Big Cosmo and Women's Armpits
By John Taylor; 2006 May 15
A scientific study lately found that the custom of shaving their armpits raises the statistical chances that women will be stricken with breast cancer. Who would have thought? Somehow that tuft of hair in the middle of one of the body's sweatiest, most bacteria-ridden regions offers a mysterious front line bastion against a terrible disease, the killer that got my mother in 1978. Coincidentally, I just read a snippet of history about how underarm shaving got started. It seems that just after the Great War, as hemlines were rising and bathing suits got skimpier, some clever razor marketer got the idea of selling that product to women as well as men. It took only a few advertising campaigns to plant the idea in the mind of American women that hair in this region and on the legs is ugly and unfeminine. Once the thought was in their heads, advertising shifted away from their new, artificially manufactured need to the question of whose was the best razor for women's legs and armpits. Enough said.
Only much later did economist J. K. Galbraith make his famous studies of the corrupting role of advertisers. His thesis was that modern industry is powerful enough to go beyond the old capitalist dictum "find a need and fill it" and now they routinely create their own need in the minds of consumers, using mass media, and then step in to fill the custom-made need. The shaven armpit custom is an early example of what he was talking about; though I have read most of his books, I cannot recall whether he mentioned women's shaving habits or not. In any case, Galbraith died several months ago and now that a decent time has gone by a commentary in this week's edition of the Canadian newsmagazine "McLean's" criticized his thesis, saying essentially that it is trite and moot. Every power structure does exactly that, the critic points out, it instills an idea into the susceptible, mirror-like minds of those under its sway, and then sets out to fill that artificial demand. Governments and other power brokers invented the idea of polling to test the waters before floating an idea or proposal. Once a poll has been phrased right, their gun is loaded. "Well, 69 percent of Canadians have no objection to same-sex marriage, so it must be morally conscionable to start thinking about legalizing it." The entire educational system can be seen as a huge need creator and filler sustained by the powers that be for their own ends. Even the little guys, decentralized powers that be, have a huge impact on what is thought to be needed, and what is taught. Nobody can convince me that professional educators sat down and said, "What children should do is spend hundreds of hours in their primary years learning to spell (when a two bit word processor can spell check a document in nanoseconds) and add and multiply numbers (when a two bit calculator can do that in picoseconds) when they could be learning more urgent skills, and even, dare I say it?, virtues and problem solving techniques." No, this is not the work of Big Brother, it is Little Brother. It is the unthinking, complaining, outraged parent or employer who goes on self-righteously about all the years and money spent on schooling and they come out not even knowing how to add sums or spell the totally non-standardized orthography of the English language. Myself, I regret the loss of time, the wasted effort that my poor son and daughter have to undergo trying to get into their head this useless trivia. In any case this is a fact: whether a curriculum or a publicity campaign is educational or corruptive depends entirely upon whether you agree with what it is trying to put across.
In the case of armpit hair, until this study came out science had no opinion one way or another, though in retrospect it may have been wise to adopt a policy of leaving natural growths be unless they are proven on reasonable evidence to be harmful, not just unsightly in some eyes. European women apparently did that, they ignored the insinuations of advertisers and refused to shave their armpits. This saved the lives of who knows how many souls. But now that we do know that the practice is harmful, the situation is different. Now shaving armpits is no longer a matter of opinion, it is an educational issue. We need to create a need to not shave women's armpits, and then fill that need. How? By teaching girls in school why not shaving it is not necessary ugly and unfeminine, for example exposing them to photos of beautiful European stars with unshaved pits, and, as always, by actively discouraging advertising of razors made for women, for example by placing warning labels on their packages, like cigarettes.
I know what you are going to say, surely there are much more dangerous activities that are proven harmful, yet remain untouched. Many vices are not thought of as educational issues, like smoking, alcohol, drugs, and so forth. Nobody is planning to get rid of them, except in very narrow ways. But that is exactly my point. Maybe a start on little killers will allow us to work up to big, broad social planning goals. For example, it is well known that we could support ten times more people, or reduce the impact of human habitation to one tenth of present levels just by reducing the amount of meat we eat. But the meat industry has its defenses to even talking about that embarrassing fact all prepared. If anybody tries in the media to promote vegetarianism as a broad social goal, they step into action and stifle it. They know how to enlist Little Brother on their side too; the little guy likes his hamburgers, so he is their natural ally. Like the breweries, tobacco, Big Pharma and other merchants of death, they know exactly how to spring into action before the fire of common sense gets out of control. But the cosmetic shaving industry is probably not ready. They are vulnerable. Success in protecting women against little killers like shaven armpits might lead to greater things later on. And besides, it is not such a little killer anyway; I have been robbed of a mother for decades by breast cancer, so I do not regard "Big Cosmo" as a minor enemy.
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John Taylor
badijet@gmail.com
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