Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 23

We all understand how a shower works, and how it can work to wake us up, but we need to wake up to how it functions in the moral ecology of everyday life. Considered analytically, a shower, just like the toilet, is a way of transforming drinkable water into wastewater. The drain water finds its way (sooner or later) to an ocean, where it evaporates and circulates in clouds until it precipitates into places where we can pump it once again. In the shower, we’re in the water cycle, which is affected by every turn of the tap.

We think of a shower as a private act, but when we get in the stall, we enter with a lifetime of education and expectations. Every day, ads for soaps, shampoos, conditioners, gels, and moisturizers teach us what clean really means. They teach us about feelings—about comfort and pleasure and joy and indulgence—and sometimes, for women especially, about sexiness. They teach us to get clean, but they also teach us to get that fresh, clean feeling that we have unconsciously learned to associate with the commodities in our shower caddy. Ads don’t tell us that soap works first by bonding dirt to hydrophobic fatty acids, encapsulating the dirt in droplets of water that can be rinsed away, or that shampoos generally use detergents like ammonium lauryl sulfate to remove our hair’s natural oil and phthalates to dissolve scents and thicken lotions. They certainly don’t trouble us with information about the chemistry of conditioners, which not only coat the clean hair with different oils, but also with silicone, humectants, proteins, and quaternary ammonium compounds—primarily to make hair slick and easy to comb. We don’t learn where the ingredients came from, or who was involved in manufacturing them, but that’s okay, because our hair looks great, and that’s what matters in the morning.¹⁷

Indeed, we don’t learn these things because shampoo commercials aren’t about shampoo: They’re about cultural conceptions of beauty—about hair and the meanings of hair. Shampoo companies hire models like Cindy Crawford, Eva Longoria Parker, and Jessica Simpson—who possess what is essentially professional hair—to teach us that a woman’s hair, and not the brain beneath it, is what makes her sexy and attractive. Generally these shampoo models have long, straight hair that they wave around in slow motion. Watching the ads, we might believe that the purpose of shampoo is to train hair to dance.

A guy’s hair usually doesn’t dance in ads. Joe College’s shampoo can be stylish and scented, but for guys in TV ads, shampoo serves three putative purposes: washing hair after an athletic event, thus confirming one’s manliness; getting rid of unsightly dandruff, thus confirming one’s attractiveness; and convincing women to stroke the clean hair lovingly, thus confirming the gullibility of the guy who believes in such a scenario.

Shampoo ads teach us, or at least remind us, that women are meant to smell like flowers and fruit. For men, as usual, there is a narrower range of choices, and they tend not to be floral or fruity. If men smell, the ads tell us, they need to smell different from women—musky perhaps—thus confirming their independent gender identity. At the end of a shower, therefore, we can rinse off the shampoo, but it’s harder to escape the images and assumptions locked in the lather of the ads. Advertisements shape our common sense of what’s normal, and we respond, subtly shaping the moral ecology of everyday life.