If you haven’t already seen Gillette’s new advertising campaign for men, check it out. It’s fascinating. It’s intensely insistent upon the idea that men should be hair-free, from their heads to their armpits to their groins. The website features an interactive interface that follows a towel-clad guy as he walks through various settings (i.e.: the bathroom, a horse stable, a clothing store). At each location, the narrator provides another argument for why shaving is the way to go. “A sweater should be bought, not grown” -  “An empty stable smells better than a full one” and, my personal favorite, “If you want to see the tree, you shouldn’t have to blaze a trail to get there.” It’s novel and refreshing, in a way, to see marketing advertising such intense bodily care regimens to men as they historically have to women (though this campaign does nothing to really equalize the playing field that’s been uneven for centuries). However, I can’t help but ask why this is necessary.

Is this really a step in the right direction? I think it’s great that men are being told that it’s okay to care for your body, that shaving or being hairless is not feminizing - on one hand it is a chance for men to see that manhood can be something different than what they’ve always been told it is. Yet, it troubles me that what offers liberation in this ad is one of the very things that has subjugated and oppressed women - the idea that hair is dirty, that women must be smooth and hairless and if they’re not, they’re unkempt and unworthy, has always been upsetting and troublesome. Why push men in the same direction? Instead, why not offer both options to both genders. The way to equality and freedom isn’t to impose the same ills, it’s to dismantle and liberate them.

But, as a side note, I find it wonderfully normative that each location in the ad also features a woman who is longingly and desiringly gazing at the man before her. This, I believe, serves to rectify any threat to masculinity that the advertisement might create. It lets men know that despite the attention they give to their bodies in a historically “feminizing” way, they can still retain their heterosexual appeal, their normative masculinity and their sense of a stereotypical male self.

So, one step forward or two steps back?