Can we ever know what our authentic desires are? Does it matter?
By JD Goulet
15 May 2024
Content warnings: accidental injury from a razor, brief mention of anorexia, body image
At age 47, I'm slightly too old to be even an elder Millennial, but reading The Millennial Body Image Curse today resonated with me, and not just because I have lived through much of the same crazy-making cultural influences that have had me yo-yo-ing between obese and anorexic for nearly half a century. It helped me to consider a related body image curse I've been dealing with: body hair.
They may be hairy, but they’re mine and they still get me from point A to B
I had started to write this very article several months ago, but it remained a draft because I was still struggling to figure out The Message. You know, that pull many of us writers feel that unless we have it all figured out and can offer a solution to a problem that we have no business writing about the problem? (Which is as bullshit as the ideals of thinness and hairless bodies, by the way.) If I still couldn't reconcile my own conflicted feelings about my hairy legs and armpits over a year after forsaking shaving, how could I write about it to help anyone else figure out how to feel about it? But maybe that is The Message.
I started shaving around age 11 when my mom handed me a razor and explained that it was time I start to do so, which was shortly before she threw me a Mary Kay party so I could learn how to put on the proper face, which was also around the time she enrolled me in a young ladies’ finishing school in Louisiana. My mom had drunk deeply from the social conditioning well. (More on that in a minute.)
I cut myself so badly that first time shaving (and many times to come) that I still have a pretty vivid memory of holding the ugly brown plastic-handled razor (we didn’t get fun color choices for mundane items yet in the 80s) and shaking in horror at the sting of the water on my sliced ankle as blood poured down the drain. *Welcome to womanhood. Now, here’s your first pair of high heels. *
I don’t hold this against my mother. She had been shamed into shaving her arms in the early 60s when the boss at her job told her it was inappropriate for a secretary to have hair on her arms. Memories like that tend to stick in the craw of one’s psyche, and she wanted to spare me the kind of embarrassment and shame she hadn’t been spared from because she didn’t get the memo that it’s socially unacceptable and career-damaging to be a human being. At least she wasn’t as overtly cruel like her mother’s mother, who told my young grandmother she was too ugly to ever get a man.
Despite my best efforts to be better than the generation before me, I would go on to unwittingly inflict psychic damage on my teenagers in the name of love, too. To this day, I regret suggesting that my oldest should reconsider wearing a crop top one hot summer day because I worried they might be teased for exposing their chubby belly. But to my kid’s credit, they quickly clapped back with valid hostility that I was body shaming them. That was a sting far more earned than the sting of a cut ankle, and was a necessary learning moment for me.
As an aside, our kids have so much to teach us if we’d shut up and listen! Something to think about if you are an adult lamenting the college students protesting on campuses around the world right now. I recently listened to an amazing talk (below) a friend shared with me from African spiritualist Sobonfu Somé. She said that “children are not born to be molded by society, but to mold society.” What a wonderfully radical departure from the Western child-raising tradition, shaped by Christianity and patriarchy, that says “Give me the child… and I’ll give you the man” and “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” She said a lot of other really awesome things in that talk, and I hope you’ll give it a listen.
Enter Bernays...
You might already be familiar with the father of propaganda, Edward Bernays, but here’s a semi-quick recap about a master manipulator who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the horrors he unleashed on the world. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the sex-preoccupied pioneer of psychoanalysis who was obsessed with understanding and controlling human behavior. Bernays got the idea that the success of government propaganda in World War I might be equally useful if the techniques were applied during peacetime, too.
Drawing on the insights of his Uncle Sigmund – a relationship Bernays was always quick to mention – he developed an approach he dubbed ‘the engineering of consent.’ He provided leaders the means to ‘control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.’ To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.
Advertising wasn’t new, but Bernays’ approach to it was. Prior to the development of his ideas and techniques, ads had remained focused on the purpose, features, and quality of the product itself. There’s a problem, and our product solves it.
But Bernays plan of attack was to “set out to change the opinions of the general public, creating demand which would indirectly boost the fortunes of a particular product.” In other words, we’ll create the problem, and sell you the product to solve it.
If you wanted to sneak inside people’s heads and get them to do something without them being aware of your presence, Bernays was the go-to guy. His services were sought out by politicians, media outlets, the U.S. War Department, foreign governments, and companies like Proctor & Gamble and the American Tobacco Company, for whom he pitched smoking cigarettes, aka “freedom torches,” to women (for whom smoking had been taboo) in their quest for liberation from the patriarchy and as a tool for weight loss.
I haven’t found any evidence that Bernays’ advertising services were ever directly sought out by Gillette, but his ideas certainly didn’t exist in a vacuum, and now pretty much every university public relations and marketing textbook references him as the pioneer of the field of mass manipulation (the Nazi’s were big fans of his work and successfully employed his techniques). In any case, what we do know is that over 100 years ago, around the same time his ideas were catching on more broadly, Gillette figured out that to increase their pool of customers (and make line go up) they had to convince women that their body hair was gross, unfeminine, and old-fashioned.
As women suffragists were agitating for the right to vote in the United States and beyond and as their ankle length, longer sleeve dresses gave way to more liberating short and sleeveless dresses, Gillette’s marketers smelled opportunity. The marketing of shaving to women spawned a $1 billion a year industry in the United States alone, not to mention the money spent on other methods of hair removal.
An advertisement for Gillette’s razors for women from 1917; nothing says “gift” quite like one that sends the message you have an embarrassing personal problem! Note also that it will leave milady’s underarms white and smooth, just as Caucasian Jesus intended!
I’ve been consciously aware of this manufacturing of a problem that isn’t actually a problem to sell us shit (or get us to vote for Politician Brand A or Politician Brand B) tactic for a really long time. Like the imagining of boring diamond rings as a necessity for soon-to-be-wed couples and the invention of medical “conditions” to sell us treatments, the fear that your natural body is icky and needs to be fixed is an extremely effective sales gimmick. I know halitosis isn’t a real thing, and so I don’t swish blue floor cleaner around my mouth to solve my non-problem. So why have I still been so infuriatingly conflicted over whether to shave or not?!
I was able to keep my should I or shouldn’t I feelings at bay well enough through the winter months with my legs hidden under warm clothes that were unrevealing even to my own eye, but with the summer coming and bringing with it shorts, sundresses, and swimsuits, confronted with the sight of my own legs again, the unwanted voice is back, saying “If you want to wear that cute dress, are you sure you shouldn't shave your legs?” And also me responding, “Shut up, capitalist pig! Get out of my head, you fucking monster!”
And then I read about the millennial body image curse: "We are disappointed in ourselves for not being thin but are also disappointed in ourselves for wanting to be."
We carry around this desire because of the influence of the entire media landscape, long-held societal and culture values, and our peers and family members. To deny that those forces have had lasting effects on us to this day is to deny their immense power, and that’s a mistake — future generations will not be spared their own body image curses if we don’t keep our eyes trained on exactly what’s causing them.
I think about shaving, and then I think about how I might feel defeated for caving to desires planted in my head that were really never mine and I don't want to give Gillette, et all the satisfaction. So far I'm winning, because my hatred of propaganda and marketing—like a rubber band you wear on your wrist and snap to break the call of addiction—wins every time.
Maybe we haven’t experienced enough personal growth to eliminate the want, and maybe we never will. The self awareness of the issue, though, is the growth. Resenting the want — rather than unquestioningly bending to its whims like we did when we were teenagers — is the growth. The refusal to allow it to consume our lives the way it once did is the growth.
So that’s it. That’s The Message. I can’t deny those powerful forces exist and fuck with my head nearly every day in some way. My desires aren’t always my own, but I have the awareness to be always looking for the Propaganda Man hiding in the weeds of my mind. That awareness is a pretty useful tool to have right now, and the urgency to learn how to use it is growing every single day. We owe it to each other, and to our children and theirs, to teach them how to watch out for Propaganda Man.
P.S.
Out of curiosity, I went to look at what “propaganda man” might yield in search in terms of images and discovered a 2022 song by that name by Ray Wilson and I just have to include it here... for reasons.
JD Goulet (they/she) is an American-born former corporate writer/editor & learning product designer, political leader, Planned Parenthood board member, and secular movement leader. Throughout her career, she has been an educator and champion for inclusion and wellbeing, especially at the intersection of disability, neurodiversity, sexuality & gender, and class. Their bylines appear in Harvard Business Review, Tumbleweird Magazine, Solarpunk Stories, and various regional publications. She lives in Portugal with her wife and two dogs.
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