"We have to help guide you along"

Article here. Excerpt:

'The pleasure of these ads comes from indulging in a little reverse sexism.

Finally, after all these years of men ogling women and parsing them into body bits, we get to have our turn! The ads even commit the same crimes as all lady product ads — showing the gain without the pain. (We see the man shaving his chest into Greek statue smoothness, but we don't see the three-days-later shot with the little bristles. And already the ads have induced complaints of misandry: “The underlying message is that men are slobs, men are grotesque, men have hairy backs, and they need women to civilize them,” Scott A. Lukas, an anthropology professor and head of the Gender Ads Project told The Post. Point won.

Except that, somehow, these Gillette ads feel harmless and funny. No one really thinks that Kate and Hannah and Genesis are doing these men any damage. Why? Because the vibe they tap into is not really “last days of Rome, women rule the world,” but “first days of moving in together, girlfriend throws out my La-Z-Boy.” The ad takes for granted a truth that is sometimes overlooked: that men welcome their partners' small interventions, the way we steer them through the endless set of never-done tasks that constitute women's work. My husband even says, “Men like it when women tell them what to wear, because we don't know.”

Telling your man to shave, in other words, is not so far off from telling him that dishes left by the side of the sink eventually have to make their way under the water, etc. Listen to the outtake from the commercial, where Kate, Hannah and Genesis discuss what they were up to. “We have to help guide you along,” Kate says. Not much threat there.'