The male body spray phenomenon is something I'll never quite understand, because unlike, say, a new Lexus that does the parallel parking for you (a feature that, in my opinion, engenders far more cheap ridicule than it really deserves), a VCR that records shows without actually being a VCR (called DVR, I'm told), or, to really go back to the basics, a sliding door that opens automatically, male body spray doesn't add scent in any way that a nice deodorant stick/eau de cologne combination can't match in either method or result. There's no automation with male body spray, no laser-guided gadgetry. You still have to apply it yourself; it won't electronically remind you if you don't. If, as a fellow says, there's nothing new under the sun, then that certainly must encompass nothing new under the arm as well.
As far as fragrance dispersion goes, the body spray canister doesn't add much to the standard regimen. It's not personal disdain or poor marketing that keeps me away from body sprays; it's incredulousness. I simply can't calculate the added value of body spray. But it does strike me, though, that virtually every great American product seeks to sublime to aerosol -- and thus ethereal, lighter-than-air -- status at some point in its career. After all, you used to have to burn something fragrant to get tobacco (itself a product that, despite featuring a solid -- and liquid if you consider the constant spitting -- leafy, alternative, still finds itself overwhelmingly consumed in gas form) stink out of a room; that is, you needed an incendiary device, a candle or scented oil or incense stick, and a receptacle for the byproducts of the combustion. Now all you need is a haze of Febreeze or Lysol.
Interestingly, the body spray phenomenon also seems to have been timed to coincide with a similar craze, the body wash phenomenon, a hygienic and psycho-sexual sea change by which men can now use liquid soap in the shower and not somehow think themselves effeminate or gay. It was probably the mushrooming of loofah and puff use that led to this regrettable stereotype in the first place; a male reclamation of the washcloth seems to have reversed it. This is, perhaps, a welcome development, as many American men have enough pleasurable or practical activities they have to get through every day without having to think themselves effeminate or gay because of their individual bathing techniques. Since being thought effeminate or gay is, well, pretty frightening for American men (just ask Sen. Craig), it's nice that liquid soap is now one less thing to be "afraid" of. To see the results of this minute reduction in American homophobia, you just have to take a look at the brands now crowding the Olay and Dove on the liquid soap shelf: Old Spice, Irish Spring, Dial--these are men's brands and men's soaps. (Hippies, of course, have been doing the liquid thing for decades with Dr. Bronner's 18-in-one Magic Soap -- these days a bona fide "Whole Foods" product if there ever was one -- but the "magic" in Dr. Bronner's referred to its panacea-like -- at least in a laundering sense -- qualities. Old Spice markets its new body wash as ideal for both hair and body, but Dr. Bronner's claims suitability for toothbrushing, dishwashing, laundry, and just about anything else that needs to be cleaned--anything, that is, except hair, for which Dr. Bronner disqualifies his soap as too dehydrating. Moreover, the story of Dr. Bronner, an escaped electro-shock patient, is much more spiriting than that of Messrs. Procter and Gamble of Cincinnati, Ohio.)
Axe and Tag seem to be the most popular, or at least the most heavily advertised, of the body sprays. They're also the only two I've happened to spy in friends' bathrooms, although I'll admit that I get the two mixed up, and one friend's Axe could have been another's Tag and I probably wouldn't remember or have remembered the difference. Recently, though, the familiar hygiene players have introduced their own body sprays, Old Spice through an advertising campaign that features '70s porn film styling and a reintroduction of its classic maritime jingle, the likes of which we haven't heard since boating was relevant in America (and didn't need to advertise itself as something fun to do, as the American Boating Association now does), which is to say circa Gulf of Tonkin, 1965.
It's peculiar, but this embrace of Vietnam-era lighting and nostalgia may be the point entirely, as if during this contemporary nightmarish revamping of that war, we're attempting to scrub clean the original, or at least those grimy times surrounding it, so that the past we're repeating is, then, figuratively sanitized and sterilized, is really not so bad at all. Fashion cycles in and out of vogue; why can't geopolitical quagmires?
After all, since when has garish, sticky, shaggy shtick ever been necessarily associated -- as it is now, via the male hygiene product in which it's coated -- with freshness and cleanliness (and, proverbially, godliness)? Tag's -- or is it Axe's? -- campaign encourages users to add a little "Bow Chicka Wah Wah" to their lives, to inject a little meaningless, San Fernando-style porn sex into their presumably ordinary days and nights. Now, those who found themselves addicted or infected or worse because of -- either directly or indirectly -- the Southern California pornography industry may find the ad campaign at best puzzling, at worst offensive, but, well, it's merely a sign of our guilty times.
For my generation, though, the seediness of the seventies, which we conveniently weren't around for, has been distilled into an ironic -- and, thus, automatically cool -- backlash from the '60s (the decade we really think was cool), a time we now deride as foolish because we secretly wish we'd have been able to throw together a Summer of Love '07 or that we'd write down our own Port Huron statement -- be able to, that is, if the old legends like Tom Hayden or Ralph Nader would retire and get out of the way. At least, that's what we tell ourselves. We may just be too busy trying to make ourselves -- and our problems -- smell nice.