hollister is (for) the pits!

Music: Neko Case: Middle Cyclone (2009)

Many years ago my friend Mirko and I were in a shopping mall. We walked past an Ambercrombie & Fitch store, dance music blaring from the entrance. I've always felt a bit sheepish walking into this kind of store because, well, I'm too old to lurk in this kind of space and, frankly, the clothes have never appealed to me. Nothing is more annoying than having to scream at a check-out clerk because you cannot hear him or her (usually a her) because of the BOOM BOOM BOOM of the store tunes. (I confess I know this because I used to go to A&F once or twice a year to buy a cologne I really liked ["Woods"], which they discontinued). "Look!" said Mirko, pointing to the billboard-size graphic plastered on wall at the store's entrance. "Maschalingus!" he said.

"What?"

"Mas-kel-ling-gess," he replied slowly, with a smirk. "Doncha wanna lick his armpit?" He pointed to the graphic, which depicted a shirtless, toned, hairless, young man with his left arm raised; he has virtually no underarm hair, which is not usual for U.S. men. Women, yes, but not men. Mirko explained that A&F frequently featured men's arm pits in their ads.

In the years since this pit-sighting, I've noticed a preponderance of pits in A&F advertisements---so much so the raised pit seems to be something of a signature for A&F (oh, and the hairless body and relative absence of women). I first became aware of A&F's advertising ever since a controversy broke over the A&F quarterly catalog (I bought the issue that was forbidden for folks under 18, primarily because Slavoj Zizek wrote the ad copy, but also because of the half-naked people); like Calvin Klein, A&F pushed the envelope by using naked people to ironically advertise their clothes, and I found their approach amusingly queer. I never noticed, however, all the pits. That is, until Mirko pointed it out. And now that I've pointed them out to you, you're going to notice them---like, everywhere.

At a recent wedding I was discussing A&F's pits with some friends, and more than one seemed surprised. "Really? Arm pits?" So, I thought I'd discourse here a bit about pittage---or rather, what is termed mascahlophilia, the love of armpits. Let me go on record to say that I find this "love" amusing and am not personally prone to being aroused by armpits (usually the opposite), although there's nothing wrong with that. It's a classic example of the "fetish," a term usually reserved for shoes or breasts in Western culture. For some reason A&F advertisers have decided the armpit would be their signature advertising fetish---or at least one of them (there's the whole Aryan controversy to contend with as well, of course).

So why did A&F advertisers choose the armpit? The answer has something to do with the concept of the fetish itself. Papa Freud first theorizes the fetish in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexaulity, in which he examines the strange attraction of a piece of fur as a kind of substitute for childhood memories of the parental crotch (which is hairy and unlike that of the child's):

The replacement of the object by a fetish is determined by a symbolic connection of thought, of which the person usually is not conscious. . . . No doubt the part played by fur as a fetish owes its origin to an association with the hair of the mons veneris . . . . Symbolism such as this is not always unrelated to sexual experiences in childhood.

Well, of course, there's plenty room for doubt about some sort of actual memory of mum's (or dad's, or whomever's) crotch. But Freud's point is that a snatch of "fur" can trigger a memory of such a region in a way that is not conscious. In his book Fetish: An Erotics of Culture, Henry Krips continues:

The function of the fetish is as much that of a screen as a memorial. That is, it stands in the place of that which cannot be remembered directly. It substitutes for that which is and must remain repressed (verdrangt). As such, the fetish is also a site of disavowal (Verleugnung), and specifically of contradiction: we know that fur is not pubic hair, but even so, in a way that is never clearly specified, we know that it is . . . .

And, so, there you have it. Why the armpit? Because, it is both a reminder and a screen from the act of sexual intercourse. The classic (if not tired) reading of A&F's use of armpits is that it is a classic metonym (metōnymía, "a change of name"). If A&F cannot show a nude crotch, the armpit is a good substitute: it's culturally regarded as somewhat "dirty," yet not offensive. It can be shaved to make it appear "clean" and devoid of "fur," and still, it does the trick of innuendo---just like shoes might do in other contexts. (For example, Carrie Bradshaw has a thing for Manolos in a show titled Sex in the City). If you're going to market clothing to the Great Teen-Age and you wanna use sex to sell, the last stop on the way to pornography is . . . the armpit.

Needless to say, any google search of "armpit fetish" will turn up countless hyperlinks to websites devoted to mascahlophallation and mascalophilemia. It's a little noticed undercurrent in our culture, but once that undercurrent is pointed out, you start to notice it is ubiquitous in the advertising world.

The deodorant industry thus takes on a new valence. Of course, smelling someone's underarm odor is, for most folks, unpleasant (especially in the workplace, and especially if it's not your own). But sometime in the 20th century visual rhetoric came into the picture, so to speak. The "Dry Idea" brand of deodorant advertised their products under the slogan, "never let them see you sweat," and commercials began to air in that linked confidence with dry pits. Somehow wet pits have come to signify a lack of self-control---a form of incontenence.

And so, well, there you are. Pitiful bloggin', I know.