The problem with ‘woke’ ad campaigns

It seemed to me for a moment like my memory was playing tricks on me, but apparently not: looking back into ye olde blog archive, about five years ago I posted this little gem about Proctor & Gamble promoting hip, ‘woke’ feminism via their Pantene brand, targetted at women. And now it seems the same big pharma corporation is using one of their ‘men’s’ brands, Gillette, to get in on the same angle, with a hip, ‘woke’ variation on their slogan, ‘The Best a Man Can Get’. Back then, I believe the exact phrase I used was: ‘Guh.’ So, here it is, gentle readers: the Feminist™ critique of toxic masculinity. Brought to you (again!) by Proctor & Gamble. Guh.

Back then, I made the rather simplistic point, echoing Nancy Fraser (who said it better) that neoliberal capitalism and feminism are not necessarily at odds with each other. Indeed, they even have some common interests. Not that such a conclusion was wrong, of course. The confluence between neoliberal interests in demoralised, replaceable, fungible labour on the one hand, and the liberal-feminist suspicion of rooted family structures on the other, is clear, obvious, and requires critique from the left. Such a critique is not only possible, but historically-evidenced and necessary. But now that angle of approach seems to miss a broader point: a point that has only come into clearer focus as I have read more books by Christopher Lasch, René Girard, and Thomas Frank.

Thomas Frank, author, analyst and contributor to the Guardian, the Baffler and the Real News Network, whose book Listen, Liberal is a notable cry from the heart for the American political left to remember its working-class roots, has an incisive critique of ‘woke’ neoliberalism from the opposite angle. Sure, on the production side of the equation, there is a confluence of interests between a sæcularising left which views the family with suspicion and a corporate capitalism willing and ready to seize upon the breakup of the family œconomy for the cheaper labour it frees up. But on the consumption side of the equation, Frank’s The Conquest of Cool ought to be required reading.

In brief, The Conquest of Cool details how the notably un-cool marketing machines for the American corporate world managed to study the rise of the youth movement and the counter-culture of the 1960s and make rebranding themselves a perpetual strategy. The ‘hip’-ness of youth rebellion and non-conformism was coöpted and transformed, with resounding success, into an ‘official capitalist style’, starting with the first minimalist advertisements for Volkswagen in the 1960’s as they catered to the youth market with a self-subversive style, and ending with the embrace of the sleek futurist æsthetic that is the Apple brand. Not only that, but they did so in full faith that the creative-destructive aims of the counterculture were right and just and good – which should be a trifle disturbing for anyone who truly believed in the counterculture! As Frank writes:

Many in American business, particularly in the two industries studied here, imagined the counterculture not as an enemy to be undermined or a threat to consumer culture but as a hopeful sign, a symbolic ally in their own struggles against the mountains of dead-weight procedure and hierarchy that had accumulated over the years…

Like the young insurgents, people in more advanced reaches of the American corporate world deplored conformity, distrusted routine, and encouraged resistance to established power. They welcomed the youth-led cultural revolution not because they were secretly planning to subvert it… but because they perceived in it a comrade in their own struggles to revitalise American business and the consumer order generally.

Here we are at the end of the 2010’s, though, and ‘woke’ has now replaced ‘hip’ as the wilfully-coöptable and creatively-destructive potential partner of the modern ad man. I daren’t speak for Frank on this question, but I imagine he would have a field day with Proctor & Gamble’s new ad, because there’s so much there that echoes beat-for-beat the thesis of The Conquest of Cool. The narrator signalling his authenticity with an earnest appeal. The children symbolically bursting through a screen playing an old Gillette TV commercial (notice the subtle self-critique, which adds to the feeling of ‘earnestness’). The old Berkelite solid-state television set playing tellingly-retro cartoons and lowbrow Archie Bunker-style sitcoms. The man with neatly-combed hair, shirt and tie making sexist jokes in front of a studio audience. The male executive in a corporate boardroom ‘mansplaining’ what a woman has just said. Picket fences. Barbecues. Polo shirts. All the tactile and visual touchstones that indicate the 1950s vital-centre mainstream against which the original ‘youth culture’ rebelled. The implicit message is clear: sexism is unhip. It’s square. It’s not cool. It’s something old people do, or else it’s something old people model or condone for young people to copy.

By contrast, the ‘wokeness’ in the ad is signalled through the use of modern technologies – cable news, for example, and smartphone cameras. ‘Woke’ manliness is performed by young people with non-conformist hairdos and neatly (Gillette?)-trimmed hipster beards. ‘Woke’ manliness is young dads stepping out into the yard or struggling against the oncoming crowd at a busy intersection to break up a fight. And the sign-off, of course, is an appeal to the future: ‘the boys of today will be the men of tomorrow.’

I would just take a moment to note that there is very little wrong with the message itself: sexism and violence and bullying are generally things we can agree are bad (or ‘toxic’, if you prefer) and should change. But Frank would have us notice the packaging, the subtext in which and through which that message is carried – and he would point us straight to Girard in doing so. There’s always a mark. There’s always a designated butt, a scapegoat – and in this case, it’s the old people. It’s not even enough to say that the ad misses the mark even though the ‘flight from feeling’ is still the most pronounced and the most violent among the young, because that doesn’t quite address the impulse to pick out and attack a mark in the first place.

There is, after all, something quite ugly about a company that points to old and old-fashioned folks as ‘the problem’ in what is otherwise a laudable anti-bullying message. (Ageism is a thing, guys.) There is something even uglier and more hypocritical in being lectured to about the evils of bullying by a company which ruthlessly exploits slave labour in its supply chains, but does nothing about it because the victims of this particular kind of bullying are invisible in the news cycle this ad glorifies. Of course the ad provoked a backlash: it was designed to. More attention means more airtime. More negative press gives Proctor & Gamble more free opportunities to look like a ‘woke’ rebel and culture-jammer against the ‘squares’ who complain. Again, Thomas Frank, keen cultural observer that he is, noticed this years ago:

Ordinary working-class people are right to hate the culture we live in. They are right to feel they have no power over it, and to notice that it makes them feel inadequate and stupid. The ‘Middle Americans’, after all, are the people the ads and the sitcoms and the movies warn us against. They are the prudish preacher who forbids dancing, the dullard husband who foolishly consumes Brand X, the racist dad who beats his kids, the square cowboy who is gunned down by the alternative cowboy, the stifling family life we are supposed to want to escape, the hardhat who just doesn’t get it. Conservatives are good at pinpointing and magnifying these small but legitimate cultural grievances. What they are wrong about are the forces that create the problem.

Thomas Frank’s now 15-year-old analysis would not be out of place today – with one very notable exception: the last sentence. As Frank himself points out in his more recent book, conservatives are the ones who are wising up, and noticing that in the post-Trump era, the old playbook of social conservatism + markets doesn’t work anymore (not that they ever did so well). Don’t believe me? Ask Tucker Carlson! Now, of course Tucker Carlson weds his critique of unbridled markets and their penchant for destroying the things that social conservatives claim to value (communities, churches, local businesses, agrarian lifestyles, nuclear families) to a chord of Yellow Peril racial animus that is unacceptable. And of course Carlson refuses to posit any sort of real alternative to capitalism. But that doesn’t stop his line of critique from being popular among the same people the left should be reaching. This has been the logic of the backlash from the beginning.

If there is no critique from the left of the sort of performatively-‘woke’ capitalism that Proctor & Gamble is engaging in with this ad, the field will be wide open for the neo-Coughlinist ideology of Tucker Carlson and those who will inevitably follow him. And 2016 is behind us now, so we know what ‘woke’ neoliberalism looks like and sounds like, and more importantly how it performs, when it goes up against an even marginally self-aware appeal to popular anger over such cultural slights. This is not a development to welcome.