Commentary: My aftershave is ever so manly. Here - take a gruff, confident sniff!
What makes a man’s skin so different than a woman’s that the identical razor blade must, in a woman’s hand, be held by a curvaceous pink handle whereas the male hand grips it by a straight shaft wrapped in steel grey?
Most people see through this and even joke about it. Gender roles evolve but there is always money to be made from people who think buying something is a means of self-expression. Advertisers and marketers know we are pliant to their manipulations. It is how they make their living.
Thus, I hold in my hand this bottle of aftershave lotion manufactured by a company named “Soap Commander.” Their logo is a ship’s wheel with the slogan, “Take charge.”
I like their stuff. Their various scents have names paying tribute to virtues such as vision, fortitude, endurance. Well, they need names. My selection this morning is “Courage.”
Reportedly this is what courage smells like: slightly sweet and woody. The black bottle features a textured grip so it can be squeezed vigorously even in wet conditions. Let me attest: this is one of the manliest squeeze bottles I have ever grasped. All it is missing is a picture of G.I. Joe on a horse with Miss America riding on his shoulders. It makes me giggle every time – No! It elicits a manly guffaw! - but I reach for this bottle frequently because the gloopy, genderless stuff inside feels good on my skin and I enjoy how it smells. It could be in a lavender bottle and named “Princess Bunny Kissing Flowers” and I would still use it.
“Advertising is now literally everywhere,” Jerry Mander wrote, “Interrupting our lives at every turn, requiring that we deal with it. … Even clothes have ads on them, and we wear them proudly.”
Merchandisers hook us and pull us around the marketplace, no longer any further away than our mobile phones.
This is not to say they always get the gender signals right – especially when it comes to smell. Another aftershave in my man-cave is named “Unconditional Surrender,” with a smell its manufacturer claims is a tribute to the manly Ulysses S. Grant, with notes of tobacco, black tea, and cedar.
I had to quit using that stuff. My wife says it smells like “old lady.”