Gillette - The most racist an ad can get

I’ve got a problem with Gillette and for once it’s not to do with the addition of yet another blade to their latest range of razors. Oh the innovation! At what point are they going to stop and start selling cheese graters to the confused souls that actually believe this new razor will get them the job/woman/life of their dreams? Picture it now, dozens of demographics rubbing mercilessly at their faces until all that’s left is a collection of these dreams in a bloody slop bucket full of moronic brains.

Nor is my latest objection tied to the farcical names that accompany these “special editions”, you know the ones that twitch irritatingly in your hand like a wounded raccoon clawing away at your face. Oh it’s black and it’s called Stealth or Phantom or Tornado or Combine Harvester.

No what’s irritated me this time is their latest ad campaign. And it’s not the usual saccharine, chisel-jawed, face-rubbing close-ups that have got me angrier than Naomi Campbell waiting at Terminal 5. No it’s the new horrible, “acceptable” racism of their new self-congratulatory twat-fest. You know the one where all the different men of varying races stand in a terrible CGI bathroom while their identical partner comes jauntily in to rub their face and have a poo, okay maybe I added the poo part. The black man’s with the black woman, the asian man with the asian woman, and so on and so forth and it’s such a frenetic pace it could almost be a subliminal advert for the BNP, providing of course the non-white members were in a CGI bathroom somewhere the other side of the North Sea.

Now I must confess I’m horribly biased on this issue, my girlfriend’s British Indian and I’m white British, although the British part in my case can be read, as with nearly other white Brit, as European mongrel, a bit of everything in the European area. I digress.

The point is, for all but the most sheltered and rural, this just doesn’t fit with our experience of the world, our experience of modern Britain. And it’s racist, mind-bogglingly racist. Does Gillette have a right to say who I can date, spend my life and times with, indeed who we can all date, fuck and marry? In thirty years will the human race stop diversifying as we marry people who are not only the same race as us but have almost identical features? Definitely not. The reality is most towns and cities have diverse populations, well except Norwich but I seem to remember saying modern Britain. The days when thousands of people turn up to witness a black man marry a white woman as they did in Long Eaton sixty years ago have thankfully passed. In three and a half years my girlfriend have never suffered direct abuse for our relationship and we wouldn’t expect to, the truth is the majority of people see the world with more dimensions and diversity than this advert suggests.

Much advertising has always been woefully behind the times, often it depends on the demographic they’re aiming for, hence all those horrible sofas on Dfs adverts and Michael Winner’s appearance on those god-awful e-sure adverts, but the fact that two of Gillette’s most prominent advertising stars, Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry are and were married to white women only makes Gillette’s crime all the more hideous. Tiger Woods himself is mixed race, so why this daft racism? It’s not just Gillette though, everywhere I look across every cultural medium, with the exception of the heart-stoppingly attractive woman on the Next adverts and her white other-half, white faces go with white faces, asian faces with asian faces, etc. Ultimately our cultural mediums need to reflect our culture and need to represent perfectly acceptable relationships as perfectly ordinary and a fact of life. Only when advertising starts portraying gay relationships, mixed race relationships and the like, relationships that aren’t from a 1950s manual of what’s “normal” can we take it seriously as a medium once again, oh except the Churchill dog and the meerkat from that website I can’t remember, now those are characters I can truly relate to…