A Little More On Perfume and Gender

I'd like to try and refract the powerful arguments Jicky has made below through the prism of masculine mainstream scent marketing to see what strange images can be conjured upon the wall. I use this general term "scent" rather than the more specific "perfume" for reasons I'll come to in a moment.

There is a great deal of truth in the suggestion that clean fragrances can be associated with the suppression of a woman's natural smell and can therefore seen as an instrument of control. Certainly until very recently the state of the union was that most women would wear mass-market perfume, generally something floral or slightly comestible and men would stink of old armpit. Today the same mass-market has shifted and men do now smell of something other than themselves. The trick in selling scent to men is twofold. Firstly, it must be seen to achieve some practical end, usually getting the wearer laid, and second, the scent must be contained within a product which is primarily used for something other than smelling pleasant, for example a deodorant.

The example which leaps inevitably to mind is, sadly, Unilever's Lynx range. This same range is known as Axe in the USA and much of the rest of the world. The brand was devised and launched in 1983 by Fabergé. It has been incredibly successful for Unilever, Fabergé's parent company ever since. Last year men with dysfunctional noses spent $7.3 bn on Lynx products worldwide. According to Unilever the target market for the range of deodorants, shower gels and so on is 18-24 year olds. Whilst many of the glossy men's magazines such as GQ and Esquire will feature expensive identikit adverts for fragrances from Tom Ford, Calvin Klein and Jean Paul Gaultier, these are perfumes aimed at slightly older, professional (read "richer") men. They cannot therefore be seen as a barometer of the mainstream. Lynx certainly can, the numbers do not lie.

Lynx is targeted at the reader of Nuts, FHM and The Sun newspaper: all massive selling publications. The key here is that Unilever do not make a perfume as part of the range, not even sneaking one by disguising it as "after shave". Every product is, first and foremost, something other than perfume. Perfume for perfume's own sake is still a worryingly feminine concept for many men but the paranoia that women will find you attractive only if you smell of something other than old sweat is all pervasive. In order to sell to these men you must employ a carpet bombing marketing strategy of providing a product they can feel confident about buying and mix that with advertisements that promise that its scent will get them some action. It is worth pointing out that Unilever's advertising concentrates entirely on the supposed effect of the scent, no mention is ever made of the product's qualities as a deodorant. Nonetheless, at no point may you suggest that a man might want to wear a scent for his own pleasure; that would be unmanly.

This strategy, bizarrely, often ends up with the same practical result as mass-market women's perfume, that of horribly ersatz, sinus stripping bleach-fresh fragrances with no hint of nature, sex or humanity about them. What is interesting is how differently they are marketed and what this says about society's expectation of gender. Women's fragrances are sold on the basis that the wearer will be seen, by others, as a dazzling starlet, perhaps a little like a Paris Hilton (can you even dare to dream?), presumably because all her foul female odour has been covered with Thierry Mugler's Angel. Contrast this with men, who are sold to on the basis of how wearing the product will change how they are seen in the eyes of women. This is especially true if they wear Lynx's new range, Temptation, a chocolate scented deodorant. In actuality, these two scents, Temptation and Angel are practically the same fragrance. They both smell repugnant: artificially sweet with a hint of Play-doh and vomit, but both claim to be chocolate.

So although identical in the inhalation, it is the service that each is sold as providing which differs, though both pray on the paranoia of what each gender is expected to act and smell like. Both the "virginal woman" and the "machismo man" are painfully dim-witted, insulting and repressive constructs with which no right-thinking individual would identify.

What becomes increasingly clear in my mind is how the mass-market scent manufacturers so cleverly sell the societal status quo of gender expectation, presumably because the actual product they are trying to shift is garbage. In exactly the same way as WKD sells itself on the basis that people's inhibitions diminish the more kaylied they become rather than on the delicious and careful blending of ingredients that no doubt make up its cyan coloured liquid-brain-cell-annihilator, the marketing emphasis of the mainstream perfumer is on the societal effect not the personal experience of their product. The moral seems to be that if you can't make something good, sell it to people so that they understand they will be seen as functional, normal members of their social group if they consume it. This has nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with submission to the norm and that applies to people regardless of gender.