Please be advised. This paper deals with mature subject matter.
This is hardly the most popular (nor for the sake of this paper, applicable) picture of Britney Spears latest shaving headlines.
Why do we shave? We shave our faces, our armpits, our legs, our heads, our chests and our pubic hair. Perhaps we do so to keep ourselves cleansed. A way of keeping out germs and viruses, a shield from "others." Maybe we shave our armpits to be more comfortable, our legs to be less itchy and our faces to be more aerodynamic. Aliens never have any hair and they are highly evolved. It's as if our evolutionary process has not yet eradicated hair. Surely with the global climate rising, the need for facial hair to insulate must be declining. Our hair grows naturally and we deny its existence daily. Not all of us shave. Dissidents and rockers have goatees, bad boys have 5 o'clock shadows and hippies have dread locks, armpit and leg hair as a sign of their rejection of sameness. A way of reifying a non-conformist ideology.
Those who do shave do so for similar reasons. I cannot look like a rogue for my meeting. I want to look presentable, "clean shaven," and respectable. Generally speaking we shave because everyone else does. We must appear like everyone else, and at the most basic level, a level almost too basic to be of note; shaving is a way of doing so.
My focus here is neither to dissect the reasons we shave nor to shed light on the exceptions to the broad sweeping statements I've made. Rather I aim to set the stage for an even less focused circumlocution which features the Gilletter Venus and the Gillette Fusion razors.
The Gillette Venus and Fusion Razors are one of the most telling commodities Millennial Culture has to offer. I'd like to be clear. By Millennial Culture I am referring to the culture in which I have and continue to participate. I fully understand that any attempt to analyze segments of that culture do not exclude me from it. Rather, analysis or partial understanding of Millennial Culture makes my participation in such even more deplorable. Getting on with...
The Proctor and Gamble Company is responsible for a major advertising campaign for both the Gillette Venus and the Fusion razors. The razor itself is "dressed" differently but at its core, it is identical for both men and women. I believe that the advertising campaigns of each, assumptions that are made concerning gender differences, tactics utilized in the campaign and the reasoning behind the tactics run parallel with the fears and promulgation of Millennial Culture.
King Camp Gillette founded the Gillette razor company in 1902. At that time, his disposable razor sold for an astounding $5 ($134 by today’s standards). They were wildly popular and by 1915 he had sold over 70 million units. Although the "safety razor" was not his invention, he was the inventor of the throw away razor, an invention with large implications that are perhaps better saved for another paper [Wikipedia]. He is also responsible for a number of books. He felt that all business should be run by one single entity owned by the public and that the entire United States should live in a giant Metropolis centered around Buffalo due to its access to an "inexhaustible supply of pure water" [Gillette 90]. The significant natural horsepower Niagara Falls provides would sustain the Metropolis. The large buildings that would be built (ten in all), would be capable of housing one hundred million people. Every unit would be exactly the same and the world’s best artists would provide artwork to make the units idiosyncratic.
"It also seems clear that Gillette’s monolithic world corporation would complement the unifying forces of his urban technology by replacing the bewildering separateness of the competing inventors, scientists, businessmen, companies, states and nations with one coherent and unified human organization, [Roemer 567]”
He talks of the beautiful harmony we would live in were we to all live together. Furthermore, "World Corporation" would eradicate the difference not only of race, but also of gender. To repeat, "World Corporation" would eradicate the gender difference.
"World Corporation" means the absolute emancipation and freedom of woman. All that woman [sic] has attempted to do for centuries to throw off the yoke of man's dominion will be accomplished at a single stroke; for it must be self-evident that under "World Corporation," where intelligence is the only factor that determines position in the corporate body, sex cannot be considered without arbitrary laws and the destruction of the equitable basis of adjustment. Woman, under "World Corporation," and under its Labor System, will have the same right as man to enter any department of industry which she is capable of filling...Under "World Corporation" man and woman will be free and equal for the first time in the history of the world. [97]
He most likely meant for the second time in the history of the world. You see, "World Corporation" promises a return to the Garden of Eden. A return to the time of unnecessary self-awareness. A return to a time where shaving is perhaps superfluous. Men and women live in harmony and equality.
But let us not lose our place. Gillette is the guy that made razors. He came up with plans to recreate "heaven on earth" in his spare time. Fast-forward nearly one hundred years to the announcement of the new Gillette Fusion, a razor that blends the inanimate with the animate, and non-technology with technology. Let me remind you that this is a campaign for a razor...
The beginning and the end of the segment have a short clip of two people in the woods that appear to be non-related to the commercial however, because they are a part of the visual information I can't help but think of Nietzsche's idea that man is only a bridge. The first clip is of two people about to cross a bridge. In the second clip at the end of the commercial, they have or are in the process of crossing the bridge. Although it might not be on purpose it does seem to suggest that we have entered a new era, an era that is the posthuman. An era in which man has served its purpose.
In any case, we have a team of men that are at once science, at once technology and at once the government, flying in a yellow helicopter overhead. The beeping and the sound of men communicating on walkie talkies is an indication of such. We get a glimpse of a man in an orange suit with something pulsing and flashing between his legs. It appears that the cylinder between his legs is a container for something very important. He descends onto the large ball that can be taken for a globe or quite possibly an egg or perhaps both. He penetrates the globe in a move apropos to artificial insemination. After the insemination, which is void of any type of ejaculation or emotion, he floats back to the helicopter. The globe gestates and then begins to rise. The music changes and I am reminded of Space Odyssey 2001. The music is a clear indication that something has changed. At the apex of this globe/egg's journey upward, it shoots a laser beam out at one of the other planets that we can only take to be Earth. There are 9 globes in all each connected to the other. After sucking out the secrets or life or power or whatever it is it does to the globes (it's just a razor commercial for the heavens sake) it explodes. Shit, it's dead. Wait... the music! It is alive again and now reemerges from its own smoke, like a phoenix from the ash, an autonomous entity. A global One. A united One capable of including and replacing all the rest. It descends (did Matthew Barney ever model for Gillette?).
It might here be profitable to show a drawing from Gillette's book World Corporation, titled "Man Corporate." He holds the world in one hand, dressed in a skirt. Somewhat ironically, Gillette repeats in his book over and over how World Corporation will reassert the power of the individual while at the same time equating everyone. Part of the inscription underneath him reads...
HE WILL DO MORE: HE WILL PENETRATE THE CONFINES OF SPACE, AND MAKE IT DELIVER UP ITS SECRETS AND POWER
His pursuit continues today. On the Fusion website there is a cyber game you can play. The object is to "match wits with a seductive secret agent" to make her deliver up her secrets. "Warning: she's hot and you could get burned." You have the option to act "aggressive, flirtatious or shy." Are you Armed to Charm?
Here there are three references to revelation. The globe sucks secrets after being penetrated, Man will penetrate for secrets and we can try to get secrets from a secret agent. Whether it is power, or secrets, or information, something that was not revealed is being revealed or if not revealed at least transferred. In the Vital Illusion, Baudrillard writes, "Today, the object wakes up and reacts, determined to keep its secret. [76]" This brings up two issues. Firstly the object waking up.
The ability of an object to wake up suggests some sort of, "It's alive" moment. Pinocchio dancing with Archipeligo or whatever his name is. Can in not be said that when the wireless cell phone, when the wireless toothbrush (another commodity who's rising technology always seems to be at the forefront of science) when the wireless razor, and when the wireless vibrator begin to vibrate, they come to life? Toothbrush commercials use the word "pulse" as part of the advertising campaign! The inanimate object becomes an animate object. It shuffles off its immortal coil and becomes mortal. Its batteries die. The Baudrillard quote above comes from page 78 of The Vital Illusion. Page 77 says "Irony is the last sign that comes from the secret core of the object, the modern allegory of the reversibility of all things." It is this ironic reversibility of both of these shaving campaigns that interests me. I will come back to this quote later. For now, like the Toyota motto, Moving "Forward" we should go to the Gillette Fusion website. Baudrillard would say "EERRRRRTTT." Moving forward? "Things have become so accelerated that processes are no longer inscribed in a linear temporality." This was on page 79.
Before we enter the site we have an option to select a country. Consider MCKibbens description of Gillette’s global strategy: "One product, one ad campaign for nineteen countries, with the same visuals and music, and only the language altered for local understanding." [Roemer 251] With only the smallest variation, the entry pages and navigation for each website is identical for Nederland, Canada, Spain, Croatia, Australia and Denmark, with a variation in only the language.
Once a country has been selected, our Flash loading bar says "Initiating Sequence," as if we have just entered a code to a very important vault of some sort. It feels as if we are having a private viewing and the entry pages to the Alien and Matrix DVD's seem close at hand. You can move to different floors and sections of the Holosphere guided knowledgably by our host Cassandra, a computer generated hologram that holds a "PhD in physics, including a published thesis on the distribution of force and its relativity to pressure exerted on smooth surfaces." Oh to get a hold of such a document. She has a clipboard and a lab coat quantifying her as a certified doctor/scientist/physicist. At one point she duplicates herself and says, "I hate it when I do that." Perhaps she hates it when she does that because, like Call in Alien resurrection, it is a reminder of her inhumanness. Rather than being self-aware she is aware of her 'other' self and her 'other' self is presumably aware of her. Neither holds the trump card. They are equal.
Our apparent ability to reproduce Cassandra reaffirms the superfluous nature of the opposite sex. Why do we need females at all if we can reproduce females without females? This is a part of the irony early suggested. The website uses the idea of a woman and the possibility of sex with a woman to sell its product. However, working from within the ideology of the website, if Cassandra is a hologram, than the possibility of sex with her does not exist, save for virtually.
This website uses role-playing video games as its guide. You take on the character of a person and act and react to circumstances based on pre-conditioned abilities/powers. It allows one to escape the body, if only momentarily, and replace it with a computer body. It is the disappearance of the human body as a whole. We are communicating with Cassandra not with our minds and our voices existentially as Heidegger would say, rather we are noncommunicating (as Bienko would say) with Cassandra using our devices. Our computer is telling Cassandra to go here and do this. We are not communicating. Our devices are doing it for us. I encourage you to navigate the entire website which is thorough. However, as difficult as it may be to remember while looking at this computer screen, we are mortal and for the sake of our mortality, we best move on.
The Gillette Venus razor is a whole other can of shaving cream. Even calling the razor "Venus" (a truly paper ready word) has stark implications.
1. Venus
-An "inferior" planet (along with Mercury) because it is closer to the sun than Earth.
-It is known as the Earth's sister planet due to its similar size and gravity.
-It is the only planet in the Solar system named after a female figure.
-It is covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds. [Wikipedia]
-It is Earth's inferior female double.
2. The goddess of love.
3. And on an art historical note, let us not forget the contentious Titian painting of the same name. Touching herself or covering herself? Mark Twain writes, "There are pictures of nude women which suggest no impure thought -- I am well aware of that. I am not railing at such. What I am trying to emphasize is the fact that Titian's Venus is very far from being one of that sort."[Wikipedia]
Upon entering the Venus website a remake of the Bananarama song "Venus" is playing. It was remade for this commercial and consequently re-remade by Hitomi, a famous Japanese pop star. Hitomi is the spokesperson for Gillette Japan. She is also featured in the adult volleyball video game Dead or Alive known for its adult subject matter and its M (for Mature) rating. Video examples are readily available.
The first time I saw the Venus Vibrance commercial on television I honestly thought that the song said, I'm your Penis, I'm your fire. If you are unfamiliar with the song, then I'll let you be the judge of exactly what the lyrics to the remake are. On the website it is literally virtually indecipherable. Replacing the word "Venus" with the word "Penis" takes no stretch of the imagination. The Venus Vibrance vibrates to give you a closer shave... but that is a bit misleading. The razor itself does not vibrate, rather its hot pink bulbous tip vibrates to help soothe you and reveal your inner goddess. Again, we have this theme of revealing. Revealing the very thing the object is determined to keep secret. I hope that it does not appear that I am being perverse or ironically sexual. There is a long history of vibrating home appliances geared specifically toward women. Historian Rachel Maines describes how in 1869 a physician named George Taylor patented a steam-powered massage and vibratory apparatus for treatment of female disorders, such as "hysteria." Medical and midwifery massage of the genital area had been a common practice since the seventeenth century for various female disorders, often categorized as "hysteria," a condition believed to result from the womb's revolt against sexual deprivation [Juffer]. In the 1970's, there were a large amount of vibrating appliances that were marketed discreetly to woman. For instance Norelco's personal beautifying kit, which resembles a pack of birth control pills. [Goodvibrations.com]
The shaving of hair, specifically pubic hair can be seen as a return to prepubescence. A return to a time when our sexual differences did not matter. A time when we were incapable of reproducing. This can also been taken as a glimpse of the future where we no longer have hair. All of our renderings of aliens from the future are lacking hair. The only need for any type of sexual act would simply be for physical satisfaction and for that, we need not rely on the opposite sex. A machine is perfectly capable and in actuality, superior. Written on the front of King Camp Gillette's book World Corporation is...
"A MACHINE WHICH HAS THE ECONOMIC POWER TO DISPLACE ANOTHER MACHINE IS BETTER THAN THE MACHINE DISPLACED."This book was written in 1910. The technology involved in making something vibrate is very simple. The technology to produce the Venus Vibrance has been around for a very long time. But...
As history repeatedly demonstrates, the mere availability of a technology is no guarantee that it will be taken up. [Wertheim 29]
It would appear that the time for this technology to be incorporated into a women’s razor is now. This is not a phenomena that is exclusively for women though. Although the website for the Venus Razor and its potential applications is hardly coded, the commercials for a vibrating razor for men do not even make an attempt at being coded (at least in terms of there sexual implications. Their posthuman implications, well...).
OR...
In an attempt to avoid letting something obvious 'slip under my nose', I would like to reiterate that the tool being marketed to opposite sexes is identical. It is a razor that cuts hair. It is sort of like grabbing the left-handed spatula from the drawer. The tool works and for all intents and purposes, is interchangeable. The Gillette Venus website and the Gillette Fusion website are not. A thorough comparison of the two sites is fodder for a paper more involved than five pages. The ways each website goes about seducing its targeted consumer is nothing, if not telling.
The Venus website urges us to release our inner goddess. We sort of float along the beachy landscape while swirls and butterflies loop around us. Goddess tips float from bottles while we make our decision of whether we want a razor that ejaculates creamy shaving cream or one that vibrates. The Fusion website offers a two tiered architecture in which we can move back and forth from the laboratory to the holosphere. Holograms that seem infinitely reproducible are at our fingertips. We are encouraged to investigate different floors the way video games have conditioned us to do. In there own way each website eradicates the need for the other. The Venus Vibrance vibrates, ideal for masturbation, and the Gillette Fusion is the hybrid of technology and tool. It replaces a real female with a technological representation of a female and offers a cybersphere for us to exist in. We can win the war of wits with a combination of aggressive, shy and flirtatious behavior in the virtual sex game.
In his No Sex Please, We're Post-Human essay on lacan.com, Slavoj Zizek references Alan Turing's famous "imitation game." To paraphrase, the game goes like this. We communicate with two interfaces. One is human and one is computer. If we cannot decipher which is which then it proves that machines can think. What is less known about this experiment, Zizek points out, is that it was first performed without a computer. The two interfaces were originally a male and a female. Why is this of note? Well which of the two examples is more applicable to Millennial Culture as a whole? One would assume the interface between computers and human would be more telling. But for the sake of this paper, could it not be the interface between the male and the female? As soon as we cannot tell the difference between a male and female, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine. As soon as we are indistinguishable, then we are equal or as soon as we are equal we are indistinguishable. If you know what I know, I have no reason to communicate with you. We are together a specific series of data and that data is shared. "Your are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. " There is no need to communicate. You know what I know, and I know what you know. "Your voice in my head." "Your voice in mine," Tyler Durden retorts in the final scene of Fight Club.
Each of these campaigns, Gillette promises the end of sexual difference. Here again, Baudrillard...
"Irony is the last sign that comes from the secret core of the object, the modern allegory of the reversibility of all things [77]."
If indeed, it is the unrevealed secret of the object to promote sexual, and in effect, universal sameness leading to the eradication of sex and communication, is it not ironic that it is the very instruments that promote sex and communication that keep hidden these very secrets. I'm thinking specifically of shaving razors but no google search for razor would be complete without turning up results for the number one selling cell phone in the world. The Razr! And it should be no surprise to you that it vibrates! It is not an inanimate object, "It's Alive!" I don't want to suggest immoral thoughts as Twain says, so I'll let this device do it for me.
This commercial follows a wave of vibrator related commercials. Ikea (the same Ikea featured in Fight Club) has a similar commercial that can be found here.
Why are all of these videos available at our fingertips? Pornography. Pornography on the Internet is responsible for a significant amount of the advancements of the Internet, from streaming video, to secure online payment systems.
Cyberspace is hardcore pornography, i.e. hardcore pornography is perceived as the predominant use of cyberspace. The literal "enlightenment," the "lightness of being" the relief/alleviation we feel when we freely float in cyberspace (or even more in Virtual Reality) is not the experience of being bodiless, but the experience of possessing another aesthetic, virtual weightless-body, a body which does not continue us to the inert materiality and finitude, an angelic spectral body, a body which can be artificially recreated and manipulated [Zizek].
This is Millennial Culture. It is a culture that relies on devices that free us from our bodies. The closer we come to eradicating our physical bodies, the closer we come to being "same." Once we are "same," our material, physical bodies will cease to exist. Tyler Durden says, "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything." A floating “virtual weightless body” that is no longer tethered to this mortal shell will replace our body. It is this freeness that signifies the true birth of Man. As soon as the cord that holds us to this human body has been cut, life will begin. Grab the left-handed scissors from the drawer.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Vital Illusion. Columbia University Press, 2001.
Gillette, King Camp. World Corporation. The New England News Company, 1910.
Goodvibes.com. Museum of Antique Vibrators.
http://www.goodvibes.com/Content--Antique-Vibrator-Museum--id-367
Juffer, Jane. At Home With Pornography: Women, Sexuality, and Everday Life. New York University Press, 1998. eBook available through UGA GALILEO
Lacan.com. "No Sex Please, We're Posthuman" Slavoj Zizek
http://lacan.com/nosex.htm
Roemer, Kenneth M. Technology, Corporation, and Utopia: Gillette's Unity Regained
Technology and Culture, Vol. 26, No. 3. (Jul., 1985), pp. 560-570.
Wikipedia.org
