D&D is for Sissies

It isn’t possible for me to remain completely divorced from politics; I’ve struggled to keep politics from this blog and I think I’ve done a good job. But … while I’m not going to talk about the American experience, I have some things to say about this.

We’ve all seen the male indignation. We’ve seen it in the comments section and in the rush of videos that have come out. Pro-male 4chan and reddit content creators live for this; the big company turning out a highly public woke film that enables them to scream blue bloody murder to their own kind, for the LOLz, for the views and the cash, for the entitlement and the promotion of a cause that relies on them creating injustice against males out of SOMETHING, whatever they can dig up today. Creating views means we have to write about something every day … and it is exhausting having to dredge up content from weak connections that can be put together from a Disney film or the latest contribution to the Joker universe.

Thank gawd Gillette decided to make a contribution that helps writing a rant about the vilification of males easy. The man-boys can coast on this for weeks.

I find myself puzzling, “Why did Gillette think this was necessary?”

My thoughts lead me to think this is the company thinking of the long game. There is a growing philosophy in business that recognizes the difference between the “finite” and the “infinite” game. For the most part, in the 20th century, business philosophy has argued that business is a finite game. We, us, our business, we’re going to win when we destroy the competition and establish ourselves as the last man standing. All the rhetoric that you’ll find for most of the big companies used to talk like this … and much of the rhetoric for smaller companies still does. Only, it is becoming painfully recognized that this strategy is impractical ~ and not only does it not work, it actually hurts the company. Beating the drum, beating the drum, beating the drum steadily causes the competitor to believe that “winning” is more important than “competing” … and in the process of shouting slogans and pouring money into the marketing campaign, to say how grate we are, the product doesn’t change and steadily market share diminishes. For example, professional sport.

The infinite game has no end. No one playing the infinite game thinks there’s an end that’s going to come. As Sinek says in the link immediately above, "... in infinite games, because there are no winners or losers, what happens is players drop out of the game when they run out of the will or the resources to continue to play."

So let’s look at the Gillette commercial again. This is not a “woke” video. Gillette doesn’t care about what offended males think … or what razors offended males are going to buy. They’re going to buy Gillette. Oh, for a little while, some of them are going to try another product, out of anger, but they’ll hate the other product and they’ll have trouble finding something as reliable as a Gillette razor; and a lot of them already own a shaver so they’re not going to throw that away. The threat to Gillette’s bottom line is minimal. Gillette has deep pockets, and it’s got Proctor & Gamble’s pockets, so it isn’t going to go under.

None of this was done without a lot of marketing experts looking at it, both by Gillette and by P&G. I think the theme of the commercial, the way it is presented, shows the goal here. Gillette is concerned about children who aren’t allowed to shave yet. The next generation. Who are seeing this commercial everyday, because they’re just as able to watch a commercial as any one else.

Go on, examine the commercial shot by shot. The men in the mirrors, shot slightly from below; the kids chasing the one kid, breaking through the woman kissing the man; the mother hugging the kid; the taunts of being a loser; the old cartoon of male wolves, sitcoms, videos, all on a television ~ depicted as a kid sees them, not as they occur in real life. I think we forget that once almost all adult life was seen only on a screen. Cut to bored male kids sitting on a couch; bored at this content. More sit-coms, bad television … and so on. And of course, we have Dads shouting over the barbecue.  These are all images a kid will remember.  A kid growing up in a world where loud, abusive men are becoming a less viable role-model.

Those shouting at the video are only emphasizing Gillette’s agenda. Children are watching this battle royale between feminists and masculinist and it’s not hard to see which is the bigger threat. Dad is angry and mom is giving you a hug. It’s what four generations of terrified fathers have called the sissification of America, as they watch their sons have feelings, lose interest in football, become gay, resist war for war’s sake, marry independent thinking women and give up the church. It’s been a hard century for generations of males who have died while losing their grip on Victorian-era attitudes.

This, however, does come around to role-playing games, as the reader might have guessed. I chuckle, thinking of fathers who once, in my lifetime, thought that any interest in computers was “sissy,” and those who played role-playing games doubly so. This, I will remind you, was the central theme that  arose for decades whenever D&D was depicted ~ that if you pretended to fight pretend dragons with your pretend sword, rolling faggy dice, etcetera, it meant you were sissy.  Of course, we’ve made nerdism cool now so that sissified men who don’t play football can pretend they’re just as strong as the real thing, carrying their two hundred pounds of extra weight just above the chair seat.

Sorry. Did that hit too close to the bone? You’re saying we’re not sissies?

Of course we’re not. I’m only stressing that four generations of males, the generations that raised the man-boys bitching online about a razor commercial that says, effectively, “We don’t like bullies either, use our razor” ~ those generations absolutely thought in their day that we are all sissies for using computers and playing dungeons and dragons. I just want to put this rhetoric in context.

It is the benefit of remembering a world 40 years ago.