Look natural
Friday evenings is traditionally when I give myself a break, catch up on some reading, both on on paper and on screen. Tonight I remembered to check out this month’s Nervy Girl, Portland’s once paper, now webzine feminist magazine. (Hopefully soon paper again, as that is where they will make true revenues with advertisers.) One of the things I read was one of their regular columns, Damaged Goods, this month’s installment being “Men are for MACH3, Women are for Venus” by Jessica Hoffmann.
It’s basically a compare and contrast of the language and attitude of the Gillette Company’s marketing of safety razors for women as opposed to men. Here’s great example of that difference is given by Hoffmann in her column:
On the “Experience Venus” page, I learned about how Venus can give me “oh-so-touchable legs.” And I got the inside scoop on some features special to the Venus system, including the super-simple blade-change function—“No fiddling. No mistakes. Blade-changing made simple. Click. That’s it. Just open the refill and click on the handle. You couldn’t do it upside down if you tried. Phew.”
Phew indeed. The MACH3 site’s version? “Open cartridge architecture makes rinsing and cleaning the MACH3Turbo blades easier than ever; the single-point docking system … makes it virtually impossible for consumers to accidentally load a cartridge upside down.” Architecture? Docking system? Thank goodness they didn’t try those 50-cent words on the girlies.
All this dredged up memories for some research I did for a column I wrote for Anodyne about hair as gender signifier. Specifically, an 1991 article by Susan Basow “The Hairless Ideal: Women and their Body Hair” and the role that the Gillette Company played in popularizing the shaving of female skin back in the 1920s.
The following is a quote by Susan Basow from a post she made to a Women’s Study List in 1995, which sums up :
In my research, I found that in the U.S., prior to 1915, very few women removed underarm or leg hair. Then Gillette began “The Great Underarm Campaign” to get women to shave with their new safety razor. The ads emphasized “smoothing” the underarms and had a racist tone (to make skin “white” and “fashionable” at a time when waves of “dirty” “old-fashioned” immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy and Ireland were flooding the U.S.). In the 1920s, the female “look” was a boyish and youthful one (the flapper), but this is also when women had won the vote and were leaving the domestic sphere for the public one. Ads emphasized the importance for women to manage their appearance in order to be sexually attractive to men. Leg shaving didn’t become popular til the 1940s, and coincided with the shortage of silk stockings due to the war (and the consequent bare-legged look). Ads emphasized attractiveness, neatness, cleanliness, and modernity. Given that women were behaving more like men (in terms of jobs and education), the gender lines became drawn on women’s bodies: men are hairy, therefore women must be hairless. Legs, leading as they do to the crotch, also have a sexual association. Shaving them can be viewed as a means to socially control (modify) women’s untamed sexuality.
Basow also surveyed 420 women on their personal and cultural attitudes on hair removal among women:
The major reasons for starting were because “it was the thing to do.” The major reasons for continuing were because it makes women feel “feminine” and sexually attractive.
I admit it, I do shave—very irregularly, mostly on what can only be described as a whim, sometimes for a grooming effect. I still find it amusing that some people identify feminists by their hairy legs, as if hat was a side effect of a condition. Ah, if only it were that simple—don’t shave your legs and you have instant enlightenment on a philosophical belief system.
I have to say, the Gillette ads have always annoyed me, even without probing very deeply into their “culture.” On the whole, I was much more impressed by the blades in The Seven Samurai—a movie which I just saw for the first time tonight.
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If you swap out “cartridge” (and it’s synonyms) with “vagina” in the Mach3 set of instructions, you get this:
“Open vaginal architecture makes rinsing and cleaning the vagina easier than ever; the single-point docking system … makes it virtually impossible for consumers to accidentally load a vagina upside down.”
I dunno what that might signify (other than i think about female reproductive organs way too often than is healthy), but there’s a method to that thar madness somewhere, i tells ya.
(Oh, and i like how the girly-razor copy sounds like every tampon instruction sheet i’ve ever read. Which is more than you’d probably imagine. But that’s not my fault! I used to live with girls who would collect them from different brands! It made for great bathroom-reading material! Well, not “bathroom reading material” meaning “free masturbation-fuel bonanza”, but…butbutbut…)
*sighs*
Stupid freakin’ vaginas. Next thing you know i’ll be ranting about “boobs” via a long-distance phonecall with Kip and Jenn. Feh.
Anyway, i always get sort of bummed when i hear women yarking about shaving themselves. I mean, shaving isn’t neccessarily a bad thing, but to see a woman with some fur growing out of her stinky/sexy bits is actually really cute, and gives you an idea of how she would look like if we were all still fuck-monkies bouncing around the forest primeval. Which is a pretty sturdy test of sexual attraction, if you ask me. Yep.
(Then again, that’s easy for me to say, given that i’d be one of the few people in the world who’se physical appearance would be *improved* by living in a prehistoric fuck-monkey society. Instead of being an obese couch potato, i’d be a lean, mean, Johnny Weissmuller-lookin’, hairy-lady-boinking machine.)
Sure.
*darts back into his pervert-hole*
(Oh, and speaking of moody, hairy freaks such as myself…i’m glad you had a chance to rest your peepers on “Seven Samurai”, Jenn. Toshiro Mifune cracks me up in that flick. And not just because you get to see him trumble about in the rain for 20 minutes with assless-pants.)
I (obviously) have no problem with with shaving, nor other body altering fun such as tattoos, piercing, hair dying or make-up. I do have a problem with any of the above being dictated to me. I don’t care for bullying from either side of the hair shaving argument. And I think men and women should be able to indulge (or not) equally without censure, name calling or rock throwing.
But actually I get the most hassle about the length of my head hair, especially from hairdressers who worry about me being mistaken for a boy (I don’t wear make up and am usually in pants, you see) I usually laugh cause 1) there’s only one person who really needs to know my sex, i.e. Kip and 2) I feel I would have to go a lot farther than a short haircut to get mistaken for male.
And yes! Toshiro Mifune rocked, both in and out of the mud.
JennDude:
Now that you’ve watched Seven Samurai, you should listen to the comentary, too. Most commentaries I can take or leave, but the one on Seven Samurai is one of the best I’ve run across so far. You can even, (oh, joy) listen to it while you work. Borrow the dvd next time you come by.
S
SteveCat
Sounds swingin’. I’ve only 40 minutes left in my latest audio book. (gasp!)
Actually, we should organize a whole audio book swap. Whee!
I will admit to having a Mach 3 razor, although the emphasis on technology in men’s razors is ludicrous. There was a commercial for a *four-blade* men’s razor on during the Super Bowl - I expected the Energizer Bunny to come out.
I’m not one to go ga-ga over technology. If I want to, I’d watch Junkyard Wars or that show with the father and son arguing about customizing motorcycles. Give me a razor that shaves my face close without cutting or irritating my skin, and I’ll be happy. It’s a razor, not a freakin’ spacecraft….
was interested to see whether any discussion would arise about shaving of pubic hair. interesting in that the force driving that doesn’t appear to be via marketing to women but marketing (via porn) to men. the idea of a vertical buzz to reduce the entire genital region to a large slit in appearance just seems odd and dehumanizing to me, but why should one expect anything else from commercially driven interactions?
A male friend of mine recently stayed at my apartment overnight, and in the morning, he realized he had forgotten his razor. He borrowed one of mine, something pink with an extra moisturizing strip for women’s sensitive skin (as though the shins are more sensitive than the face). Anyway, after using it, he declared it vastly superior to his own, men’s razor because it caused fewer nicks and actually did moisturize. He tells me that he now buys them for himself, although he’s found one that isn’t pink, because that’s just too girly.
I have to admit, pink is too girly for me as well–not that many give you much choice.
But, wow, what a switch! When I was single, I used to buy men’s razors because they were both better made and not disposable. I still use a man’s razor–I just don’t shave that often, so when I do, I just borrow the Spouse’s.
I feel all shaving is grooming fetish, genital or otherwise. Again, I think choice is grand, but blind acceptance to conform to an ideal is not. And, wow, tried hair removal between the legs nce and I felt anything but sexy.
Kinda glad I don’t have a beard as I bet I’d prefer to be clean-shaven and the last thing I wanna do in the morning is drag a blade over my juggular. And four blades would just make me more nervous, not confident. Oy.