Everyone relax – it’s just a John Lewis advert

On the one hand, we wring our hands and say, ‘how can we get boys to express themselves more?’ On the other, when an ad dramatically depicts one doing exactly that, we freak out about entitlement

I had no idea John Lewis did home insurance and now, thanks to the furore of people who muddle John Lewis adverts up with government campaigns, I do. Well done, sharply-dressed advertising types. The endless string of meetings, meticulous casting process and oat latte overdoses paid off. The advert with the kid in a dress flouncing about his home making a total mess while his mum and sister look on is all over Twitter and has made exactly the splash you were aiming for.

In the advert, a young lad with glasses on pulls a dress over his clothes and runs amok through their shiny home, wrecking the joint in time with Stevie Nicks’s Edge of Seventeen. Right-wing columnists raged about it. The cult-like clusters of boy-in-a-dress haters declared that the child is the “embodiment of male privilege”, doing whatever he wants with impunity while his sister and his mother look “meekly” on.

Nice one, John Lewis. You took the hot topic of the day and goaded people into shouting about your brand.

There are two types of people who objected to the advert. First are the right-wingers who detest any kind of “wokery”; anything which positively represents minorities or liberal sensibilities. They are the ones permanently outraged that anything in culture moves forward in any way whatsoever.

The other type of objectors are people who consider themselves extremely accepting and champions of minorities. They would have been the first to praise the decision to finally have non-white people being represented in TV adverts; they are the types who will donate to a refugee charity at Christmas and would stick up for people at a bus stop if someone shouted a racist slur at them. But when they see a young kid expressing himself, tearing down stereotypes, they consider it an attack on cisgender women; a bloke can do what he likes with no repercussions, but women can’t.

We all see things from our own perspectives, and here is mine: I live in a world where boys and men are killing themselves at a much higher rate than women because it is still not regarded as acceptable for boys to cry. They are told to bottle their feelings up in a way women and girls are not.

I am raising a son who is a bit of an introvert. He loves playing football, but off the sports field is a quiet, studious boy who has never given me much cause to tell him off. He has always sought to remove himself from boisterous, loud types (like, erm, his mother and sister). He’s not a “lad” type and there is not much on TV that aims to represent boys like him positively.

My children are allowed, as I was when I was growing up, to draw on their bedroom walls. My daughter and her friends spend hours decorating hers with drawings in felt tip pens. My son wouldn’t dream of it; his walls are immaculate.

My daughter gives me a minute-by-minute commentary on her every emotion. But when my son gives me the slightest notion of what he is feeling, I hold my breath because the moment is so rare that I don’t want to make the slightest noise in case he skedaddles.

I see the boy in the John Lewis ad like my son. He’s not a kid who has done what he is doing before; the “meekness” of his mum and sister is because they are so taken aback that he has come out of his shell. The advert champions the freedom of quiet boys who don’t fit in with “laddish” types – and are forging their own path.

To say the boy is “entitled” for behaving the way he does, dehumanises him. We don’t know his story. Maybe he’d shut himself in his room all weekend because he was being bullied at school and this was his way of showing he’d had enough.

On the one hand, we wring our hands and say, “How can we get boys to express themselves more?” On the other, when an ad depicts one doing exactly that, we freak out about entitlement (it’s worth noting John Lewis did a similar ad in 2015 with a girl behaving much like this boy).

I recently came home and found my son and his mate cheerily painting their nails. He grinned at me and said, “Boys will be boys!”. Their generation is way ahead of mine, which is endlessly dissecting a home insurance advert. We are dinosaurs. The youth have got this.