cut than ever before. Yet all this shaving had another function as well: to enforce insensitivity, militarism, and a brutal machinist ideology.
Hair acts as antennae on the body. Hair on one’s body makes one sensitive to one’s environment. Religious people are typically hairy and resolve not to cut their hair lest their relationship with God—via their antennae—be severed. Hasidim, Amish, Rastafarians, Orthodox Muslims, and Sikhs all have edicts about maintaining certain hairs or hair that is sacred. Samson was the biblical story of a hero who lost his power by cutting his hair. Conversely, when the Greeks and Romans successively conquered their respective known worlds, they were remarkable for their decision, culturally, to be without facial hair. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, a Greek descendant, was the last of the kings of Rome (535–496 BC) before the Senate era, and also the man to introduce the razor to the kingdom.
Lucius shaving himself signaled a paradigm shift which brought about his own defeat. The beard was a signal of the monarchic father authority, while the shaved face was androgynous and democratic. The razor excited new passions which struck with a dialectic fist. Shaving reversed time and blurred identity. Old could suddenly be young, masculine could be feminine, identities were revealed to be mutable/equivocal, and a craze for democracy was the result. Lucius’s dynasty was overthrown and gave way to the senatorial Rome of historic renown. After he was deposed, the newly shaven Roman Republic was declared, which then set about conquering the known world.
The Romans had taken their democratic model from the Greeks of Athens, who had also been known to shave and oil their bodies, as had the Egyptians who inspired them. In antiquity, the Athenians maintained an empire in the Peloponnese, demanding slaves and treasure from their neighbors. The Romans eclipsed Greek conquests and have been the aesthetic template for most imperial projects since, e.g., the National Socialists, Bismark’s Prussia, the European fascist movements of the 1930s, Napoleon (whose reign was synonymous with the architectural “Empire” style), Great Britain, and the USA (Washington, DC’s neoclassical buildings, the eagle as national symbol, and the “fasces” wall adornment at the US Congress are but a few examples of the country’s repetitive and unimaginative invocations of Roman imperial power).
Our sexual ideas are also borrowed not from the sophisticate cultures who created the Kama Sutra, but from kindred brutalists, the Romans. Roman depictions of sex in the ubiquitous brothels of Pompeii, which feature Priapus centrally, are curiously similar to images of modern pornography.
Hairless tribes were dominant over their hairy neighbors. Besides haircutting, rituals of self-mutilation were symbols of tribal potency; circumcision, an obvious example, was not religious but a cultural designator of toughness and exclusivity. In parts of the world with more history, such as Asia, it’s theorized that relative hairlessness developed as an evolutionary trait of survival. As the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians showed, less hair meant military prowess and dominance over foes. Hairiness was a sacred trait, reserved for the noncombatants such as holy men, poets, philosophers, crazies, and nursing mothers. Similarly, shaving one’s body desensitizes ones body. It makes one more machine-like, more macho; it makes brutality easier. As soon as hairiness was associated with leftism, the fate of that ideological propensity was doomed.
With the so-called sexual revolution, people started shaving not only their faces but also their pubic regions. This began with an avant-garde of homosexuals but spread with the popularization of pornography via the Internet and the “hook-up culture” of casual straight sex performed by nerds and squares. The shaved body signals a person who’s not hung up by attachments, feelings, romanticism, or any of the tawdry aspects of relationships or “love.” The shaved crotch was one that was ready for wordless action steeled against vulnerability.
Onlookers of porn complain of the childlike resemblance of the shorn genitals, that the shaved vagina looks prepubescent, which makes them uncomfortable. But the shaved pubic area is meant to look preadolescent. It denotes a preadolescent disregard for the potency of sex in regard to emotionalism, romanticism, etc. Pubic hair paradoxically doesn’t protect the sex organ but extends it; it is a quite sensitive part of it.
Chopping off one’s pubic hair is akin to cutting the foreskin or female genital mutilation that persists in some parts of the world. It is designed to desensitize. Violence-worshipping youth cults such as the military and the “skinheads” of Britain typically shave their heads as a designation of sociopathic unfeeling. The hair, instead of protecting or hiding the organ, actually comprises thousands of feelers which lend sensitivity to the organ, exposing it to its partner’s signals of empathy, love, lust, shame, fear, disgust, et al. A hairy body is simply less prepared for modernistic, mechanized body-mashing.
Hairlessness is an aggressive stance, and implies a lack of vanity and disdain for luxury. It implies a state of war. A French-style waxing job or pubic “landing strip” is like the so-called mohawk haircut favored by the Pawnee tribe and used in times of war by Cossacks, airborne troops, and the like. The “Brazilian” wax job is the full skinhead.
In the pretwist era, the dancer would often dance with many partners in a simulated orgy. It was essentially a tryout for sex or a replacement, but in its explicitness and its intimacy, it could not be called repressed. After the twist was introduced, sex repression saw its apex expression in the “mania” or alienated and displaced erotic cavalcade which met the Beatles and other stars of the era. After the disappointment engendered by the Beatles’ breakup came a mass, culturewide depression. Soon afterward, drug abuse became practically compulsory for teens who liked music. This was another replacement for sex. The so-called sexual revolution, celebrated as a liberation which encouraged participants to have more sex with more partners, was actually a revolutionary transformation of sex: changing what had been the sex act into a series of alienated, self-conscious moves, or replacing it with the sensual high of the institutionalized “culture” of drugs.
3
All Power to the Pack Rats!
Ikea and Apple’s War on “Hoarders”
I. APPLE VS. THE “HOARDERS”
THE APPLE IDEOLOGY is sleek and clean. It proposes a futuristic lifestyle without attachments or clutter, where mankind is free to chase down every desire, creative and otherwise, free of the “fuzz” of possessions. Like a nomad on the steppe, movement, horizon, and conquest are the only concern.
The room of the modern man is stark, but in its simplicity it exudes wealth and sophistication. There is just a bed or futon and an iPad. None of the old-time accoutrements which signified intelligence, artistic interest, or a curiosity about the world are evident. There are no magazines, books, or records anywhere. Just perhaps some high-priced “products,” a.k.a. toiletries, in the bathroom. Everything he or she needs is on the Cloud.
Things, stuff, and doodads are just hang-ups, after all, which serve to drag us into our past and harness us to prior ideas of who we were and what we are supposed to be.
The Apple world is apart from the old world. It is one where we can be anything, free of the wretched past. Just a being of light and electricity who wafts effortlessly from whim to caprice to passing fancy. Like their room, his or her body is also clean, shaved; streamlined for action. If one has possessions, one is seen to be rather fuddy-duddy and certainly not a sexually vital contemporary being.
The Apple proposition is a sixties futurist-Zen minimalist throwback, lifted from Scandinavian designers like Panton and Saarinen, whose Nordic functionalism was influenced by modernist movements like De Stijl and the Bauhaus.
While modernism proposed ways of dealing with the cataclysmic upheaval brought on by industrialism, Apple’s proposition is the Western capitalist commercial: freedom, ease, sex, and cool control of one’s environment. Apple actively encourages the population to lose their possessions. Music? Store it on the Cloud. Books? Store them on the Cloud. Film, magazines, newspapers, TV are all safely stored in the ether and not underfoot or stuffed in a closet. It’s a modernist monastery where the religion is Apple itself.