Advertising Made Me Do It

My 31-year-old daughter said to me recently that she could not fathom what was going on in her mind when she was 13 years old. I took this as the obligatory apology for adolescent bad behavior that children give their parents once they reach their late twenties and the myelin in their brains has tightened up.

Psychoanalysis posits a fairly uncontroversial theory that children experience a period of latency during middle childhood—a relatively stable progression between the psychosexual conflicts of early childhood and adolescence. Of course, children in the middle ages of childhood do have curiosity and some experience of sexual feelings. In many fifties families, even those who followed Dr. Spock’s permissive doctrines, an exception was made when children showed curiosity about the sexual organs of the opposite sex, witness the belt scars on my ass at age six after being caught playing doctor with a family friend.

Puberty came at Reinhardt to many, and we likely were influenced by media sources, such as advertising:

James B. Twitchell in Adcult USA describes two types of magic central to our culture which we find in advertising—contagious and imitative.

The contagious is the basis of all testimonial advertising—the explanation of celebrity endorsement—and has its religious counterparts in such matters as the relics of Christ. If you use this product, if you touch this stone, if you go to this holy place, if you repeat this word, you will be empowered because the product, stone, place, word . . . has been used by one more powerful than you. Imitative magic, on the other hand, is a variation of circular thinking. Because the product is made of something, you will be likewise if you consume it. So Africans use the powder of rhino horns, the Japanese crave certain mollusks, and we deodorize our bodies and then apply musk (from the Sanskrit for testicle) perfume. Then all over the world we get into a car with an animal name (yet more imitative magic) and go on the prowl for mates. Magic is such second nature that even when advertising sticks it in front of our noses, we are not stupefied.


. . . Naturally enough, the advertising directed at the adolescent is invariably the most drenched in libidinous magic oil. Look at any magazine from Details to Rolling Stone, and you will see more adolescent hands in other people’s pockets and down their trouser fronts, more faux intercourse with motorcycles, automobiles, and cigarettes, and more simply lewd positioning of the human form than in any R-rated movie. What do we expect? In adolescence we lather our bodies in unguents, slither into the most uncomfortable clothing, perform ritualistic dances that often include slamming into immovable objects, drive hunks of pig iron at breakneck speeds, and ingest poisons, until finally we exchange amulets, repeat mystical vows, and at last get on with it. All the time we are quite unaware of the authority of such behavior, and later when our children start to consume the same magical mumbo-jumbo, we say, “My, my, isn’t this advertising dreadful. It’s making Missy and Buck behave so badly.”

Adolescence is a time of life that we do not forget as we get older. As our little child bodies changed week by week and new peer social hierarchies provided revolution to our self image, we knew what was going on—that our bodies, our skins, was who we were, for better or worse. At some level, we knew about the subject of my next blog:

Synaptogenesis, Estrogen and Testosterone at Reinhardt