So, Gillette, the company that thought it was a neato-keen idea to insult every man on the planet as part of a marketing strategy, has excreted another head-scratcher of an ad. This time, it’s a father teaching his daughter how to shave his face. Yeah, that’s right, it’s the Cause Du Jour, transgenderism. I couldn’t actually find the plain, unaltered or un-commented-upon version of the video (largely because… meh, why bother), but this  “annotated” version gets the idea across.

A lot of people on the political right are terribly offended by transgenderism. I’m befuddled by it… partly by whatever quirk of genetics or wiring that causes the brain to not match up with the body, partly by how it has rather suddenly become so fargin’ trendy. As a small-l libertarian, you go do you, be what you want to be. You want to wear a gimp suit and hang from the ceiling with your significant other, go right ahead. What to dress up like a blue fox and attend a furry convention? Sure, whatever, it’s better than pretending to enjoy watching paint dry. You were born a dude and you want to dress up like a chick, go for it. You want to get your dangly bits lopped off, hey great, just don’t send me pictures or tell me about it because, dude, dangly bits and knives = shudder. But where I draw a hard line: you want to be weird and creepifyin’… don’t ask me to pay for it, and for Odin’s sake don’t expect me to *celebrate* it.

Generation Xers like myself can probably be considered to be more or less the first generation raised in an environment where it was *expected* that we’d be all tolerant and such about every damn thing. The Boomers “ended” racism and sexism and homophobia and such; when those of my age were growing up, it was considered good and proper for everyone to simply accept what everyone else was. We were supposed to be a non-racist, non-sexist, non-homophobic generation (your experiences may vary). But holy crap, the way that “acceptance” has morphed into “celebrate it or you’re a Nazi” seems to be working to reverse all the historic gains. I know more than a few people who  have tried to be “good” people who didn’t hold “bad” views, but the way we’ve all been battered with propaganda has actually made these people decide that “bad” views are actually worth a second look. I suspect that the pendulum on “trans” might be not all that far from swinging back, what with the extremely disturbing nature of such clearly “that ain’t right” cultural phenomena as “Desmond” and getting *children* to “transition.”

So I have to wonder just WTF Gillette is thinking. Just who are they marketing to here? The specific sector would seem to be pretty small… females who transition to male and need to shave. On the other hand: commercials such as this certainly bump up discussion of the brand. Without an ad like this, would The Unwanted Blog actually be blathering on about Gillette razors? Unlikely. So, kudos, I guess, for getting their name into the yammer-o-sphere once again.