Crisis Hair Management

“Clean hair is like catnip for girls.”

This is just one of the many lines used in the ongoing Axe hair products for men campaign. I’ve written about Axe before and, honestly, could devote an entire site just to them. It would be difficult to identify another company so clearly invested in manvertising as a foundational principle. Axe, like many contemporary corporations, is not particularly known for the quality of their products, but rather their marketing and advertising techniques. Nearly all of those techniques have focused on creating and holding a market share of younger men with grooming anxiety. The strategy is simple, and extremely effective: Axe products sexually attract women.

The Axe brand was created by the Unilever corporation in 1983, first in France, and then later exported around the world. The U.S. launch was in 2002, with an aggressive marketing campaign that immediately positioned the brand with its trademark “sexual attraction” advertising. Unilever is a British/Dutch multinational with a large family of brands in a variety of areas–including Dove, which will play an important role in the many contradictions and questions surrounding Axe.

The first ad campaign set a consistent tone that the company has never wavered from:

This might be the prototypical manvertising commercial. An unattractive, “average” man uses a product and is suddenly the object of sexual attraction for a literal horde of young, attractive women. “Spray more, get more” sums up the extremely basic, blatant effort to link the product to sexual success. Even more important, though, is the brilliant insight the company’s brand managers and marketers (BBH in New York) had about male grooming anxiety: there’s always a lingering implication that men who pay attention to their bodies might be TOO interested in their bodies; that bizarre logic travels down an escape route that terminates in homosexual anxiety. In other words, there’s a concern that male grooming might end up being a performance for other men. That tension is amplified by the cultural stereotypes surrounding gay men’s grooming and appearance interests, and by the circulation of discourses that attempt to claim “metrosexual” men are not “real” men, but are instead somehow liminal, in between straight and gay, and are probably in the closet about their own sexuality.

Thus the Axe strategy circumvents all these problems by boldly and explicitly claiming that their products have been created to emphasize and reiterate heterosexuality, and that their “effect” is to somehow trigger a natural urge in women to need sex. It’s as if Axe (in any of its forms) were a sex potion. No homosexual anxiety here; the product eliminates any anxiety by overexaggerating the apparent heterosexual effects. But, as I’ll talk about more below, such emphases have unintended visibility effects in the opposite direction.

The second major ad campaign, designed by BBH to attract new male customers just entering adolescence, pushed the brand into even more explicit territory and further cemented the “Axe effect” as the primary purpose of the products:

There are several key details of this campaign that need to be parsed out. First, the “bom chicka wha wha” sound is a direct lift from the pornographic film soundtracks of the 1970s, which frequently featured the “wha wha” pedal with the electric guitar music as a cheap, effective background to the sex scenes. This sound has become a cultural shorthand for a “dirty” and “sleazy” sex act, a link between those (often cheaply produced) films and an often humorously intended statement. Axe’s use of the music in this way furthers their own desire to create a pornographic fantasy in their customers’ minds, which, of course, has been their primary technique since the beginning.

Yet there’s another, more complicated association with the “wha wha” sound effect: blaxploitation movies. The electric guitar sound was also a staple of the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Isaac Hayes’s theme from “Shaft” (1971) provides a prototypical example of the effect:

By using the “wha wha” effect, then, Axe is making another, more disturbing claim about sexuality that invokes racial stereotypes and deep-seated beliefs about people of color and “wild,” aggressive sexuality. White people, always the primary demographic target for the product, can obtain some of this sexual prowess by using the product. White women, in particular, will have this aggressive and wild sexuality summoned out of them. Seeds of this ideology can be seen in that very first ad, in which a deserted island (read: “wild” place) full of women act out their animalistic sexual urges.

The Axe managers, in their quest at fabricating an “identity” out of the “wha wha” phenomenon, even went so far as to create a musical group that toured in Europe. A video was even released, which sums up the “Axe Effect” almost perfectly:

The ideology of the brand is on high display in this video. Most strikingly, the video features almost no men, and instead foregrounds the narrative of a woman undergoing a makeover. Not surprisingly, specific stereotypes are embedded here. First, and most importantly, she wears glasses prior to the makeover. I’ve written about this omnipresent imagery before, but I’ll reiterate here that almost no more powerful visual marker exists for the domineering, controlling, sexually unavailable woman that men cannot “have.” The glasses exist in such imagery to point directly to the eyes, which are, in standard psycholanytic accounts, the site of judgment and castration for men seeking to control and sexually dominate women. In other words, by explicitly pointing to the eyes, they are emphasized as a place of action, of behavior, of looking. Women, in patriarchal structures positioning them as submissive objects, do not look — they are looked at. Again, not surprisingly, the glasses must be removed before the woman in this narrative can assume a submissive, sexually available position marking her as obtainable by men.

What makes this video so remarkably insidious is the way it plays out as a female empowerment story. By layering details of “releasing” her from boring, domestic tasks, freeing her from her mother’s control, and offering sexuality as a way “out,” the video can claim the same sort of post-feminist message that has appeared around musical groups like The Pussycat Dolls. Being sexy, such discourses claim, is empowering. I won’t debate the merits of that complicated argument here, except to raise the most important question: who decides what is sexy? In this ad, the answer is clearly very standard male sexual fantasies. Complicating it even further is the explicit message that the “release” the woman gets is by inhaling the cologne worn by a man. What exactly is her empowerment, other than to be intoxicated and (in a sense) hypnotized by a man?

Following this marketing campaign, Axe moved into other products, including a shower scrubber for men. Fearing, again, that such products are only used by metrosexuals and gay men (which, in the manvertising universe, are essentially the same thing), a commercial was released featuring a fantasy in which men’s bodies are scrubbed and groomed by a squad of women:

Remarkably, the brand managers don’t seem to have any problem whatsoever with this sort of imagery continually appearing in their campaigns. Women, always in groups, seem to exist only to serve and care for men, and to do so within highly stylized and affected appearances marking them as “sexy.” It would be difficult to find another example so blatantly sexist in terms of what women’s roles are in regards to men; once the man’s body is clean, they disappear from the narrative. In the Axe universe, then, women exist to care for men and to sexually service them. At all other times, they apparently live in a state of sexual repression, unable to release their inner self-confidence that manifests only as heteronormative sexual submission.

The next campaign further pushed a racialized set of sexual imagery to link the product to sexual potency:

The “Chocolate Man” advertisements feature the now standard elements to any Axe commercial: groups of women overcome by the “effect,” throwing themselves uncontrollably at an “average” man, and (finally) finding sexual satisfaction. Disturbingly, the primary addition here is the literal consumption of the male body, which is now constructed out of chocolate. It is hard not to see a racialized thematic emerging here, in which a white man is converted into a black man by the product, and then consumed by white women who have been driven “crazy” by the transformation. That would, as I have shown, fall neatly into line with the overall history of the product, in which the real Axe “effect” is to draw out some wild, aggressive sexual instinct linked stereotypically to mythologies surrounding the sexuality of people of color, transposed onto white bodies through capitalistic consumption.

This all brings the discussion back to the latest campaign. Perhaps sensing that the anxiety and tension surrounding male use of grooming products still lingers in the background, the brand managers have once again amplified the soothing balm of heterosexuality. Two new additions enter here: first, women are positioned as “experts” for men to learn grooming from, and a language of “crisis” is implemented to exaggerate the consumptive need for the product:

“94% of women agree that greasy hair is a turn-off” is the key line in this commercial. The overwhelming majority of women, according to Axe, prefer a very specific type of man — and Axe can make you into that. Once again, women in a group perform the labor, and the result is a sexually attractive men now ready to receive the submissive availability of those women.

This website, created by the Axe brand managers, returns to the narrative style of the “Wha Wha” girls: the site appears as if it was created by women interested in solving the “crisis” of bad hair. Once again, then, the narrative burden is shifted to women, away from men, as if to relieve the homosexual anxiety and tension, not to mention the self-conscious worry of “being in the spotlight” and worrying too much about the male body. Real men, after all, don’t worry about those things. Axe, though, has realized that if that worry is linked to sexual prowess, it can be justified.

This site, linked to the main page, offers a “live” view of 100 women evaluating and judging male hair, and then voting on the results. Having examined this video closely, I can see no women wearing glasses: thus, the ad offers evaluative judgment without the serious castration threat invoked by pointing directly to the eyes. Instead, the evaluations promise a sexual victory if the advice is followed. The glasses, of course, would prevent such a possibility.

Ultimately, this latest effort by Axe to convey their brand identity is another example of the brilliant ideological response to feminist efforts to eliminate and change this sort of imagery. Key to their techniques, as with all manvertising, is humor: by including a tongue-in-cheek sense of “irony” throughout these ads, exaggerating virtually everything, and underlying everything with humorous music and sound effects, the brand managers can claim that it’s not to be taken seriously, that it’s all meant in “fun.” As I’ve written repeatedly, such tactics represent the largest contemporary challenge to feminist politics because of their desire to build-in such defense mechanisms, apparent guarantees that they are criticism-proof. Humor, as I’ve also mentioned, is the safest genre in which to make bold political statements because of its ability to deflect criticism while encouraging empathy; the cultural tendency to desire laughter without critique makes comedy an ideal site in which smuggle ideological representations and narratives. It also marks it as the most important place in which to perform aggressive and continual analysis.

Finally, to return to Unilever and its simultaneous ownership of Dove and Axe, I’d like to conclude by presenting a question: if Axe presents a highly specific, regressive, and sexist view of women’s roles as either caregivers or sexual submissives, expected to perform an aesthetic sexuality conforming to stereotypical male fantasies, what do we make of the Dove campaign for “real beauty”?

This ad seemingly contradicts virtually everything present in the Axe campaign, tearing it apart and exposing the cultural fallout of male fantasies.

And what about this one?

The end of this ad could easily (and accurately) be rewritten to say: “Talk to your daughter before our other company, Axe, does.” How can one corporation simultaneously present both messages?

Perhaps the answer is that neither message is sincere. I’m not suggesting that the individual people involved with the Dove campaign aren’t sincere; their message is powerful and much needed. But I am suggesting that both Axe and Dove seem to be fabricating brand identities based around cultural fantasies. That they are both owned by Unilever illustrates to me that what’s really most important here is the corporate bottom line: what will sell more soap? For men, apparently, that means a “revolution” fabricated and created to tap into the anxiety and tension men feel toward their sexuality being under siege, taken away from them and criticized by feminism. For women, as these ads show, it means bolstering those very same feminist attitudes, criticizing the very imagery the company’s other brand incessantly champions.

In other words, it’s a perfect capitalism machine, self-replicating, feeding itself endlessly in a loop, washing the left hand with the right, and repeating with no end in sight.

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