A few months ago, for Father’s Day, Angel Soft tried to be obnoxiously progressive, and it blew up in their faces. On June 15th, the toilet paper company, who for whatever reason actually has a youtube account, posted a video called: “Happy Father’s Day, Mom”. Now, anyone capable of rational thought wouldn’t even need to view this video to see where they went wrong right out of the gate. Obviously, we have a day called Father’s Day for fathers, and a day called Mother’s Day for mothers. Equality. No heavy-handed, try-hard, progressive agenda needs to be applied to this situation. If there only existed a Father’s Day, the premise of this video would actually work. This isn’t the case however, so the video fails, and hundreds of thousands of eyes collectively roll.
In case you weren’t able to deduce what the video is about yet, it is a series of heartfelt, dramatic testimonials from various individuals, telling stories about how great, and appreciated their mothers are. In a Father’s Day video. Not a Mother’s Day video, mind you, but a Father’s Day video. Why on Earth would a company do this? After all, it’s sort of like celebrating Black History Month by releasing a video of people giving examples of the accomplishments of white historical figures. It completely undermines what the entire month or day was created for altogether. Maybe we can start celebrating Chanukah on Memorial Day, or Halloween on Martin Luther King, Jr Day. I’ll make sure to thank my toaster for it’s service the next time Veteran’s Day rolls around.
It seems what Angel Soft was trying to do here is cash in on all that popular social justice feminism hashtag gluten madness. That same madness that is allegedly carried out in the name of equality, all the while exhibiting the very properties of inequality. Somebody at the company probably thought to themselves: “What hot new trend is going around out there in the streets that we can use to make toilet paper sexy again?” After 2 minutes on twitter, they found their answer in aimless third-wave entitlement feminism. “Ah yes!” The toilet paper lackey exclaimed. “We’ll take any given situation and focus solely on the female, and write the male out whenever possible. It’ll be a smash hit!” Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the smash hit that Angel Soft has hoped for, and they learned an important life lesson that day.
People were none too thrilled with their fatherless Father’s Day message, and took to the company’s social media profiles to let loose. Their facebook page, which would receive maybe two comments on each post on a good day, was flooded with over a thousand comments, most of which overwhelmingly criticized the ad for downplaying the importance of fathers on the very day set aside to celebrate them. Not only that, but facebook users took the opportunity to go back though Angel Soft’s profile and leave snarky comments on all the previous posts. Posts of children’s art would have comments like: “Is that a mom calling a dad a deadbeat?” or “she’s probably tired from wishing her mom a happy father’s day.” on a posting of a sleeping child. Many of the posts are quite hilarious.
The barrage of comments continued for a solid month after the Great Father’s Day Debacle of 2015, before tapering off, back to the 2 or 3 comments lonely housewives were previously leaving on the toilet paper company’s facebook page. It seemed like things were back to normal, with the posting of children’s artwork and constant influx of comments asking about toilet paper coupons, when Angel Soft fucked up again.
On Labor Day, they posted an image of a father (They had started to acknowledge fathers by this point) playing with children on a bed, with the caption “Not All Workers Get Today Off.” It was by no means the shitstorm of three months earlier, but nonetheless another influx of comments greeted whatever poor individual has the job of handling social media for the dookie paper company. Some people complained that parenting is a blessing and not a job. Others complained that plenty of them had to work that very day. Somebody even played the deployed servicemen card. Normally, all this social media complaining wouldn’t catch my attention, but I couldn’t help but feel that by this point, people were just waiting around to find things to chastise the company for. I find that spitefulness to be very funny.
In the end however, I guess any publicity is good publicity, because the company that makes paper to wipe booty holes has over 300,000 likes on facebook. The Father’s Day joke posts have all but ceased at this point, and people other than lonely middle-aged women are actually posting on their page now. The funny thing is, the company never once acknowledged any of the angry posts, and seemed to act like they didn’t even exist. They obviously saw them however, because most of the image posts they’ve put up since actually have men in them, or revolve around fathers. I have no idea how to end this post. So, uh, bye I guess.