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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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On a CW note, and thinking out loud, what is going on with men where someone is profiting by branding soap as distinctly masculine? Is this downstream of targeted advertising in the internet age ? I guess Irish Spring’s, “Manly, yes, but she likes it, too,” from the ‘80s suggests this has been around much longer.

I do wish mild ill on that dollar-store T.J. Miller from the Dr. Squatch YouTube ads — like he realizes he bought sweet pickles instead of dill after biting into a sandwich.

As a man who buys soap I am vaguely aware that I'm not supposed to use the ladies ones because they're more expensive and something something exfoliation, something something scented. I don't actually buy the man brand ones because they're also upsold but I appreciate that they are always next to the generic brand stuff that I can buy.

Marketing and consumer purchases have been retarded for a century. Are masculine soap brands any worse than masculine cigarette or car ads?

Tangent-to-a-tangent below.

The Dr. Squatch adds are part of a certain streak of marketing that can be described as "tongue in cheek hyper-masculine." The other ones that come quickly to mind are the various, heavily-punned male grooming devices (Gronk did a couple of commercials for one), and beef jerky. The themes of the adds are all fundamentally the same "be a manly man by buying this product ... here are a bunch of pun-ny dick jokes and comic book illustrations of masculinity; chopping wood, wrestling a bear, etc." They stop far short of any actual violence, and the entire air of the ads are always meant to be comical.

So, it's safe-for-kids masculinity. It's not actually genuine or earnest. It's the little boy wearing his dad's work shoes and pretending to "go to the business factory." And this is why a lot of these ads are not-so-secretly hated by traditional masculinity oriented men - because they infantilize the men in them and the men who would buy the products. I'm trying to picture my WW2 vet Grandfather coming home to his wife and saying "look, honey, I bought the MAN soap!" I can, however, easily picture a Laptop Class San Franciscan showing off his "Warrior Berkenstocks" with genuine pride ... because I saw that happen in 2016.

Tin-foil-hat me sometimes thinks this is part of a radical feminist agenda (I told you I was wearing that hat at the beginning of that sentence!) That these advertisers want to create a "dress up pretend fund time" version masculinity that lets husbands and fathers feel like men ... but never, ever lets let actually develop self-assured independent traits that could break them out of the matriarchal dominance of the wives / mothers (often the same person functionally).

Then again, I'm waxing philosophic about men's soap on the internet. I'll go outside and fuck a bear now.

I'll go outside and fuck a bear now.

What kind of man doesn't have a bear inside the house?

Once you're married, dead bears inside (rugs, heads, etc) and live ones outside is a compromise you have to make. (and who fucks a dead bear? Don't answer that.)

what is going on with men where someone is profiting by branding soap as distinctly masculine?

Presumably because Real Men don't use soap to bathe, they scrape off the topmost layer of skin with pumice stones and flint razors, then take a refreshing dip in lava? 😁

I don't know, a lot of soaps are floral etc. which I don't like - I prefer unscented ones. So I suppose if all the branding is for "feminine, girly, sweet-smelling" stuff, men won't feel comfortable shopping in the women's toiletries aisle?

There is definitely a difference in how deodorants, shower gels and such like are fragranced - the men's products are all 'leather, black pepper, sea minerals, peppermint' though there does seem to be a shift now towards 'citrus, herbal' as well. There probably is a lot of social conditioning going on - even this HowStuffWorks article adopts a "do you really want to smell like a woman?" angle, apart from the practical "men's skin and women's skin is different, so formulations need to be different", so there may well be a real effect of "if this guy smells like vanilla, he smells like a woman and comes across as effeminate" at work:

Call it shallow, but fragrance can be a big deal. You may not mind the way a woman smells, but you may be making yourself less attractive by using a woman's soap. Researchers found that women choose mates who are most different from them genetically, and they get their clues from a man's scent [source: Colenso]. Fragrances in soap and other skin-care products can alter your natural scent to such a degree that women may find you less desirable as a potential mate.

Not only this, but do you really want to smell like cherry blossoms or wild vanilla? The fragrances in soaps tend to stick with you throughout the day, and when you perspire, these scents become more pronounced, in combination with those produced by your hormones. Men's natural odor has been said to smell like cheese, and the smell of women's soap may not make for the best aromatic blend.

EDIT: And since perfume does react differently with different people's skins, then it could indeed be the case that 'masculine' scents are the ones that react and smell better with men's body chemistry.

The answer seems pretty obvious to me- women do the vast majority of the shopping in the US, and also have no idea what men want(which is for whatever soap is on sale at Walmart to come in bulk), so it’s intended to sell to women taking over boyfriend’s/husband’s toiletries shopping, or else needing a father’s day gift. The adds are campy masculine and address things that women spend a lot of time thinking about(eg nice skin) but men never do, featuring presenters that come off as gay to men but macho to women.

More or less how I ended up with a Dr Squatch bar of "man soap" for Christmas.

Same here. I quite like the Pine Tar and Bay Rum but I am sure it is over priced.

The charitable version's that a lot of heterosexual couples might benefit from being able to readily have a his and her's ablutions materials, without the various problems that come about from other labeling approaches, and this is a (stupid) workaround for it. No one's gonna die if they use their partner's shaving razor, but between travel, keeping adequate replacement stock, and other expectations, it seems like there's a lot of room for things to be obnoxious.

The middle-ground's that a lot of the femme-focused stuff is... up to taste. Lavender /everywhere/.

The less-charitable culture war one's that if you don't have a thing, you risk getting demand for it getting replaced by the signifiers of that thing, even if the underlying material is no longer present. If someone doesn't even know where to start about being a Man, they're a lot more vulnerable to advertisements offering easy outs, and this is a really easy out.

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