Pit Boss

Dove's NYC Subway Campaign Is the Pits

Some years ago, I was at a party where an elderly gay man, who shall remain nameless, was holding forth with his fascinating and amusing stories. This man had been the lover of a very famous closeted entertainer (who shall also remain nameless), and had known a galaxy of stars and celebrities. One tale he told was of Hollywood heartthrob Errol Flynn. Flynn was starring in his first major role, Captain Blood, and they were shooting a scene in which shirtless Ross Alexander, in the role of (ironically, given the nature of this essay) Jeremy Pitt, is being viciously flogged by the evil Colonel Bishop. Alexander’s arms were tied above his head, and at one point the makeup department suggested that his armpits should be shaved, to make things more aesthetically pleasing. Flynn, who, according to the old gentleman telling the story, was having a sexual affair with Alexander, stepped in, stating unequivocally, “If you shave those armpits, I quit!”

Errol Flynn and Ross Alexander in Captain Blood

Apparently, Flynn liked his men au natural. To each his own. Flynn had a thing for pits. I have, in my time, known many a gay man who has a penchant for armpits; this is often paired with a thing for “mansmells,” i.e., body odor. Often hookup app profiles include the preference “no deodorant.” Not, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, that there’s anything wrong with that. Personally, pits aren’t my thing, and I’m more of a soap and water clean kinda guy. Armpits, to me, aren’t something to be featured, per se—rather like buttcracks. Sometimes, due to low rise pants, or if you’re the proverbial plumber crouching under a sink, the buttcrack makes an appearance—but that’s usually by chance, rather than design. We get a glimpse, but it’s not—pardon the expression—in one’s face. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So, speaking of soap and water—and armpits in your face—let’s talk about Dove’s #freethepits “armpit positivity” campaign.

The Dove website features its Arms Up Series: Perfect Pits Don’t Exist. Dove tells us that 8 out of 10 women suffer from underarm concerns and despite this fact “almost three quarters of our research group said they’ve never spoken to friends or family about our underarm skin issues.”

Armpits are a source of suffering? I mean, I was a drag performer for nearly a decade and at one point or another shaved everything. I know armpit razor burn can be pretty terrible. But these underarm concerns are so shameful women never talk about it? Dove continues:

“And to encourage women to celebrate the uniqueness of all underarms, we’ve launched the Arms Up Series, a collection of armpit portraits featuring real women proudly showcasing a diverse set of pits.”

“Armpit portraits?” Eew. You do you, there’s nothing wrong with it, but I don’t get the point. I mean, yes, I get the point that Dove wants to sell women a range of armpit products. I worked in the beauty industry for 15 years, so I know that it’s always more marketing than anything else. Women, men, and all other humans should feel good about their bodies, treat them well, and try as much as possible not to indulge in comparisons with other people’s bodies, in my opinion. So, I get the idea of women proudly raising their arms…but do I want to see a gallery of it…? Um, no. No more than I want to see a buttcrack gallery. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I can hear certain voices from here. You know, the folks I call the “Pick-a-Little-Woke-a-Little Ladies.” They’re whining something like:

“Why wouldn’t you want to look at their armpits? What’s wrong with their armpits? Why are you so uncomfortable with it? Women aren’t here for your approval! Fuck the patriarchy!!”

Dove’s subway campaign is saturated in this snarky, confrontational tone.

”Not your underarms. Not your business.” Yeah. Okay. Great. But, if it’s not my business, why is your armpit all up in my business when I’m trying to use the subway? You’re shoving your armpit in my face and saying, mind your own business! Look, I’ve been a New Yorker for 30 years. One of the compromises of living here—and they are legion—is riding crowded subways, where most of those standing are holding on overhead. Bring me your tired, your poor, your many armpits. I get why the Madison Avenue types who pitched this campaign to Dove thought they were being cute here, but armpits aren’t something to celebrate on the New York City subway. They’re something to cope with, or try to ignore, on a hot July day when the A/C isn’t working on the uptown local.

But the underlying messaging here is more important to Dove’s marketing VPs than the ad gimmick. Using the tone and verbiage of the social justice clack, the message is clear: women have been shamed about their armpits for too long!! It’s the armpit version of Free the Nipple. Personally, I’ve not witnessed a woman being shamed for her armpits, and I’ve been in show business half my life, sharing quick change areas and dressing rooms with thousands of women. It’s weird to me that women’s activism, feminism, what you will—there’s nothing wrong with it—keeps coming back, generationally, to the same two gestures of liberation: burn the bra and let your armpit hair flourish. Fuck societal double standards!

My mother, may she rest in peace, was a single Mom at 40 with three kids, at the height of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s. She was sort of Bonnie Franklin in One Day at a Time meets Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman. She started her own business with another female friend, running it in the black for almost a decade; she was a member of the League of Women Voters and the National Organization for Women. But she always insisted she was not a feminist. She would bristle at the suggestion. To her, a feminist had saggy breasts and hairy armpits—and my Mom was a lady.

Which leads me to something rather crucial here. Just who is shaming whom? The Dove armpit campaign includes the following sentences which, intentionally or not, tell the truth of it.

6 in 10 of us admit to judging other women’s armpits. Let’s change that.

First you tell us that 8 out of 10 women have “underarm concerns” and then tell us 6 out of 10 women admit to judging other women’s armpits. Well, that’s pretty clear. The underhand underarm oppression is being inflicted by women on other women, and Dove thinks women should change it. I know firsthand, from many years in the multi-billion-dollar beauty and skincare racket, that women are straight up evil to each other, dressing and grooming themselves for each other, and often, in competition with each other. So why, then, do all of us have to have high resolution photos of armpits in our faces on the A Train? We have enough real armpits, male, female, and other to deal with, thank you very much.

I scoff at this narrative that women endure such terrible objectification from men, such pressure to have “perfect pits” from men, and are being so oppressed for their body types, hairstyles, grooming preferences, physical idiosyncracies, such that we have to have a quasi-protest-movement-cum-advertising campaign in the NYC subways, where unsuspecting commuters are assaulted by a closeup of a furry pit with the caption, “Uncomfortable? She isn’t.” Well, good for her. But maybe we might think about everybody’s comfort? How about exercising good taste and some decent manners? Common courtesy is all too uncommon nowadays, and I propose we bring it back! Let’s go old school! And no—I’m not talking about the use of formal, gendered salutations like “Sir” and “Ma’am,” or colonialist, Euro-centric mores of social behavior. I’m talking about not being an asshole.

“Consideration for the rights and feelings of others is not merely a rule for behavior in public but the very foundation upon which social life is built.” ~Emily Post, Etiquette

So many issues that social justice fetishists obsess over, exaggerate, and exploit in order to make money smack of teenage rebellion and tantrum. Whether it be issues of gender, or race, or whatever our marginalized victim group of the day is, the activists and their amplifiers dredge up, cook up, and make up societal ills to protest against, dredging up old tropes about the prerogatives of femininity for example, the wage gap, societal pressures to be thin, and pretty, and white. As I explored in my piece about Barbie, women can’t seem to break this cycle. They can’t change the record. I’m sorry—I live in New York City, one of the most diverse, most fashion forward cities in the world. I see women of every shape, size and color dressing as they want, doing their hair they way they want, shaving their legs and pits—or not. To me the oppression fetishism that inspires an entire corporate ad campaign dedicated to armpit positivity—as if we’re having a national armpit shame epidemic?? Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Pit Pride (not that there’s anything wrong with that)

The first time I saw a woman with hairy armpits was when my brother did a foreign exchange in high school. The young woman who came to stay with us was French. She didn’t shave anything. She was a beautiful girl, and she came from a culture where shaving was neither a compulsion nor a custom. She was totally oblivious as to whether anybody stateside found it off-putting or strange.

My point is this is a cultural issue. Cultures evolve the way they evolve, and different and diverse cultures have differing and diverse standards of beauty and socially acceptable dress and behavior. American women have every kind of choice today for self expression (they can even have a penis if they like). But if you make a choice that most of the culture finds odd or unusual—like getting your armpit tattooed, or growing your underarm locks long and curly—then fucking own it. Stop pretending that in the process of bucking tradition or cultural norms—which you choose to do—you’ve been made a victim! You made a choice, girl, and that’s your right as an American. But, I dunno…could ya stop sticking your pits in our faces and then crying oppression when we hold our noses? There is something wrong with that. And it’s the pits.