Fur, Hair, Sex and Virility

Most of the information provided in recent blogs by journalists such as Vance Packard and Betty Friedan was actually developed by a psychologist named Ernest Dichter, who wrote many books through the 1940s-70s, and I find him to be a tough hombre, just like this guy from a Marlboro commercial he likely influenced. I occasionally smoke a Winston (Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should) but in 2007 what's left but Marlboros? Does this guy have a tattoo on the back of his hand?


From Dichter’s 1960 The Strategy of Desire:

“The Soul of Things”

To want material things, then, is a natural human desire, engendered partly by biological forces, the wish for security and protection, and reinforced by our contemporary culture. . . . . There is no sharp dividing line between materialist and idealistic values. To make such a distinction is unscientific. It is cheap moralistic hypocrisy. Let’s look at the amoral facts of human behavior. Doing so does not mean we approve of it. But even to think that nature needed our approval for the way we are put together is blasphemous and arrogant in itself. How do we behave always comes before how should we behave.

I buy a book. Is this materialist or idealistic? A book offers opportunity for new adventure, education. Raising vegetables, taking a trip, the child’s thrill with a new pair of shoes, the new Broadway shows, what are they all? What values do they represent? We still want suds in detergents, not being able to forget the stereotypes of all soap; we judge tools by their strength, we can’t conceive of aluminum beings as strong as steel. In all these cases ideas contaminate material things.
. . .

In many of our studies, we could demonstrate that the old proverbs “Clothes make the man,” “Tell me what a man eats and I’ll tell you what he is” are not too impractical and are not empty statements. Modern psychology has overlooked to a very large extent the real expressive power that objects have. Objects have a soul. People on the one hand, and products, goods, and commodities on the other, entertain a dynamic relationship of constant interaction.

Individuals project themselves into products. In buying a car they actually buy an extension of their own personality. When they are “loyal” to a commercial brand, they are loyal to themselves.
. . .

Take fur, for example. In our study conducted for the fur industry, the problem was, in addition to the commercial one helping to sell more furs, to also understand what the “soul” of the fur is. Few people today buy fur coats in order to keep warm. There must be other deeper reasons. We found that expensive fur coats are often being bought by men for their wives or girl friends. Mink stands out in this respect. Mink and most other fur coats are non logical buys, they are based on emotions, on the “ideological” meaning of these furs. In order to understand the meaning fully, to find the answer to the why problem of human behavior, we investigated the cultural anthropological meaning of fur. Originally , it was the warrior of the tribe who brought the fair maiden a skin, the trophy of his hunts and the proof of his prowess. The rarer and the more dangerous the animal, the more it serves as proof of the skill and virility of the warrior. This is replaced in the modern world by price. The more expensive the fur, the more it proves the earning power of the male giver of the fur coat, his earning virility. Fur, hair, sex, are of course all interrelated. The famous painting by Durer, entitled “Furlet,” and the painting of Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus,” show that many hundreds of years ago the real artist intuitively felt this relationship.

From a practical viewpoint our findings were developed for the fur industry in the following way. We found that a fur hierarchy had developed wherein furs are seen on a descending social scale on which each fur is assigned a rigid place related to the age, type and status of the woman who wears it. At the same time mink had become a too obvious symbol. In general, a new trend is developing particularly in the United States, to be more subtle in one’s conspicuousness. We are becoming more interested in keeping up with the “inner Jones,” than with the too obvious outer one. We want the neighbor to guess at our wealth and status rather than to display it too openly. At the same time we have learned that an easier way to stand out and to buy status is to resort to individuality and to be different.

From this different and new viewpoint which we found to be operative in the psychology of fur buying, we found that mouton [or rabbit] was seen as a fur for typists, sales clerks, and college students; beaver for suburban housewives and professional women; Persian lamb for elderly spinsters; and mink for society women, chorus girls, and movie stars. Our advice thus was to develop specific personality profiles for non-mink furs. We suggested that furs be pulled down from their psychological pedestal and promoted as fashion items rather than status symbols. Wearing a fur coat would thus lose the blatant conspicuousness.