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This situation is now, however, peculiar to advertising. I once took a seminar on Metaphysics in which the professor began by asserting that there were no more than 75 original ideas in the history of philosophy. To learn the art of philosophical reasoning, we were asked to draw five ideas from a hat and construct a metaphysics based on all and only those ideas.

Consider, too, the current state of anthropological or, more broadly, social science or cultural studies theory. How many genuinely new or different ideas can you come up with? Recombinations may generate new insights. Advances in technology offer new fields to research and new tools for tackling old problems. But mainly buzzwords multiply. The signal to noise ratio? Not, in my experience, all that different from advertising.

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A) Becoming uncomfortably warm if you exert yourself in any minor fashion (cool?)
B) Sweating like an absolute bitch no matter what deoderant you use (dry?);
C) Looking like an animated candy fluffball (sexy?)

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Of course. The question is an invitation for others to pitch in. Still looking for someone to explain the connection between revealing the goddess and shaving legs. The only thing I can think of is the absence of hairy legs in representations of divine women. Does anyone know of an art tradition in which this is not the case?

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Over dinner last night we decided that for the next little while, we will describe things and events that suck as “Arctic Blast;” things that are ordinary but unremarkable as “Arctic Blast Ultra;” and things that are actually pretty neat as “Arctic Blast Extreme.”

As in, “Sarah Palin was like, so Arctic Blast, but then when Obama won it was Arctic Blast Extreme!”

John, didn’t it happen because so many women have incomes independent of men now and are therefore autonomous consumers? A woman with an income can be more choosy and isn’t so much in competition with other women for a man as a meal ticket. This opens up a lot of semiotic space.

Why it happened has to do with the hard-won accomplishments of heroic feminists, structurally enabled by the transformation of labor in late capitalism.

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“Absolutely,” “barrage”: On cool reflection, who would expect anything else? Everything marketers market is sold to human beings, i.e., to men or to women. That most ads employ, implicitly if not explicitly, representations or one or the other (or frequently both) is entirely predictable. An ad that doesn’t is a rarity, indeed.

Thus, analytically speaking, the interesting questions have to do with “Why these particular representations? Why these applied to men versus those applied to women? At this particular moment in history? For these particular products? Used in these situations?

Consider, for example, the Venus razor commercials that I saw repeatedly while watching Countdown during the recent election. What is, after all, the relation between a woman’s revealing her goddess and shaving her legs?

One can go further: Consider the casting. Why multiple women instead of one? And why these women? Why are they dressed the way they are? What do their voices and gestures tell us about the kind of woman they are supposed to represent?

I recall an observation I owe to my daughter, who having grown up in Japan went to Japan and became a Navy helicopter pilot. She once pointed out to me that women in her class at Annapolis had very different attitudes from earlier generations of female officers. They, the leaders in breaking into what had been a very masculine world, had minimized their femininity: No weak girly stuff for them. By my daughter’s generation, Annapolis was still a very macho place (“I have never been in a place where the testosterone level is so high,” she once told me), but women had been going there for nearly twenty years, they made up over 10 percent of the class, and received a lot of institutional support. So much that my daughter’s biggest complaint was guys who blamed her promotions on affirmative action instead of merit.

But, reverting to topic, my daughter and her classmates no longer found it necessary to deny their femininity. In uniform, yes, 120%, we’ll show the bastards we’re better than they are. But on leave, hair, clothes, jewelry–as my wife observed, the only way you could tell the difference between them and other women at a Georgetown nightclub was posture; their military training showed in the way they carried themselves.

So I look at the women in those Venus razor commercials, and I can’t help noticing that these are not shrinking violets. They are good-looking but not, I observe, glamorous in a sultry, come-hither mode. Neither are they anorexic; no “heroin chic” here.

And look at the scenes, a beach, a bare stage or a single chair. These aren’t happy housewives, messing around in the kitchen or delighted by the absence of ring around the collar.

I’d say single, late 20s, early 30s. Yes, they like being sexy. But there is more to that goddess schtick than sex appeal. There’s a confidence, an assertion of personal power, a pride in who I am, that’s a long, long way from poor little me dependent on my man.

How did that ever happen?

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For sure! Here there be some of the contextual subtleties John is pointing at. For example, it is not correct that fancy stanks are marketed to men as “wear this product and women will want you to rape them.” It’s actually ‘wear this product and women will want to rape you’ (look at the predatory eyes on those models), because this is the fantasy world of the anxiously undermasculinized pencil-necks who have trouble asking women out and are the likely market for such products. ‘Real men’ don’t fret about how they smell, and if they want to enhance their masculinity they buy a truck, a drill press, or a gun. (These are of course zones within a general field of masculinities, mapping which is or should be the evil genius of marketers.)

I also spoke too quickly when I said ‘extreme’ is not gendered. It is true that there is a kind of macho to having the heaviest flow and needing the industrial strength staunchification systems, which those ads exploit if not interpellate. Nevertheless, we have not yet seen an ad in which a towering wave of red liquid is calmly confronted and absorbed by a dashing cartoon maxipad in an aviator helmet, goggles and scarf. Nor is Tampax yet marketing a “Tsunami Plus.”

I hope I didn’t jump the shark here, I’m really starting to enjoy this thread.

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But honestly, no matter what lame names marketer’s invent for men’s products, women’s products always give me more of a laugh. Think of all the commercials of women gliding along a beach or in a meadow or some other ultra-green background, content that their vaginas smell like “Summer’s Eve” or “Ocean Spray” or “Tranquil Pines” or “Peach sunset” or some other such nonsense.

I like the quotation from the play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” by Shange where one of the women is talking about ‘feminine hygeine spray’ incredulously and says: “Rain!? I don’t want my p*ssy to smell like rain! I want it to smell like p*ssy!” LOL.

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Of course. But the critical methodological question is still how do we justify the meaning we claim to see. Turner’s opus offers some hints:

1. Ground analysis of possible meanings in a corpus instead of a single case.
2. Closely examine the circumstances surrounding each individual case, including where possible the social relations and interpersonal histories of the actors involved.

Applied to advertising this would mean

1′. Mapping the range of possible meanings evoked by all competing ads within the category and time frame in question.
2′. Considering the relationships of creators to each other, the audience implied by the ad, and the actual audience. (It is often, if not usually, the case that the implied and actual audiences differ. Alcoholic beverages, for example, are frequently consumed by people who differ dramatically from those depicted in ads for the beverages in question.)

Competing interpretations can then be evaluated by the amount of detail they account for, including the sequences in which particular details occur.

Anyone who is interested can find this thinking elaborated for the case of a Taiwanese exorcism in my 1995 paper “Negotiating with Demons: The Uses of Magical Language” in _American Ethnologist_.

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Seeing meaning does not mean we equally see conscious intention along with it.
This, to me, is an obvious point; for better elaboration I suggest corralling a member of an English faculty, pointing to their latest paper, and announcing “but the author didn’t intend that”.

Do I think that somewhere sometime a bunch of advertising people sat in a room and had a conversation along the lines of:
“I really think we need to connect to cultural ideas of rugged, adventurous masculinity”
“Exactly, we clearly need to differentiate our product, and hence men, from the feminine goddess imagery evoked in our women’s fragrance campaign”
No, of course not.

But I absolutely do think that it regardless connects into a barrage of representations of men and masculinities (and I’m a little surprised this seems such a difficult concession). I don’t think it is the explanation in its entirety, and John brings in a very nice perspective with Turner.

John, your hotness (sorry!) point is well observed. Rex mentioned in his earlier post that the other deodorant imagery option was “wear this product and women will want you to rape them” – do those evoke hot/cool? Does the arctic imagery suggest that the icily blasted bloke can pull too, or is he more of a lone adventuring type?

Steve Coogan reminded me that deodorants have arrived in the arctic via Africa :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8FCTKmdZVU

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My pleasure. Coincidentally, I have been rereading Victor Turner’s Morgan Lectures _The Ritual Process_. The first chapter, “Planes of Classification” has something important to contribute to this discussion. It isn’t just that symbols have multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings; which are highlighted depends on the ritual [ad or occasion] in question.

So I find myself pondering what it is that makes “arctic” an appealing description for deodorant in a world and historical moment when “hot” is applied approvingly to both men and women who are seen as sexually attractive. What are the situations in which “hot” should be replaced or masked with with “cold” or, conversely, “hot AND smelly” is embarrassing?

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BJG, fjords aren’t in play because lots of folks don’t know what they are; or if they do, don’t immediately associate them with cold. But more importantly, when the crew is sitting around the table free-associating from ‘cool, comfortable’, fjord just isn’t the first thing that comes up, or the fourth, and by the time this theme ticks down to that checkbox it will have gone stale and it’ll be time to brainstorm another one.

Clare’s on the money about the ‘extreme’ thing, which is an all-purpose accelerator for lazy marketers nowadays, and not gendered: if we are to believe ads for menstrual products, the flows of Niagara must be absorbed each month and space-age technologies deployed to do so.

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Come on, Chris, read your Dante. The bottommost level of Hell is frozen stiff.

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