2008 Woodie Awards
Axing the Axe Effect: boys are stinky
Phil DeSantis
Issue date: 12/16/05 Section: Opinions
- Page 1 of 2 next >
I've been a dirty boy all my life and never had a problem with it. As an infant, mud and sandboxes were one of the finest places to play. Balling it up, throwing it, even feeling the squishing of fresh, soft mud between my toes takes me back to simpler days. As I got older, I still enjoyed playing with dirt-type substances. I've always been a big fan of the pottery wheel and sculpting, probably from some repressed childhood urge to play in the mud. However, as a lifelong "dirty boy," I have never felt the need to use any Axe brand product to get clean.
If you have lived under a rock and not been aware of Axe, let me fill you in. Axe is a body spray designed specifically for men. It is sort of an after-shower spray to give, as the website claims, "new and improved male musk." This musk is apparently "The Axe Effect" that is so well-advertised. Well, my musk has never been anything to shake a stick at, but do I really need to size up to the big leagues of musk with Axe?
The parent company of Axe, Unilever, would definitely argue for everyone to buy more Axe body spray. It is currently the number one body spray in the world, with sales somewhere in the area of $1.2 billion. A distant second in the body spray market is Tag, made by Gillette, with $12.6 million since early October, only eight months after its inception.
How do these body spray companies do it? Some would point to the rising tide of feminism within men and the waning moon of women's lib. Men seem to have gotten prissier with each passing year, from metrosexuals to the great popped polo collar revolution. You know, the expensive polo shirt, designer jeans, slightly crooked sideways hat, and perfectly white shoes, usually K-Swiss. These men, for good or for bad, care about how they look and smell. Body spray has replaced cologne because it is cheaper and has become the "in" product of today's man, from pre-teen all the way to certified old man.
Women help the "effect" by caring less and less that they are openly portrayed as stupid, material-driven sex objects. A female student writing for the University of Tennessee's Daily Beacon Online talked about a promotional campaign that Axe used for students in her humanities class. Each student received a binder with a "Reserved" sign to indicate you have been waiting for a certain someone (stupid), a book cover that is supposed to look like a book of poetry (shallow), an inkless pen and notebook without paper for easy pickup lines (never going to work), and a fake ATM receipt showing thousands of dollars in deposits and withdrawals (demeaning to women). These pick up tools supplied by Axe all imply that women can easily be manipulate by stupid, material objects.
