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.
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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.
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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.

Learning About Dental Hygiene

From Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 1957.

Our toothbrushing habits offer a prime example of behavior that is at least seemingly irrational. If you ask people why they brush their teeth, most of them will tell you that their main purpose is doing so is to get particles of food out of the crevices of their teeth and thus combat decay germs. Tooth-paste producers accepted this explanation for many years and based their sales campaigns on it. Advertising men who made a study of our toothbrushing habits, however, came upon a puzzle. They found that most people brushed their teeth once a day, and at the most pointless moment possible in the entire twenty-four-hour day, from a dental hygiene standpoint. That was in the morning just before breakfast, after decay germs had had a whole night to work on their teeth from particles left from supper—and just before the consumption of breakfast would bring a new host of bacteria.

One advertising agency puzzling over this seemingly irrational behavior made a more thorough study of the reasons why we brush our teeth. It concluded we are motivated by differing reasons, based on our personality. Some people, particularly hypochondriacs, are really concerned abut those germs and are swayed by a “decay" appeal. (The hammering in recent years on all the wondrous anti-decay pastes has swollen the size of this group.) Another group, mostly extroverts, brush their teeth in the hope they will be bright and shiny. The majority of people, however, brush their teeth primarily for a reason that has little to do with dental hygiene. Or even their teeth. They put the brush and paste into their mouth in order to give their mouth a thorough purging, to get rid of the bad taste that has accumulated overnight. In short, they are looking for a taste sensation, as a part of their ritual of starting the day afresh. At least two of the major paste merchandisers began hitting hard at the appeal in 1955 and 1956. One promised a clean mouth taste” and the other proclaimed that its paste “cleans your breath while it guards your teeth.” (More recently one of these products got itself a new ad agency, as often happens, and the new mentor began appealing to the extrovert in us through the slogan, “You’ll wonder where the yellow went. . . “Good results are reported, which simply proves there is always more than one way to catch a customer.”)


Click here to watch a commercial on the possibilities that come with fresh breath.
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Tooth-paste makers doubled their sales in a few years, and one explanation is that they succeeded in large part by keeping a great number of people feeling uneasy about their teeth. They hammered at the wondrous new ways to kill bacteria and prevent decay. In the mid-fifties, Crest tooth paste containing a fluoride was unveiled with the typical modesty (for a tooth paste) as a “Milestone of Modern Medicine” comparable to the discovery of the means to control contagious diseases in the eighteenth century. The marketers themselves were less reverent in discussing among themselves. Advertising Age called the fluoride paste the latest gimmick of a series of big promises (ammoniated, chlorophyll, antienzyme) and added, “The feeling persists that public has responded appreciatively to every new therapeutic claim that has come done the pike in recent years. . . . The hope is that it will exhibit the usual alacrity at the sight of the fluorides.”

Click here to learn about harms to children in human testing of fluoride.

An interesting success story among the tooth pastes is that of Gleem, which on the surface had nothing spectacular to offer in the way of killing the dragons in our mouths. It had an ingredient called GL-70 that was apparently a competent bacteria killer, but as Fortune pointed out GL-70 seemed pretty puny as a peg for ad copy when compared to the more spectacular cleansers that had been ballyhooed. Gleem, however, had discovered a secret weapon. Investigators had uncovered the fact that many people—as a result of being subjected for years to the alarums of tooth-paste makers—felt vaguely guilty because they didn’t brush their teeth after every meal. Gleem began promising tooth salvation to these guilt-ridden people by saying it was designed for people who “can’t brush their teeth after every meal. “ (This, of course, includes most of the population.) Two years after it was introduced Gleem was outselling all but one rival dentifrice.

Click here for a solution to dangers from once-a-day morning brushing.