"The Best Men Can Be" Gillette Commercial

This ad made me join the dollar shave club. Thanks Gillette :blush:

If my SJW senses are on-point, Gillette is saying that they are the preferred razor for shaving the butts of young white women with the unhealthy ideas about body positivity.

Why is this not more widely disseminated, I wonder? (And then I feel really cynical and jaded when possible reasons pop into my head.)

This is my take, too. No one is taking anything from me, they’re trying to raise awareness of something important to them. I also agree that it’s a slogan more than an organized movement. Perhaps people are organizing around it, but from what I can tell it started as a cry of hurt or outrage or something along those lines.

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Cool. Grew up around there. Spent a fair amount of time in cloudcroft , tulie, and ruidoso

From their own site:
The project is now a member-led global network of more than 40 chapters. Our members organize and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

See the chapters here:
https://blacklivesmatter.com/take-action/find-a-chapter/

To me it’s similar to Metoo in that I don’t think that women should be raped or have obscene comments made to them in public and such, but I disagree with the approach they are taking.

Well, that’s why I specified “U.S.”

In any case, my understanding was that traditional family structure for most of history were either extended families or community-based. That isn’t to say that the nuclear family did not exist, but rather that it was included into those above.

Thus, I wasn’t sure what’s far-left about going back to how people traditionally lived.

No statistics point to going back to extended families or community-based raising of children. All metrics point towards a trend of dramatically increasing instances of single motherhood since the mid-60’s in the US. Fathers have been replaced with government incentives to have children out of wedlock. We are beginning to understand the disastrous outcomes this has produced. All measurements point towards dramatically increased chances of poor outcomes for all children raised in single-parent households. This cuts across all races and hits poor people especially hard.

You can argue whether this was a result of Democrat policies like the Great Society that literally threw cash at this behavior, some other nebulous social factor or a combination thereof, but you won’t find many instances of conservatives advocating these sort of life choices. This shift in behavior was advanced by leftists, liberals, Democrats, whatever overlapping term you’d like to use.

The irony of this whole situation is that we definitely do have a problem with men behaving badly, and this behavior is undeniably linked to males who grow up without a father present. When I was growing up you had people who weren’t conservatives, so let’s just call them “the left”, advancing the notion that a woman was perfectly capable of raising children on her own. Indeed, she was often better off doing so. Strong. Independent. Capable. All the good things were attributed to these brave women.

Now that a few generations have passed since LBJ’s landmark legislation, we can see the folly of throwing cash at women who discard their children’s fathers. This doesn’t all lie on women, of course, but the correlation between the change in family structure with government incentives for that exact behavior is hard to ignore.

Enter Gillette, the savior of misguided men. A new generation of leftists is now insisting that the values their predecessors worked so hard to tear down now need to be restored. We need things like individual accountability. We need fathers to guide children to better behavior. We need bros to check other bros. We need to shave our beards with no fewer than five blades on our razor cartridges.

Perhaps I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but the ever-shifting values of American liberals in my lifetime are hard to stay on top of. Conservatives, on the other hand, have mostly been singing the same song for my 39 years on the planet, and it hasn’t ever been that women are better off without their baby daddies around.

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That wasn’t the point- I was commenting on chris_ottawa saying some statement from a BLM site seemed far-leftish.

This was the statement-

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

Now, I think the statement onto itself is ridiculous- what “requirement”? As far as I know, the concept of the nuclear family developed largely because people moved all over the place and had no one to root them besides their immediate family. So, it could be argued that this development was inevitable in nations like the U.S. where westward expansion literally led people to strange places where they knew no one. And then you have enormous migration even within the U.S. throughout the 20th century as places boomed and declined. From what I understand, the current status of people not migrating that much is not the norm in the U.S.

Contrast that with many Asian or otherwise countries with stable, fixed borders and historically with little economic opportunity. There is no large scale migration, and so extended families and community-based family groups are much more common.

But the idea of extended families and the “village” caring for people doesn’t seem far-left to me.

Edit- Honestly though, fuck extended families. They only work if the family is stable and happy. Otherwise it’s a clusterfuck of betrayals and back-handed scheming.

It’s not. It is a long tradition that’s existed in many cultures, and still exists today.

The term “nuclear family” is obviously relatively new. I doubt it was coined before the atomic age. What isn’t new is men marrying women and having children together, whether in the presence of extended family, broader communities or not.

What is new are dramatically increased instances of that paradigm being abandoned, which I covered in my post above. Dig as far back into US history as you want, and you won’t find a greater frequency of children being born into fatherless families as you will today.

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This is so profound.

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I have nothing against this; I just wanted to write out what I meant.

It’s also similar to metoo in that it started as a cry; women saying “me too” and telling their stories. Then the media got a hold of it and people saw the potential to ride it to power and fame and began organizing. See also: the Pride Movement; Women’s Movement; Civil Rights Movement; American Revolution; Christianity; etc, etc, etc.

Some moments become more virtuous as they organize, some less. Mostly less in the beginning because of the zealots, who eventually fade as things become more and more structured. But you know, thank God for the zealots, because they’re the ones who keep it on the news (symbiotic relationship) and most of these movements have good at the core. Not all, but most. And they force needed change. Are dirty cops afraid of getting caught on video and turned viral as a BLM representative of evil? Good. Might a McDonald’s manager think twice about chasing some poor 16-year-old girl around while she’s trying to finish her side work at 10:00 at night? Good.

I’m half Jewish, and for the moment, at least, I don’t have to worry about being put in an oven to die. There was a movement about that.

I’m half Irish, and for the moment I don’t have to worry about signs saying I need not apply to jobs. Back a few years ago people like me got organized and started running for offices in places like Boston. Things got better. My grandparents came over on a boat and were basement-dwelling sanitation workers, but my father was an executive. 'Cause of the movement.

I’m female, and I don’t have to worry that I can’t get credit in my own name. There was a movement about that. My mom was in it. We didn’t drink orange juice for a bit, for reasons I’d have to Google, but now I can do stuff she couldn’t.

I like having sex with my husband, but if I didn’t because he was an abusive drunk, he wouldn’t be allowed by law to rape me. There’s a law about that because there was a movement.

The criminalization of marital rape in the United States started in the mid-1970s and by 1993 marital rape became a crime in all 50 states, under at least one section of the sexual offense codes.

1993! Isn’t that crazy? What could be a clearer example of domestic violence than the forcible taking of an unwilling partner? Child sex abuse had to be a movement, too, because for whatever reason people don’t always seem to do the right thing on their own:

Organized child protection emerged from the rescue in 1874 of nine- year-old Mary Ellen Wilson, who lived with her guardians in one of New York City’s worst tenements, Hell’s Kitchen. Mary Ellen was routinely beaten and neglected. A religious missionary to the poor named Etta Wheeler learned of the child’s plight and determined to rescue her. Wheeler consulted the police, but they declined to investigate. Next, Wheeler sought assistance from child helping charities, but they lacked authority to intervene in the family. At that time, of course, there was no such thing as child protective services, and the juvenile court did not come into existence for a quarter century. Eventually, Wheeler sought advice from Henry Bergh, the influential founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Bergh asked his lawyer, Elbridge Gerry, to find a legal mechanism to rescue the child.

How about labor laws? Personally, I’m glad that poor kids don’t spend their lives in sweat shops, because if they still did my dad would have had to, and then I suppose so would I have. I really like my master’s degree and sweet office. I’m glad I don’t have to sew clothes for 14 hours a day so I can eat. I’m glad there was a movement about providing public education to kids like me!

Some movements overreach, I recognize that. @twojarslave makes reasonable points, but I wonder how he feels about marital rape and the difficulty of leaving abusive relationships before the legislation came into being that he decries. Not all men stuck around, even in the halcyon days of before AFDC. Boy were those women screwed! (Probably often by johns, since you gotta feed your kids, and prostitution was one way to do it.)

But most movements are saying something people should hear and consider, whether they agree or not.

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The advertisement aside, I got into wet shaving b/c I was looking for a cost saving measure - I just couldn’t bring myself to shell out the money anymore for these expensive ass cartridges and I grew to hate disposable razors. I’m not really an environmentalist, but I produce far less waste with my safety razor than with any other type of shaving - if I switched to a straight razor my waste production as it relates to shaving would be close to zero.

Yes, extended families are part of the family structure in most of the world but the point here is that they are advocating for “disrupting” the universal norm of two parent families (outside of polygamist societies, and even then only rich men have multiple wives). And what exactly do they propose? A “village” of single mothers caring for one another.

If you actually read what I wrote earlier, you will notice that I said that BLM is fighting for a worthy cause but the problem is the way they are going about it. If they weren’t so unpalatable to the rest of society then perhaps some real changes could be made, rather than a couple cops getting charged and most of them getting acquitted. You don’t think that it would be helpful to their cause if more white people supported them? Sure there are some racists who will just oppose anything to do with black people, but BLM gives people good reasons to oppose them.

Maybe just more cooperation between families.

Like a stronger sense of community. And more Eyes on the Street, looking out for trouble and each others kids. Kinda like an old style ethnic neighborhood from the 50s. Everybody knows everybody. Kids in the Street, safely playing stick ball. Open fire hydrants with kids splashing around.

What does that have to do with disrupting two-parent families?

I’m saying they aren’t unpalatable to me because I can distinguish between “some” and “all.” If you actually read what I wrote you would see that I acknowledge poor behavior on the part of some but do not paint all with the same brush. Generalizing from individuals to the group, by the way, is pretty much the definition of prejudice.

But hey, hate on! No skin off of my nose, because you have no power over me.

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So the organization has no responsibility to condemn the actions of some members and protestors? If that’s the case then there is nothing wrong with the law enforcement system, the cops who abuse their authority have no reflection on the system as a whole, no matter how pervasive the abuse is.

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I’ll raise you Grants, NM for the win haha spent a good portion of my spring every year down there for fire for years.