• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1092 0

material goods grew in partnership with an explosion of advertising, carried by an explosion in media, literacy, and technology. As each grew, it expanded the others: the stuff changed the world, and the world changed the stuff. There had long been market fairs where you could be confronted by a huge number of products at once, but even so, when we started approaching the modern consumer culture, suddenly we had to invent “world’s” fairs. They started in 1851, in England, and got more and more humungous, and then essentially popped, starting in France: they spawned department stores that were permanent abundance fairs, and these ever-changing yet constant emporia dampened the need for the old fairs. Until we figured out how to make large, clear panes of glass, in the late nineteenth century, there was no window-shopping. Sidewalks came soon after, in response. Before that, when you needed to buy a dress, you went to the dressmaker; shopping was not a constant orgy of temptation. Now you strolled down the Champs-Élysées as an entertainment or went into the Bon Marché for several floors of everything imaginable, all in mirrored cases and multitiered displays. Department stores, from their beginnings to the present day, exhibit their goods in a way that highlights a dizzying, almost psychedelic profusion of goods. There are minimalist ads, and there are minimalist stores, but look what an abundance of them!

After millennia of concentration on food, it is shocking to see advertising turn clothes and things (not only food) into a dream of abundance on the order of the Land of Cockaigne. History does not show us examples of happiness as a fantasy of having many organizational gadgets and kitchen utensils. The proliferation of stuff for sale never before existed in anything like the way it does today. From the origins of advertising to the present day, many commercials are all about abundance—full of smiling, buxom women surrounded by mounds of whatever is being sold. To deal with the imagined health threat of having too much, the women in today’s ads are thin as bones, but still show off their bosoms, the only part of the human body that feeds. These days breasts are even more complex symbols because many of the ones you see on television are fake: they are not big because they feed, nor are they big because the woman is herself well fed. As with our food, we found a way to be lean yet keep the image of abundance (though, with both low-fat food and low-fat breasts, the texture might be a bit off).

Shopping is an opportunity to enact one’s personal power, to act out a psychologically fulfilling drama. A People magazine ad of 1937 (People was a monthly of the period) ran as follows:

There may not be as much romance in earning the dollars—someone else is usually the boss on that job—but in parting from them, the buyer is boss. Selecting a necktie gives him a gratifying sense of power. Buying a fur jacket is a great adventure for a woman—she in the seat of authority, with salespeople eager to do her bidding. Yes, spending is fun. No wonder all the increase in national income will not be spent “sensibly”—for the rarer the purchase, the greater the adventure.4

Shopping is buying the wolf’s pelt and becoming the wolf. Shopping is also a matter of coping with the wolf’s attentions. The more the real wolf was no longer in the living memory of the people and the more starvation disappeared from the normal life cycle, the more the wolf came to refer specifically to sexual hunger and sexual danger. In the second half of the twentieth century, for the first time, lustful men were referred to as wolves, not just in an occasional metaphor, but as a constant nickname: “He’s a wolf.” Lupine hunger had to disappear entirely before the wolf could be so simply identified with men. The “wolf whistle” apparently dates from no earlier than 1946.5 The Otto Preminger film Anatomy of a Murder, which came out in 1959, had lawyer Jimmy Stewart insist that his client’s victim was worse than a ladies’ man, a womanizer, or a masher. Instead, Stewart hollers: