Gillette and Me

My first and last Gillette razor looked like this one:

It was a hand-me-down from my father, and I used it (and Gillette’s double-edged blades) for about a decade. I then — more than 50 years ago — switched to a  Schick injector razor. I went through a few of those before I found an off-brand razor-mirror combination for shaving in the shower. I’ve been using it for more than 30 years.

The blades that came with the shower-shaving razor were a knock-off of Gillette’s Trac II. I’ve bought nothing but similar knock-offs since then. So, apart from a pittance in licensing fees (and maybe not even that), Gillette hasn’t made a dime from me in more than 50 years.

That makes me glad because of Gillette’s toxic wokeness, about which Harry Stein writes in the Autumn 2019 issue of City Journal:

If, as we’re often told, corporations aren’t people, Gillette recently did a good job of impersonating one — specifically, an over-the-top campus feminist — with an ad declaring its customers’ defining trait, masculinity, “toxic.” Featuring bullies, sexual harassers, and sociopaths without porfolio, the ad flipped Gillette’s usual tagline to ask: “Is this the best a man can get?” And soon, a Facebook ad followed showing — wait for it — a dad helping his transgender teen shave for the first time.

I missed that because I don’t watch commercial TV, other than 5 minutes a day to catch the local weather forecast (which is a habit but certainly not a necessity these days). It’s a good thing I missed it, or I might have ruined a good TV set by throwing a brick at it.

The good news, according to Stein, is that because of the strongly negative reaction of Gillette’s customers to the “woke” ad campaign, Gillette’s parent company, Procter & Gamble, had written Gillette down by $8 billion this past summer. I would have been among the many consumers who boycotted Gillette products and caused the write-down. But I presciently abandoned Gillette more than 50 years ago.