Shaving as Ritual
If the consumption of goods does in fact involve the transfer of meanings from object to consumer as I am suggesting, then the mechanisms by which such a transfer occurs is a matter of considerable importance. Fortunately, there has been some important work done in this area, although typically it remains tied to the ‘supply side’ of the issue, in this case the methods by which meaning is encoded into objects, as opposed to the process of moving those meanings into the personal life of the consumer. Nevertheless, a number of scholars have addressed this issue with respect to 'display' goods, being objects which are worn or used in a public setting (1). In this instance, much of the meaning-association process is tied to the social interactions themselves. Our choices, in other words, are validated through a stimulus/response dialectic with an external respondent. For example, if we elicit a more 'positive' response from others when wearing jeans than when clad in a suit and tie, then the 'jeans-message' will be strengthened and the 'suit-message' weakened. If this response is repeated, then over time we are likely to come to think of ourselves as a 'jean person'.
While this may provide a reasonable explanation for meaning-transfer in display goods, what of those items which are commonly used in private? This is a much thornier problem, if only because most of the available theoretical constructs have emanated from the field of sociology, which focuses of necessity on the arena of inter-personal relations.
To understand how meaning may be transferred from privately consumed goods to the user, we need to turn to the field of anthropology and the concept of ritual. As anthropologists have long known, ritual can perform a range of important functions, but the one that concerns us here is the idea that “...rituals provide positive benefits by contributing to a person’s individuation and fostering healthy ego development.”(2) Dennis Rook has identified four tangible components involved in ritualistic behaviour:
- Ritual artifacts
- A ritual script
- Ritual performance role(s)
- A ritual audience.
In general, shaving for men clearly encompasses the first three requirements, bearing in mind that a ‘script’ does not necessarily involve verbal components, and noting the conditional plural where roles are concerned. The fourth requirement, however, seems to present an insurmountable condition, since shaving is almost always performed in private. I would suggest, however, that this apparent solitude is in some senses an illusion. As suggested by the illustration above, there are two presences involved in the shaving process: the man with the razor and the man in the mirror. The first is the subject of the exercise, the second the object - ‘I’ and ‘me’, ego and superego, being and becoming. Seen in this light, shaving becomes an act of self-creation by which a man recovers a critical element of his public masculinity - his face.
If we examine the act of shaving for women in the same light, several obvious differences become immediately apparent, differences which I suggest entirely change the significance of the act. In the first place, women generally shave areas of the body to which far less importance is attached socially than the face. And because this is so, women do not commonly use a mirror when shaving, thus reducing the importance of the ‘other’ - the audience - in the process. Finally, women usually shave with far less frequency than men, perhaps only once a week or less. Taken together, these variations tend to suggest that shaving is far less ritualistic for women than for men, and also less critical to the construction of their social selves. It is not in shaving that we find a female counterpart to the daily shave, but in the application of makeup. In the latter case, the ritual elements discussed above are all present: the mirror, the sequence, the implements and the ‘other’, constructed self.
Shaving, then, is much more than a simple mechanical act involving the removal of facial hair. It is also, and perhaps more so, a ritualized mechanism by which a human male assumes one specific modern masculine gender value - ‘clean-shavenness’. There is, however, more to the process than that. In addition to creating a signifier of masculinity (lack of facial hair), the ritual process is also a vehicle for transferring additional meanings from the ritual objects to the subject self. Unlike display goods such as clothes, cars and jewellery, shaving implements are not employed in the presentation of self (to use Goffman’s phrase), but in the preparation of self. This crucial distinction begins to explain why the design and advertising imagery used in grooming products tends to reflect the gender of the consumer, rather than that of the opposite sex as is usually done for display goods. Display goods are used to make us appear desirable in the eyes of others: grooming goods are intended to help us define ourselves to ourselves and are used in a secondary process to create a display good, i.e. our visible bodies.
Last updated: 29 December 1997
