The Culture Code (7 page)

The work I have done in Japan indicates that seduction is a very subtle activity there for both sexes. Women spend a great deal of time making sure their hair is clean. They also pay extraordinary attention to the neck, enhancing its appearance with creams and makeup. Then they will put their immaculate hair up and wear the collar of their kimono to display their neck in the most flattering way. They do this to attract men, and Japan’s is the only culture I can think of that does so with a part of the body that has nothing at all to do with the reproductive process.

The discovery sessions on seduction were fascinating all over the world, though they often underscored things I’d already learned. The American sessions were the least predictable, despite what I knew about adolescent cultures. In all, three hundred people from various cities participated in the American sessions, offering me glimpses of not only their first imprint of seduction, but their most powerful memories, and their most recent memories as well. This gave me nine hundred messages to work with—and one very common theme to identify.

The first time my mother told me to keep my skirt down when boys were around. It did not make sense to me at the time. Why not girls, too? Later, I understood.

—a forty-five-year-old woman

No idea about seduction. Nothing comes back. Maybe drinking beer with friends, speaking loud, offering a drink to girls, drinking with them. Then going home.

—a forty-year-old man

I was going out with an older man. He was nice, but always wanted me to wear a skirt. I thought that was old-fashioned. I like my jeans. Until he told me that I turned him on when I had a skirt. I don’t see him anymore.

—a forty-year-old woman

This kind of angry, confused imagery appeared repeatedly during the sessions—along with stories about “hidden persuaders,” subliminal messages, hypnosis, and dishonesty. This was a trait of adolescence I hadn’t anticipated: suspicion, fear of being controlled, and rebellion against anyone “telling you what to do.”

As I said earlier, emotion is the key to learning. When the emotion that leads to an imprint is a negative one, the imprint is likely to be negative as well. Throughout American society—and the consistency of the responses during the discovery sessions made this abundantly clear—there is a negative association with the concept of seduction. When Americans think of seduction, they think of being forced to do things they don’t want to do or that they believe they shouldn’t do.

The American Culture Code for seduction is
MANIPULATION
.

Because we look at seduction in such a negative way, we bring a high level of unconscious suspicion to all relationships between men and women. Even when sexual advances are not confrontational, the unconscious message of “manipulation” is present. Americans invented the concept of the “battle between the sexes.” American books and talk shows endlessly exhort their audiences to rail against the way one sex treats the other. Tremendously successful movies illustrate the way men and women manipulate each other during the act of seduction. While these books, talk shows, and movies might use humor to make their points, the underlying message is decidedly unfunny: seduction makes us very, very uncomfortable.

After this discovery, L’Oréal made the decision to work away from the Code in its marketing. While their ads in France were very sensuous and oozed seduction, the last thing they wanted was for American consumers to feel uncomfortable or manipulated when presented with their products. They decided that their advertising would have a distinctly nonsexual spin, focusing on feeling good about oneself. The purpose of using L’Oréal products was not to seduce a man, but rather to feel confident—“Because you’re worth it.” Their campaigns spoke of feeding and nurturing your skin and hair, evoking unconscious images of motherhood rather than of manipulation.

By avoiding the Code for seduction in their advertising, L’Oréal created a winning strategy. They went “productively off Code.” When an advertiser knows that associating a product with a certain Code will trigger negative feelings, it can choose to sidestep that Code completely. Another approach, particularly useful when a negative association is unavoidable (as we will see later with the Code for alcohol), is to subtly acknowledge the Code in such a way as to lessen its impact.

This latter strategy is useful to any individual attempting to be seductive. After all, there is no way to avoid engaging in seduction unless one is resigned to celibacy. A useful tool here is disarming honesty—letting the object of one’s affection know of one’s interest directly to avoid any sense of trickery or manipulation. The negative Code is still there, but the honesty—the unstated acknowledgment of the Code—will blunt its force.

“
AMERICANS
DON’T
HAVE
SEX
,
THEY
HAVE
SEX
PROBLEMS
.”
—
MARLENE
DIETRICH

The adolescent view of the world includes few gray areas. Adolescents tend to see only the extremes: things are good or bad, interesting or boring, meaningful or worthless. This kind of thinking is pervasive in our adolescent culture, and you will see examples of it throughout this book. One such example is the Code for sex.

Knowing the Codes for love and seduction, I approached the Code for sex with every expectation that it would reflect a certain level of discomfort. It was already obvious to me that Americans felt a significant degree of stress when it came to intimate relationships. Still, I did not expect the responses in my discovery sessions to be so extreme.

All boys are dogs. We know what they want. We give it to them…sometimes. But we know why they are telling you they love you.

—a fourteen-year-old woman

When I was eleven years old, I was with my sister, who was twelve, and her friends. We were sitting on the top stairs of an elementary school in our area. My sister’s friend told my sister and me about it [sex] because she had just found out about it. It really scared me. I really did not understand the reasoning behind it.

—a forty-two-year-old woman

I remember I wanted it so badly…it was all I thought about for years. But when I finally had sex for the first time, it was over quickly and I felt like someone was scamming me about how great it was. I expected to feel fantastic, but I felt beaten up instead. It was kind of scary how much of a letdown it was.

—a thirty-six-year-old man

In fifth grade, my friends and I read the book
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
[by Judy Blume]. There was talk about sex and I went home and showed my mother, wondering what was happening in the book. She told me for the first time what was going on. I was scared and anxious.

—a woman in her forties

I was eleven years old and a tomboy when I began puberty. I did not want to become a woman. I was a very serious child and my parents did not prepare me enough for this change in my life. I wondered how I would make it through my teens.

—a fifty-year-old woman

When I was a teenager, I found out my older sister’s best friend was a stripper. After that, every time I saw her, I just wanted to tear her clothes off and have sex with her instantly. My hormones were raging.

—a thirty-four-year-old man

Repeatedly, the respondents spoke of winning and losing, of taking things and of having things taken from them, even of dominance and being dominated. Even when they wrote about sex as a pleasurable experience, the story often ended darkly.

When I read what people write during discovery sessions, I look not at what they say (remember, you can’t believe what people say), but at the common messages. I don’t look at the context, but at the grammar. Not the content, but the structure. In doing this with the pieces people wrote about sex, I noticed something in the cadence of the writing; in the regular appearance of words like “scared,” “scary,” and “anxious” and of phrases like “I felt beaten up” or “I wondered how I would make it”; in the use of clipped sentences and a certain breathlessness in the tone. It brought to mind confrontation, but not the kind of confrontation that is resolved peacefully, with both sides coming away winners. Rather, it brought to mind the kind of confrontation that always has at least one loser and often two. A violent confrontation.

In fact, the American Culture Code for sex is
VIOLENCE
.

This illustrates the extremist thinking of an adolescent culture. Since we are uncomfortable with sex, we equate it with the extreme opposite of pleasure, something that causes pain and death. It is also clear that as a culture we are far more comfortable with violence than with sex. We consider it bad manners to discuss sex at the dinner table, but we permit lengthy conversations about war, crime, or the latest action movie. If a man is planning a hunting trip with the express intention of shooting and killing something, he can tell all his friends and coworkers and maybe display pictures of himself next to his “prize.” If, however, two unmarried colleagues plan a sexual encounter at a nearby hotel, they are likely to tell no one other than their closest confidants. The
FCC
fines television stations for showing women breast-feeding (as though that were in any way sexual), but on any given night, those same stations can broadcast simulations of murder and mutilation without penalty.

You might recall the 1989 movie
The War of the Roses.
The film chronicles an extremely acrimonious divorce between a character played by Michael Douglas and one played by Kathleen Turner. By the end, their battle turns into all-out physical conflict and the combatants topple off their foyer balcony and crash to the floor below. As the two lie dying, Michael Douglas turns to Kathleen Turner and asks, “Was it as good for you as it was for me?” This sexual question at the end of a fatal confrontation is decidedly on Code. What the director, Danny DeVito, and the screenwriter, Michael Leeson, understood was that Americans have unconsciously “replaced” sex with violence. Our popular culture is filled with the sex/violence connection. Hiphop lyrics regularly extol the virtues of rough sex. There’s an entire subgenre of romance novels called romantic thrillers, in which lovers connect in the midst of stories about serial killers, mass murderers, and terrorists. And how many times have we seen that film cliché where couples slap each other’s faces before falling into each other’s arms?

It isn’t difficult to find places in our culture where the lines between sex and violence blur. Men talk about “nailing” or “banging” a woman when they bed her. Women joke about castrating a man if he cheats on them. Date rape drugs proliferate on high school and college campuses. We commonly refer to singles bars as “meat markets.” All this is very familiar.

Earlier, we saw how L’Oréal chose to avoid the negative messages associated with seduction in their marketing. The Code for sex is another negative one, yet American marketers use sex to sell products—very successfully—all the time. When advertisers sell with sex, they tap into the Code. While most of them don’t realize, and would be stunned to learn, that they are associating their products with violence, this works for one simple reason: Americans are fascinated with violence. Consider this snapshot: for the week ending October 9, 2005, the number 1 television show in the country was
CSI
,
a drama filled with grisly crime images. Number 2 was
Desperate Housewives,
a show about sexy suburban women with several subplots that involve murder. In fact, each of the top five shows that week had strong violent themes. The same week, the number 1 movie in the country was
The Fog
, a horror film; number 4 was
Flightplan
, a violent thriller; number 6 was
Domino,
an action movie about a female bounty hunter; and number 8 was
A History of Violence
. The number 1
DVD
rental was
The Amityville Horror,
and the number 2 and number 4 CDs were gangsta rap albums. Americans may abhor real violence, but we find simulated violence enthralling. This is another offshoot of our cultural adolescence: as adolescents, we feel immortal, indestructible, and we are drawn to violence to test our invincibility. When marketers use sex in advertising, they connect with this fascination.

STUCK
ON
THE
ROLLER
COASTER

Cultures change at a glacial pace. We will not see the end of our cultural adolescence in our lifetimes. Nor will our children or their children. That means the Codes for love, seduction, and sex will be the same generations from now—not the best legacy. Adolescence is a roller-coaster ride, though, and you will see in subsequent pages how our cultural adolescence, which takes us to uncomfortable lows, leads us to some extraordinary highs as well.

The Codes for Beauty and Fat

L
ife is tension. Everything we experience in life lies somewhere on an axis between two extremes. One cannot truly know pleasure without knowing pain. One cannot legitimately feel joy without having felt sorrow. The degree to which we feel an experience depends on where that experience lies on the axis (a little painful, overwhelmingly joyful, and so on). The same system that communicates pain to your brain also communicates pleasure, as every sadomasochist already knows.

Similar tensions define cultures. Every culture is composed of an endless number of archetypes and of the tensions between each archetype and an opposing one. For example, one of the primary tensions in the American culture is the one between freedom and prohibition. We consider freedom an inalienable right. We have fought numerous wars to protect it, and our citizens are willing to die to maintain it. At the same time, however, our culture is very strongly inclined toward prohibition. We believe we shouldn’t drink too much, play too much, or exhibit too much wealth. While the axis itself never changes, where a culture stands on a particular axis varies from era to era. At various times in our history, for example, our culture has found itself in different places on the freedom–prohibition axis (leaning heavily toward prohibition in the 1920s and far in the opposite direction during the late 1960s and early 1970s), but the opposing force was always evident (bootleggers in the 1920s, the Silent Majority in the latter period). This tension is a constant in our culture and it helps make our culture what it is.