On X (formerly Twitter), the actor Kevin Sorbo, best known for playing Hercules in the mid-1990s, recently posted a commercial from that era:
It’s why younger gen’s are having “nostalgia” for the 90s despite not even being born then. They instinctively know something’s off, and things aren’t how they’re supposed to be, because there’s so much evidence of us having lived in a completely different society only a moment… https://t.co/TsvNtf4uFh
— TheFamousArtistBirdyRose (@TheFamousArtBR) July 11, 2026
Sorbo wrote, “Few things will radicalize you more than seeing what the world looked like 30 years ago.”
Fair enough, but these images are not “what the world looked like 30 years ago.” They’re a tightly curated and edited series of film clips designed to boost the sales of disposable razor blades to 1990s-era men. But they do say a lot about what large corporations and the firms they hired to create their commercials thought about their potential customers, and how to reach them. For Gillette, those customers were young men.
As 2026-era Gillette is hoping you’ll forget, by 2019, with the #metoo movement still in vogue, Gillette’s corporate overlords had a very different opinion of their customers:
This worldview among the establishment left reached a peak during Kamala Harris’s stillborn presidential bid, as Don Surber wrote at his Substack in October of 2024, in a column titled, “Gillette, Bud Light, Kamala:”
Women are 50% more likely to get into college and men are 9 times as likely to be in prison. The media and the government repeatedly try to emasculate men as they want to turn us into drones for these queen bees. The gender gap merely shines light on the problem.
After decades of this stereotyping of men as evil and the constant discrimination against men, males have had it. The backlash may have begun with Hillary but it later torched Gillette, which launched a ridiculous ad campaign on attacking toxic masculinity.
On January 15, 2019, Forbes gushed, “As Gillette has come under increasing competition from low priced competitors such as Dollar Shave Club and Harry's, along with a resurgent Schick who is offering refill cartridges that fit Gillette razors, its market share has dropped from 70% to 50% over the past decade. Gillette has been forced to drop the price of its razors by about 15% over the past few years and is on the verge of losing master brand status.
“It is within this competitive context that Gillette debuted its ‘We Believe in the Best in Men’ ad campaign on its website yesterday, part of an overall shift to the slightly modified tag ‘The Best a Man Can Be.’ The 1:48 length video starts out with images of remarkably troubled looking men as a narrator makes reference to bullying, sexual harassment, and toxic masculinity. It then poses the question ‘Is This the Best a Man Can Get?’ The viewer then sees depictions of a series of very ugly and negative behaviors, including bullying, fighting, sexual harassment, and blatantly interfering with a woman speaking in the workplace. The ad goes on to state it is time for men to stop making excuses and to renounce the idea that ‘boys will be boys.’ Gillette concludes that by calling for and showing images of men holding other men accountable and emphasizing that the boys of today will be the men of tomorrow.”
I saw the ad, blinked twice, and threw all my razors into the trash.
In 2019, Glenn Reynolds of PJ Mdeia’s sister-site Instapundit.com responded to Gillette’s ad by noting that the real reason Gillette’s ad “really struck a nerve is this: Men are used to being treated badly on TV shows and in ads, because women control most discretionary spending. But now men are even being treated badly in ads for the products they themselves buy. Advertisers thinking they can get away with that is a pretty open expression of contempt. And the contempt is being returned.”
Pushing back against the Cultural Revolution
2020’s color revolution and the Biden-Harris era were right around the corner. But several years before “the Great Awokening,” some men tried to push back against these toxic trends, which were prevalent back then, but were beginning to accelerate exponentially in the establishment left. In the introduction to his 2013 book, Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness, Eric Metaxas described writing his book in part to push back from the Vietnam/Watergate-era leftist mindset of “questioning authority.” He writes, “you could say that we’ve gone all the way from foolishly accepting all authority to foolishly rejecting all authority. We’ve gone from the extreme of being naive to the other extreme of being cynical. The golden mean, where we would question authority in order to determine whether it was legitimate, was passed by entirely. We have fled from one icy pole to the other, missing the equator altogether.”
Metaxas added that in his opinion, what makes a man great is a combination of being near or at the center of a historic moment, and the ability to affect that moment, along with “that of surrendering themselves to a higher purpose, of giving something away that they might have kept. All of them did this in one way or another. Doing this is noble and admirable, and it takes courage and it usually takes faith. Each of the seven men in this book have that quality.”
In “Raising Good Men,” her interview with Metaxas at National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez asked him about why he chose the historic figures he profiled, beginning with George Washington. Lopez asked, “Did anyone really need to write anything new about George Washington?”
METAXAS: I don’t write anything new, nor was that my goal. On the contrary, I only wanted to reiterate the basics, because I’m afraid most Americans aren’t really aware of those basics about him anymore. It was once de rigueur in our schools to teach his story, but as I say in the introduction to this book, that’s no longer the case and this is having a baleful effect. We’ve so focused on the negative things about him that we have forgotten how superlatively great he was and what tremendous sacrifices he made. Every American needs to know his story.
LOPEZ: What was your goal and what do you think you accomplished in Seven Men?
METAXAS: I wanted to begin a cultural conversation on what men are and what they ought to be. We’ve gotten so confused on this subject that we’ve shrunk from it, and that’s been tremendously unhealthy. And as part of beginning this conversation, I wanted to hold up the examples of these seven men whom I think worthy of general emulation. These were real men who faced monumental difficulties with courage and grace. We need to educate ourselves — and the new generation — with these stories. We used to do that. Plutarch’s Lives was popular for centuries. Bonhoeffer actually was reading it during his last days on this earth. We need heroes very desperately, and these seven men are a good place to start.
Given the pop culture of the last 30 years or so, men particularly need heroes today to push back against how they’re depicted on TV. In Seven Men, Metaxas wrote:
One of the most popular TV shows of the 1950s was called Father Knows Best. It was a sweet portrayal of a wonderful and in many ways typical American family. The father, played by Robert Young, was the unquestioned authority, but his authority was never harsh or domineering. His strength was a quiet strength. In fact, he was gentle and wise and kind and giving—so much so that just about everyone watching the show wished their dad could be more like that! But of course today we tend to see fathers depicted in the mainstream media either as dunces or as overbearing fools.
Madison Ave. Overdoses on Irony
Fast-forward to today; the last bastion of network destination television that many American men watch on a regular basis is the NFL. We want to watch the games live, which means having to sit through endless amounts of TV ads. And when they’re not being shamed by corporations that want to sell them disposable razor blades, in most TV commercials, men are invariably portrayed as dunces or fools, or both.
In part, that’s because, unlike the 1990s Gillette commercial seen at the start of this post, when they’re not hectoring men as Gillette did in 2019, modern TV commercials are absolutely saturated in the sort of irony that used to be the province of David Letterman in the 1980s. Merrill Markoe was Letterman’s companion for most of that decade, and the head writer on his show, who invented many of its most popular tropes. In 2015, she was asked by Salon.com about the style of irony that Letterman traded in, and if it had “filtered more deeply into comedy in specific and American culture in general.” She replied:
Yes. It’s frequently the language of advertising and corporate P.R. now. It is the voice of what [musician Andy Prieboy of the rock group Wall of Voodoo, her longtime companion] calls “Your buddy the corporation.” Everyone’s hip. Everyone’s ironic. Everyone who is selling you something wants you to know they have the same limitations and daily strife that you do. You definitely should be wary when you hear this voice now. It’s not to be trusted. Unless you’re in the market for an aluminum cookware set or an Apple watch.
Because of that need for irony, TV commercials are required to be jokey and edgy, but the only group they can make fun of are men, because the sponsors would be accused of being sexist and misogynistic otherwise.
This trend went into hyperdrive by 2023. When Bud Light self-immolated that year, it wasn’t just because of hiring Dylan Mulvaney to help sell the beer most associated with men; it was also the words that Alissa Heinerscheid, their then vice-president of advertising, said on a podcast in March of 2023:
“I’m a businesswoman, I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand there will be no future for Bud Light.’”
She also said, “We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
Two days later, she solved the problem of too many frat bros quaffing her beer. She signed Dylan Mulvaney up as a spokesman-pretending-to-be-a-spokeswoman and voila! No more frat bros hogging all the beer. Sales dropped and she became the FIRST WOMAN vice president of the brand to be fired.
As with Gillette, bashing your male customers and mocking them with a transvestite performance artist like Mulvaney is not a way to build your brand, which is why Heinerscheid was eventually shown the door. But the damage was done; “Bud Lighting” became a codeword for woke, virtue signaling executives dynamiting their brand’s sales into oblivion.
The biggest problem isn't even the boycott; it's that they've become a cultural punchline. This is now like having an AOL email address or driving a minivan. People avoid it so their buddies don't rip them. Not sure how you fix that as a brand. https://t.co/JFmUU7IQj6
— John Ekdahl (@JohnEkdahl) May 4, 2023
In Seven Men, Metaxas wrote:
[B]ecause men have sometimes used their strength selfishly, there has been a backlash against the whole idea of masculine strength. It has been seen—and portrayed—as something negative. If you buy into that idea, then you realize the only way to deal with it is to work against it, to try to weaken men, because whatever strength they have will be used to harm others. This leads to the emasculated idea of men. Strength is denigrated because it can be used for ill. So we live in a culture where strength is feared and where there is a sense that—to protect the weak—strength itself must be weakened. When this happens, the heroic and true nature of strength is much forgotten. It leads to a world of men who aren’t really men. Instead they are just two kinds of boys: boasting, loud-mouthed bullies or soft, emasculated pseudo-men. Women feel that they must be “empowered” and must never rely on men for strength. It’s a lot like a socialistic idea, where “power” and “strength” are redistributed—taken away from men and given to women, to even things out. Of course it doesn’t work that way. Everyone loses.
The knight in shining armor who does all he can to protect others, the gentleman who lays down his cloak or opens a door for a lady—these are Christian ideals of manliness. Jesus said that he who would lead must be the servant of all. It’s the biblical idea of servant leadership. The true leader gives himself to the people he leads. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. Jesus died for those he loves. That is God’s idea of strength and leadership and blessing. It’s something to be used in the service of others. So God’s idea of masculine strength gives us the idea of a chivalrous gentleman toward women, not a bully or someone who sees no difference between himself and them.
Those are all noble ideas; no wonder academia, advertising, and pop culture have worked extremely hard to make them anathema.
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