The Gillette corporation recently released one of those warm and fuzzy prosocial lifestyle ads. It was an innocuous little string of inspirational skits, a bit of virtue-signalling whose message, basically, is “Don’t Be A Dick”. It’s a #MeToo update of those nice vignettes from the Church of Latter Day Saints that used to make you either tear up or retch.

Well, it certainly got the Breitbart/PJ Media set bristling. One headline declared the ad “A War on Trump”. Given that the message was “Don’t Be Dick”, it’s hard to disagree.

But my favourite response came from an apoplectic Ezra Levant, who decided to beard Gillette in their very den. He points out indignantly that Gillette hired a “feminist woman” (!!!) to direct the commercial. This astonishes Ezra. “Imagine having a middle aged male direct an ad for tampons,” he marvels. “Why would you do that?”

Well, between 8% and 11% of film and video directors, from commercials to industrials to features, are women. That means that since the invention of television advertising, there’s a strong likelihood that almost all ads for tampons have been directed by (and probably shot by, lit by, edited by, and even written by) men.

Given that Ezra once freaked about a curriculum because it included the word “vagina” (you should have seen him speaking “the word” - he looked as though he were chewing garlic-flavoured glass shards), his peculiar notion that men couldn’t possible direct a tampon commercial (“Does anyone on the set know what the heck these things are for, anyway?”), and his apparent unawareness that women actually use razors, one really has to wonder about the state of things in the Levant family manor.

Bottom line: Gillette has cannily and cynically associated itself with a popular movement, avoiding Pepsi’s astonishingly clumsy failure to do the same two years ago. But only by a whisker.