Monday, May 09, 2011

Modern American Male

I was just reading an old article by Malcolm Gladwell about the successful marketing of Dockers in the 80s and 90s. The advertisers used a strategy that challenged the ideas of masculinity, but only on the margins. Their first series of ads focused on an issue of great importance to baby boomer men -- male friendship. There was a general lack in the midst of the family and work lives, the inability to maintain close relationships with their friends. My disembodying the Dockers and having the actors engage in "natural" but fragmented conversation, it attached the pants to this abstract notion of friendship and a casual style that wasn't really stylish at all. Later, as sales began to fall, they moved to a new campaign -- based on creating an Ideal-Other that sort of cared about fashion, but without being emasculated in a serious way or becoming a fop. The Dockers ads sold conformity, through a general disinterested interest in style and fashion. The non-descript, safe Dockers needed accessories and thus expanded the fashion market for men by over 20 percent.

The newer ads however partially diverged from the old. Playing on the notion of the "canned-laughter" problem, they built around the idea that men needed simple ads with clear, uncomplicated messaged. The "canned-laughter" research found a fundamental difference between men and women. Women tended to integrate information in making decisions, thus not being as prone to be influenced by laugh-tracks, while men tended to make choices one way or another, and were thus more apt to be influenced by laugh-tracks, even for comics they otherwise wouldn't have found funny (it had little affect on "quality" comics). Women were thus more apt to integrate or synthesize information in decision making while men were more likely to select one choice and ignore evidence that confronted or contradicted that choice. The new ads altered the nature of male advertising by allowing the sexualization of the men, as women said "Nice Pants," in a series of circumstances. However, the sexuality had to be undercoded -- so the "naive" male was actually unaware of his sexual attractiveness and didn't get the girl, thus allowing an escape from the thought that they were again being emasculated and treated as sexual objects. A form of neurosis was at play here, where the interest in style and desirability had to be partially cloaked into an "aspirational reading" that was digestible.

Ultimately, the underlying message advertisers end up embracing is one of the simple male that they must play down to. Ignoring for this short entry the essentialism at the heart of the analysis, is the troubling implications. First, if it is true that men tend to select rather than integrate, does this help explain the conservative (and I would argue liberal) penchant to simply ignore confounding information? A choice is made and then the man becomes immune to ideology critique, or openness to even questioning their underlying assumptions. This seems to be a meme toward and one that essentially undermines democracy -- and certainly the more radical democracy based on deliberation and participation. And the second implication is that advertising appears to follow the central tenet of popular culture regarding men -- that essentially they are not only stupid and incurious, but this is the best way to sell to them. The underlying anti-intellectualism then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, if we believe that our wants, needs and desires are at least partially informed by the very consumer culture (or culture industry) that is based on these assumptions. Are films, television and advertisers constructing a male that is antithetical to the central tenets of modernity, thus constructing the postmodern man that is neurotic, alienated, cynical and disengaged? At a deeper level, what of the monomyths we have constructed in contemporary society? Are they even worse than Dirty Harry and the old John Wayne Cowboy? The brevity of this form precludes a more nuanced analysis, but the idea that we are promulgating a happily ignorant male who cloaks their deeper desires within media and advertising constructs certainly bodes poorly for not only democracy but our collective future. Does this help explain eight years of Bush and the Tea Party movement? Hmm, that sounds like one of those annoying questions that would make me think. I think I'll turn on the tv instead.

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