The Abdicating Male

Regard the man in the gray flannel suit: habitat, Madison Avenue. His self-effacing flannel habit is presumed to mean he is conservative, clever-but-cagey — even cautious. Before he OKs a campaign he will consult every authoritative source from polls to encyclopaedias and every sachem from psychiatrists to big shots close to the White House.

Yet it is an insufficiently-explored fact that this gentlemen's pitch (whatever the product) is usually emotional: a variation on a one-note theme: sex. Indeed, under the flannel jacket, beneath the button-down white collar, Countess Mara tie and monogrammed Brooks Brothers shirt something is going on that may be clever but is certainly not conservative or cagey. His tailor-made uniform blends innocently with a thousand others and his expression is usually deadpan (the sort that implies he died happy); but his heart is wrung with yearning and pumps his blood at the temperature of lava. For he is one of that breed of Americans who can hardly think of anything — even the market for roller-bearings — without conjuring up that aspect of humanity which Freud called libido and said was normal, but grandma called lust and counted among the deadly sins.

You doubt that? Think back to the national advertising campaign for a brand of just such bearings — extremely useful to reduce the friction in wheels. You will recall a full-color picture of a freight car that was being pulled by three lissome lasses — lovely locks were carefully arranged, blouses making it plain that they were, indeed, lasses, and in shorts, too — so nobody could mistake their feminity or its appeal.

Few girls, if any, in sports clothes (and in an apparently come-hither, or sporty mood) have pulled freight cars with a rope — even cars equipped with particularly fine roller bearings. But reality did not prevent the Madison Avenue boys from perceiving that, if you want to draw the attention of roller-bearing-buyers (men, mostly) a picture of a trio of handsome ladies will serve far better than that of the steel cylinder which is the product being sold.

In the case of whetting a beer appetite, not three, but six Miss Rheingolds annually give America's men and boys a taunting opportunity to study each doll at their leisure and wonder (don't you?) which one would make the best date, bed mate, weekend pal, tavern companion — or even wife.

Since the Madison Avenue magicians have discovered they can sell products as disparate as roller bearings and beer by stimulating a quantum of lust — I mean libido — amongst males, it's only natural they should employ the same means as an attention-compeller for anything. So be prepared to see the manufacturer who has spent years showing his belt-conveyers carrying coal, rock or partially assembled machinery over hill and dale, change his motif (at the suggestion of Madison Avenue) and reveal to us in what gorgeous postures, alluring clothes and enticing semi-clothes those same belts can carry loveliness — even wantonness — from the factory to your libidinous (I mean, normal) doorstep.

Sex, the gray flannel fellowship has long since discovered, has a colossal advantage over other lure-means (such as health, prestige, fear of dying without insurace, and the like): sex works both ways. You can seize the rapt attention of the female as well as the male by a deft sales pitch that has sex connotations. For (to paraphrase Byron) love (a subjective state definitely related to sex) may be the most important item in a man's life; but it is woman's whole existence. Thus, in pitching to the female, a Madison Avenue huckster can go all out.

But with a difference, a vast and important difference which has horrible implications for both sexes, with some pretty horrible effects already showing. For, in pitching to men, he simply employs the old-time, live pitchman's standard ploy — attract attention by some obvious means, then switch that attention, at the psychological moment, to something else. To sell a typewriter, show a man the picture of a gorgeous girl in a $300 dress (that will stop his eye) and then, when you've got him looking her over from the top down he'll see she's using your brand of writing engine. (He may even feel, through some self-hypnotizing projection, that if he has your typewriter he'll have this girl for a secretary and that if he's good enough for that, he's good enough to have her, too.) But in pitching to a woman, the opposite technique is employed: you don't try to con her into thinking she's really a hell of a fine female. What you do is tell her she's a hopeless mess — and deserves to be, unless she uses your product.

If you read ads addressed to the American woman you'll soon realize that, in the aggregate, they indicate that any product, if purchased and used by her, will attract platoons of romantic men complete with eye-patches, commander-type beards, wooden legs and other seductive stigmata.

The flannel-clad magicians of what used to be called it and is now fashionably called id, keep telling (and showing) America's belledames that The Product (be it silverware or paper tissue) is just what the non-magnetic lass must buy to rise to the envied come-hither class. That is, to play pitchman to pretty people, you assert, imply or reveal in the art-work, that every standard lass is doomed to be mural foliage, a probable spinster, and even if she somehow marries, an unsatisfactory wife unless she roars out forthwith and buys an assortment of what? A dozen soaps, four or five hair rinses, sundry hair-conditioners (for dry, oily, excelsior-type, streaked, brittle and other hair) along with a certain bathing suit, a particular bobby pin, about eight under-arm deodorant sprays, salves and poultices, six shampoos, four or five bad-breath-eliminating mouth washes and toothpastes, as many hand lotions, countless antiseptics, and the like.

To be noticed at all (let alone be dragged to the country club shrubbery or the altar) she will have to smoke this or that cigarette, drink gin of a certain brand and also drink wine, beer, applejack, cognac, cherry brandy, champagne, whiskey, and vodka — for sure. Her success further will depend upon reducing and enhancing garments of various sorts and giving male prospects a present of a particular razor blade. If she is fresh out of a certain brand of breakfast food ( according to an ad I saw a while back) girls with better-stocked pantries will go around asking, "Did you lose a cave man?" She needs one particular underarm deodorant to "land a Marine" even though, till these sweat-inhibitors came from the labs, the Marines did their own landing.

That's nothing. How our sales-staggered lass makes out will also depend on the kind of stuff she uses to wash windows, on the brand of chemical she uses to unclog the toilet, on the kind of mustard she serves her man, on her eyewash, shoe polish, laxative, clay pack, soda pop — and even more on the pain-killer she uses during those "trying times." Indeed, were I an innocent girl faced with the confusion of trying to decide in the man-hunt whether to spray my armpits, grease them, bug-bomb them, or put chemically – impregnated pads under them, I might develop an anxiety neurosis — or decide to abandon this hard world and take the veil.

Whether or not a lady uses natural gas is vital, the gas people say. What she puts on her corns is crucial. The right brand of flour may nail him down, the wrong kind alienate him. Her furniture's design is almost as much a determinant in love as her body-design. If she fries in butter or lard when she ought to use Greaso, her hopeful will run for the nearest tavern; even her basal metabolism is something he will evaluate along with her kisses. And if she gives him the wrong sort of cuff links or pipe tobacco, she's done for. He's going to notice how she cares for her nylon hose: exactly as he should watch his motor oil. She gets scratched out of his little black book for having the wrong brand of deep freeze, and (the flannel-boys more than hint) a split-level ranch house and Cadillac are not mere aphrodisiacs but the first links in the chain with that ball on the other end of it.

You think that's all?

Have you forgotten the advertisements for milady's garments — outer, inner, sports, nocturnal, et al., ad inf.? Have you overlooked the matter of perfume?

Perfume, alone, is a top ploy in Manmanship. A girl wearing "Who Cares?" or "You, Too" is out in front of one modestly moistened with "Ask First." "Right Now" is preferable to "Soon" and I believe (since the olfactory American male is a sucker for wolf baits) Madison Avenue is only months —maybe days — from announcing the ultimate perfume for junior miss or hack-shaped dowager: "Rape Me."

Our advertising is aproaching the candor of popular songs in which anything and everything people dream, try, do, want to do (and maybe shouldn't) is described in lucid, not to say slavering detail. And bear in mind — and let me repeat — this suggestive ad copy is addressed to the allegedly gentler, more moral, or virtuous sex.

Why?

The principal reason, of course, is that the ladies have the lucre. Economists and statisticians have figured out that American Womanhood controls about 80% of the capital wealth of the nation and does more than 80% of America's buying.

Right here something of a digression is necessary before we go on to my next point; permit me a capsule discourse on the culpable role in all this of today's American male, whose sporadic and impotent objections to the advertistic goings on are so puling as to constitute tacit acceptance.

I am among the thin red line of male die-hards who go to their tailors and haberdashers alone. Most other American men have so far regressed as to boast they have no taste whatsoever. In fact, at the risk of being thought a sissy by the sissy majority I will add that I am one of that skimpy band of survivors of a lustier, nobler era who like to contemplate and buy women's clothes and who (continued on page 50)Abdicating Male(continued from page 24) have taste, imagination, daring, along with savvy for the deed. Show me a man at a fashion show who is (a) interested and capable, but (b) no pansy, and I'll show you one of the few of the bloody but uncowed true men left from the days when most males appreciated women and even knew a little about them.

Joe Doakes, and even Josephus Eldridge Doakes III, have given up the franchise, however. Culture is not for such American quasi-males. The ladies buy the house and its contents, their clothes, those of their stifled husbands (gray-flannel genus included) and they pick out the color of the new car to boot. Where a man would hesitate to select a single necktie, his spouse will (and does) gladly re-do the whole upstairs while he's away in Miami at a convention. Not asking him, of course. Woman-slanted advertising did that to her — and him. Since circa 1925, even factories have looked like powder rooms — the woman's touch, her cestus touch, in man's last refuge.

It is logical, therefore, that the gray flannel pitchmen aim at the ladies. Minimally, they decide where we men will lay it on the line — and for what. In America, men are merely earners, not spenders. Many husbands who have provided their women with three cars, a split-personality ranch house, mink, European trips and such, are obliged to steal from the petty cash fund in their own offices for weeks or months to accumulate the price of a trout rod. Hence it is my assertion that, since it's harder to earn than to spend, and since American males die on the average many years before their spouses, the current theory of the biological superiority of females is founded on an intellectual blunder. If the women had to run the railroads, fly the jets, mine the coal — and as statesmen, outdrink the Russians — it is obvious they'd flop first.

The bulk of American women who do venture into the world-of-affairs do so to promulgate an affaire that will lead to their early retirement, as wives. Their mates soon die. The insurance is made out to the gals and the real estate is in their names. They own America by mere parasitism, so they are the logical target of all who would sell anything. End of digression, end of discourse — and now for the previously promised point. Let's phrase it as a question:

Why have American men built a civilization for women, then sweated themselves into early graves to sell it to women, and finally willed their earnings to women? What is the method of this calamity?

It is horrendous: the flannel-draped mahouts-of-merchandise appeal to the ladies by implying an idea to which I drew attention some years back. In effect, these advertisers ask, "Madam, are you a good lay?"

Their stress is on sex but their constant indication is that milady will miss the boat, boyfriend, bridal bower or whatever her goal may be unless she is physically all set with every product that has a trade mark and warrants an advertising budget. That is what gets her out in the stores, spending. But it leaves a great deal unsaid anent the product and it raises hell with us all.

Consider this example. Suppose it was decided by some enterprising business man to sell our forty or fifty million semi-sane, semi-adult American dames on the idea that what they need most in the ranch house, duplex, or log cabin is a revolving door. Kinsey might have been abashed at the accepted approach — but not your ad-man with the new account: "Spin him if you want to throw him" might be the slogan, or "Install a Revo-portal at home and take your pick of husbands, lovers, playfellows, wage-earners — or take 'em all." Suitable copy would make the domestic revolving door a fad and millions of them would replace the straight-opening, hinged door — and to hell with replacing the lettuce in the paying male's straight-opening, hinged wallet.

And now we're ready to state our major thesis and to suggest what to do about it, to wit: the revolving door pitch — and every single one like it — does nothing whatever to get revolving doors installed where they are needed, practical, useful, appropriate; any more than other ads of that ilk perform these functions for their products and their users. Thanks to the success of the "Are-you-a-good-lay?" routine employed by every other billboard, display advertisement and TV and radio commercial, American women would wear coal scuttles for bustles, galoshes for hats and ashes in their handbags if they thought it would aid their laymanship or even the theoretical or hypothetical bedskill of untested virgins. Such advertising, to restate the case in another way, has nothing to do with value, goods, services, prosperity, reality or sanity. It merely keeps wheels turning by exploiting female sex ego and sex illusion. For some time, now, thousands of advertisers have shied from telling the American people that what they are selling is useful, durable, practical, economical and the like. Instead, advertisements in the main have become bills of seduction; their seducee is woman; and they seduce by creating fear, misgiving, self-doubt, even panic. And these are far graver consequences than the already-noted gulling of our women and impoverishment of our men.

For when you ask a woman (however indirectly or discreetly) if she is in hair-trigger readiness for sex-service, i.e., if she has on hand several thousands of dollars worth of products described as essential for what most of us always did do and do do, when able — you are actually saying that she is not ready (which, praise be, is frequently not the case).

But, if they are shy, vague or innocent about their physical functions in love and marriage, they embark on their honeymoons (ruder investigators than I tell me) in a state of anxiety, perplexity, doubt and fear. If they are truly aggressive females (i.e., if they have caught onto the current American ideal for women) they will have either (a) tested themselves on Tom, Dick and Harry under circumstances unlikely (in this culture) to bring out the best in them, sexually-speaking, or (b) sent away for a married-love manual, a tome which gives the impression that the sex act that provides mutual satisfaction is about as acrobatic and nerve-wracking as crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope while turning somersaults and playing the tuba. Which seems odd, since human beings have carried out apparently satisfactory sex acts for about two billion years, with no handbooks whatever. Apparently, American "marriage counselors" and "sex experts" have decided, almost to a man and woman, that what used to be natural and easy, today is one hell of an ordeal — with divorce, insanity, suicide and the like, as the sure prices of failure.

I suggest that the sex slant in advertising, with its covert insistence that nature unadorned can't win, is responsible for much of this — in two respects. First, it has created the sexual anxieties which make our women sitting ducks for exploitation. Second, the sexperts, seeing the fertile field of female patsies, has figured that what's good enough for advertisers is good enough for them.

When I first asserted in a book — lo, these many years ago — that advertisers were moving wares by asserting they would help milady in her dilemma about bedwomanship (while at the same time they reinforced her fear that she was an amateur, a doomed bungler and in need of help) nobody denied my claim except a few demurring high school and college girls. These reminded me that the question, "Madam, are you a good lay?" (and its panicky connotation) was addressed to mademoiselle as much as madame — demurring girls they were, but possibly not demure. No manufacturer denied it and Madison Avenue actually profited by my exposé: several emirs in the racket have said that previously they'd put sex in ads in a random, haphazard fashion; that is, they had often casually brought up the importance of sex and thereafter implied that without Bunkum's Built-In Bedside Soup Heater and TV set, a bride was (concluded on page 79)Abdicating Male(continued from page 50) headed for Reno and a fair lass engaged in an affair would soon be dropped. But after I told them what they were doing, this previously unconscious hit-or-miss gambit became a science. Today, many agencies apply what they call in all seriousness the "Wylie Test" to all initial copy. If it does not somehow ask madam about her Pollyadlerian proficiency, and imply she is wanting unless she buys the product, that layout goes back for revision. Sometimes, when I contemplate the outcome, I feel as Frankenstein must have felt when he beheld the monster he had loosed on the world.

Frankenstein, to continue the analogy, sought to make amends by destroying his creation. As for me, I'd like to do the same — not to advertising as such, but to the Wylie Test and the fruits of its application. If any admen are listening, I beg you: go straight. Tell us what the product is, does and costs and how long it will last. And stop trying to kid Miss and Mrs. America into the fear that their sex appeal depends on gadgets.

Then, perhaps, our women (and we men) will again become aware of two vital and elementary truths:

1. A girl can put on enough make-up and put on (or take off) enough clothes to seem — briefly — the living, lust-provoking image of Cleopatra. But unless her aim is merely to provoke one man for one night, no product will help her. The man who weds her may admire her exterior, even with the shellac: but he will live with the insides of the girl — sans makeup.

2. The true test of physical sex appeal in a woman is the literal and figurative rain-barrel. Dunk her till she's clean, till all the products wash off, till the pads, perfumes, mink coats, clothes, underwear, automobiles, divans and the like are flooded away, till the hair-conditioners and permanents are done for, till the pills wear off and the hygienic capsules dissolve out. Then dry her in the sun. What remains is what you'll get if you marry her or even go steady with her for a bit. On that simple basis, an amazing proportion of females stand about even-steven: equally desirable, that is, and attractive. On that basis, the product-gals are horribly exposed.

A few paragraphs back. I referred to the graver consequences of the Wylie-tested ads. These, sadly, require further analysis. When it comes to sex, love, married love and all that, the girl or woman who depends on products is the eternal loser. Products — the very best ones — merely get in the way of love and provide obstacles to loving. What the sex-and-marriage manuals imply resembles the implication of the ads and all of it is false; for milady has no cause to fear she is a wretched you-know-what. All she must know — all Helen of Troy knew, and Fanny Hill, also — can be readily picked up by a girl of average intelligence and coordination in an idle afternoon.

What she needs — what she must have — isn't a battery of laboratory triumphs and a huge installation of gadgets. Any girl with the price can get those. But a lover, boy-friend, husband — the boss of a late-staying secretary on a rainy Thursday — is not primarily concerned with a girl's acquisitions. He requires the opposite: giving.

For "making love," the complete expression of sex love, is the first source of all human creativeness and nobility. The wanting man requires the wanting girl — and what both must want is to give themselves to one another. That act does not and cannot involve the checking of a list of advertised additives. A woman is not a trunk-full of trained goodies, no matter what Madison Avenue believes. She is a person. And a man who truly desires to express love physically has little interest in first going through his mate's impedimenta, like a customs inspector — unless he's so jaded it titillates him.

Were I given the power to speak directly to, and be heard and believed by, the yearning girl who symbolizes America's wanting, seeking, unattached women, I would say, "If. darling, you cannot give — and give all of lovely you as you are — don't offer. If you cannot relax in the inner sense of the word — don't bother to unbend at all: it won't work. If you think you can feign and fake, you may deceive a man or two. But can you fool yourself? Of course not! So you, at least, know you are a phony — and where's the love in that? To love for a diamond bracelet — or to think you're loving because you have air conditioning and percale sheets — is to assert in so plain a way no man capable of love can miss the point, that you aren't a good woman, wife, lay — anything.

"For loving is being: and being is giving you.

"That's something the manufacturers can't make or the flannel-suited salesmen advertise for sale — because it's free, and yet priceless: it's you. And remember, loving is the one objective experience left to us Americans in which perfection is achieved by getting rid of the advertised products. So, if you think you need more than you and him. they've sold you a bill of goods and frightened you, besides. Please, darling, don't let the ads make you panicky, for if you and your lad have your own selves as the reason, you'll be a wonderful little you-know-what."