning themselves with fighting social injustice, but in this act mask
Capitalism’s hand in forging such injustice.
To donate to charity through the
auspices of Capitalism is the attempt to tackle socio-economic injustice within
its own framework, whereas the truly radical and necessary notion is to construct
a system whereby these injustices are impossible.
Oscar Wilde best explains this, in his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’:
“It
is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy
with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they
[Cultural Capitalists in our case] very seriously and very sentimentally set
themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies
do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are
part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by
keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing
the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty.
The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty
will be impossible”[7].
By
amalgamating our social guilt as a consumer with capitalist consumption, the
Capitalism we experience today has gained a human face, which contradictorily
attempts to solve the injustices it has a hand in prolonging, whilst of course
capitalising on this.
Although
I will not use the full extent of Zizek’s critique, he exposes a phenomenon
that I would like to place into the context of the Gillette Razor controversy.
The phenomenon that Zizek discusses is of course a distinct one and must
undergo some nuance from the situation here. Gillette is not adding to the
essence of its commodities through the posit of a charitable donation, this
distinguishes it from the precise phenomenon Zizek analyses. Nonetheless,
Gillette, like Starbucks, has recalibrated its image to go hand in hand with a
certain framework of ethics, aligning itself with the liberal principles
defining our epoch in order to: (a) provide redemption for the guilt-ridden consumer
as a consumer, (b) attempt to solve the injustices it creates whilst (c)
continuing to produce the conditions for the accumulation of further capital,
but in an increasingly ethical manner.
Gillette
has done precisely this in a number of ways. To begin with, the company has
utilised the current climate of Liberal Feminism to frame its values as a
producer. At no point in the advert has Gillette attempted to sell its products
in the tradition manner, through their utility. There are no animated diagrams
of three or five blades moving ‘even closer’ to the skin, or smoothly slicing
hair away, for instance. The campaign begins with its own tagline, but in the
frame of a question: ‘Is this the best a man can get?’; implying that against
the backdrop of sexual harassment and the manifestation of toxic masculinity, men,
generally, need to dramatically change their behaviour to remove the chauvinist
toxicity which tends to define what it is to be masculine. This critical line
of investigation continues until the declaration that “But something finally
changed”, where a montage of attitudinal changes and news pieces are overheard
in the background and displayed on screen, and the campaign continues until its
final line in etching out the right kind of action men should take in order to
tackle systemic chauvinism and sexism in society.
This
indicates to the consumer that Gillette is a brand devoted to social justice,
in correcting the attitude of toxic masculinity – the belittling and
objectification of women, sexual assault, and so on. To the consumer therefore,
one is found to endorse the liberal ethics behind such principles when
purchasing a Gillette product, or alternatively, opposing these principles by
openly boycotting them as ‘virtue signalling’[8].
In this moment, as commodities, Gillette products receive their spectre-like
added cultural value, appealing to socially conscious and guilt-ridden
individuals as the only ethical
choice to purchase. Some may argue that this is marketing genius by drawing in
custom on an ethical register, and others that it is a marketing disaster,
alienating the conservative section of society who oppose the ethics of
contemporary feminism. As far as product sales go, Gillette’s financial
declaration at the end of the quarter will tell all.
But
what is the problem with this? Gillette profits
and reproduces the conditions of Capitalism through its new incarnation, and equally
utilises its platform to correct patriarchal social injustice – what is wrong
with that? The ethical conundrum materialises in a threefold frame. Firstly,
Gillette as a brand previously defined by ‘Masculinity’ (as ‘the best a man can
get’) is now associated with combating the very masculinity it previously
purported. This is not to suggest that one cannot be self-critical and adapt,
but my point is that Gillette’s campaign clearly exemplifies the ‘New Spirit’
of Capitalism that we experience today – going beyond a U-turn in its company
values so to associate its own commodities with combating the norms it once,
perhaps unconsciously, maintained.
Secondly, we should not forget that
this ethical recalibration is not merely as a gesture of good will, but the
logic of Capitalism must still prevail – it must aid the accumulation of
further Capital. The added redemptive cultural value posited in the commodity
is to reproduce the capacity to consume ethically; combating a barrier to
accumulation Gillette may have otherwise met with its past branding. This tells
us that the amalgamation of social-ethics with consumption is to overcome the
social principles which have appeared in the wider ether, principles which may
barricade the producer from accumulating further Capital. If there is one thing
that is central to the Capitalist mode of production, it is its malleability
and capacity to adapt with the ethos of the times. Although a controversial
text to reference, and often widely employed as a reduction of an entire body
of thought, ‘The Communist Manifesto’
explains this beautifully. On the topic of Capitalism, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels write:
“The
Bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations
of society…All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that
is holy profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind”[9]
The ‘New Spirit’ of Capitalism that Zizek discusses, and that Gillette illustrates, can be marked as the embodiment of Capitalism’s remarkable capacity to revolutionise itself so to continue the accumulation of Capital. The adage of a cultural-value to the commodity form is but the nub of this revolution – one can now consume ethically, the very critique that befell Capitalism in the last century. By signalling its alignment with the Liberal values of the day, Gillette can continue to sell razors by guaranteeing to the consumer that one shaves with a razor produced by those who hold the same ethical norms.
Lastly,
the greatest of conundrums we face here requires that we return to the
statement made above by Oscar Wilde. Although I can declare my alignment with
the central social message that Gillette are now associated with – that our
society displays traits of chauvinism and sexism which need to be tended to
urgently – I also would like to declare that this sentiment simply does not go
far enough in achieving these ends. The campaign’s aim is essentially to
deliver a message that can be entwined with the commodities Gillette sell. The primary
goal of the advert is, as we have examined, to associate its commodities with
the cultural-value one acquires through consumption. In the advert itself, this
is encapsulated in the opening sequence – lone men staring into their mirrors, overtly
postulating the social question of the day, interrogating ‘the self’. This is
the campaign’s call to the ethics it straps to Gillette products. Its ends
therefore are in redeeming the guilt of the consumer to further consume, and in
this, overcoming a barrier to accumulation and the replication of the
Capitalist mode of production; but what about the actually existing social injustice
it sought to highlight and correct?
My critique is simple; the advert
serves its own purposes in retrospect. It falls into the category of facile
critique that Wilde critically examines. Gillette intend on bringing to our
attention an ill of our society. But however, and it is a big however, this will
only add to the aggravation of the difficulty to remedy society of this ill.
The campaign sympathises with those who suffer, and as noble as this may be,
because of its existence as an advert for ethical consumption, inherently it cannot
go beyond this point – it cannot sympathise with thought to reconstruct society
to a position whereby sexism and chauvinism are impossible to materialise. Its
very being as an illustration of Cultural Capitalism limits its own capacity to
deal with the issue it claims to address. What we need is not a round of
producers chanting ‘I am Spartacus’ with a cause, benefiting from this by
nature. Nonetheless, even though it may have some ethical value, bobbing on the
surface because of its ethical façade, if we
really wish to rid society of these traits,
we must not merely claim our alignment with these causes – but we must have a
sympathy for changing how society itself functions in permitting such
injustices – we must have a sympathy for
thinking.
I
would like to present the reader with a couple of fleeting notions before they
retire. The campaign reframed the
company’s famous motto ‘The best a man can get’ into ‘the best men can be’. The
existentialist undertones of this are undeniably screaming at the surface. What
if you do not share these ethics? Does this close off consumption to those who
are not guilt-ridden? What if the emergence of such Cultural Capitalism flows
in another direction, whereby one has to be
a particular ethical subject in order to consume? Perhaps, next, Gillette will
defend itself by suggesting that those who disagree with its new shiny values
are not fit to consume their products, in the same way that Hillary Clinton
claimed that half of Donald Trump’s supporters were a ‘basket of deplorables’ –
individuals she appeared to not want the vote of[10].
Perhaps the onset of Cultural Capitalism will begin to restrict consumption –
producing an ‘Ollivander Effect’, where the wand chooses the wizard, the
commodity picks its consumer? Even so, this is but mere speculation.
There
is a final thought I would like to part the reader with. It is no secret that the
advertising industry has connected razors with one word – ‘closer’. A closer shave seems to have been the single most utilised
selling point for razor producers, and their advertisement stands testimony to
this historical fact, Gillette included. For me, the key to grasping this
campaign as an advert of a Cultural Capitalist sort came when I read the final
line of the piece: “It’s only by challenging ourselves to do more that we can
get closer to our best”. And there it is, the term we all associate with a
better quality razor – ‘closer’. It
is as if we can visualise a marketing department sat round a desk, a mind map on
a board above them, and with the word ‘Closer’ at its centre. In reverse, the
campaign is revealed to be a marketing exercise, no more than an advert
utilising contemporary ethics.
In conclusion, these rudimentary
thoughts I have laid out may pose more questions than it answers, or even
confuse more than it informs. Therefore, in short, I shall leave you with the
notion that although the onset of so called Cultural Capitalism is a tricky and
contradictory phenomenon, if we want to act in the world to change our social
conditions and the ills of society, we must begin to understand it in all its
beauty and malice. If we want to change the character of our public realm we
cannot simply wish change into existence through the means which propagate
injustice, we have to recast and reconstruct the very way we think about our
social organisation – it is imperative that we get even closer to new modes of thinking.
[1] Gillette (13th January
2019) ‘We Believe: The Best Men Can Be’, YouTube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch? V=koPmuEyP3a0 (Accessed 27th February
2019).
[2] Sarah Vizard, 18th
January 2019, “Gillette Brand Takes Hit as ‘#metoo’ ad backfires”, Marketing Week, https://www.marketingweek.com/2019/01/18/gillette-brand-takes-hit-as-metoo-ad-backfires/
(Accessed 27th February 2019).
[3] Slavoj Zizek (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London:
Verso, pp. 52-53.
[4] “The wealth of societies in which
the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of
commodities’”, Karl Marx (1990) Capital:
A Critique of Political Economy - Volume I, London: Penguin Classics, p. 125.
[5] Starbucks Advert (May 4th
2009) USA Today, p. A9.
[6] Slavoj Zizek (2009) First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London:
Verso, pp.51-65.
[7] Oscar Wilde (2018) “The Soul of
Man Under Socialism”, in Mark Martin (Ed.) In
Praise of Oscar Wilde, London: Verso, pp. 1-40, p.2.
[8] Piers Morgan and James Woods are but two high
profile individuals to register their opposition in the public realm on these
grounds. Alexandra Topping, Kate Lyons and Matthew Weaver (15th
January 2019) ‘Gillette #MeToo razors ad on 'toxic masculinity' gets praise – and
abuse’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian
com/ world/2019/jan/15/gillette-metoo-ad-on-toxic-masculinity-cuts-deep-with-mens-rights-activists.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
(1968) The Communist Manifesto,
London: Penguin Classics, pp. 222-223.
[10] BBC News (10th
September 2016) ‘Clinton: Half of
Trump supporters 'basket of deplorables'’, BBC
News,
ht tps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/election-us-2016-37329812/clinton-half-of-trump-supporters-basket-of-deplora
bles (Accessed 2nd March 2019).
---
Published in Žižekian Analysis as: Kieran J. O'Meara (2019) 'On Gillette and 'The Best That Men Can Be': A Close Shave With Cultural Capitalism', Žižekian Analysis, https://zizekanalysis.wordpress. com/2019/10/22/on-gilette-and-the-best-men-can-be-a-close-shave-with-cultural-capitalism-kieran-j-o meara/ (Accessed 24th June 2021).
Picture by: Mr.TinDC - https://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_t_in_dc/3637509516/in/photostream/