Deconstructing Old Spice

I live in a house with a lot of people, so there's never a shortage of discussion-generating diversity (of ideas, opinions, backgrounds, etc.) This week I was taking a shower and noticed someone's Old Spice body wash, and I really can't help but comment. Here's what I'm thinking:

"3X Clean Net:" I'm not even sure what this means. Was there some sort of "clean net" that was included in this package? Are they trying to say that you're 3 times cleaner, by net weight? This is just confusing. Or, perhaps "net" means "clean" in French. Looking at this a little closer, perhaps that's it, but I'm not sure.

Next: "Doesn't leave you feeling dry or rob you of your dignity." So, it moisturizes your skin and reassures you of your ineffable human goodness? I'm not quite sure exactly how these two go together. However, one might be able to take a few leaps to assume that a loss of dignity might come from a flowery/fruity scent, which this is clearly trying to avoid, nonetheless providing desirable moisturization...

"Like wearing an armor of man-scent" -- Is this a good thing? So this "man-scent" armor protects you from what, exactly? Also, hat tip to Luke for pointing out that this is slightly homo-erotic, suggesting that a man (presumably heterosexual) might not want to be covered in man-scent, or, at least, wouldn't want to be judged by this type of thing in a heteronormative society.

Finally, "Drop-kicks dirt, then slams odor with a folding chair" Even though I've never seen WWF/WWE, I sense that this may be a reference to it. So now even your body wash is a pro-(fake)wrestler in the epic battle between dirt/odor and...old spice?

Ok, I just had a few questions in response to these Old Spice sayings that showed up in my shower.

Also, I can't help but be reminded of Hyperbole and a Half's awesome segment on making showers exciting again, there are many more hilarious cartoons here.

academic subjectivity

I'm currently in graduate school. I hope that this post will be one to start a theme of my struggles to find a perspective from which to write and understand what I learn. I inherently prefer writing with the word "I" and using it to organize narratives, however this, in many disciplines, goes against very explicitly stated traditions. For today, I'd like to quote an article whose author writes on his use of "I".

Before all of this, a note on my purposeful use of the active subject in this essay is warranted. Autoethnographers have noted the highly tactical enterprise of using the first person in academic writing (Peterson & Langellier,1997). Such tactics sometimes serve as confessionals, in efforts to render texts transparent (van Maanen, 1988). However, the “I” that this essay evokes, unlike the fully-formed modern subject, is a textual, constructed and strategic “I,” designed to underscore the partiality, contingence and temporal quality not only of such insight as “I” have to offer, but of knowledge claims in general. My efforts at generating such texts are relatively recent (Ganesh, 2008; Ganesh, in press), but in many ways, as I do so, the voice with which I speak to myself draws from oral practices that stem back to my childhood: for instance, this voice evokes memories of stories that my grandmother told me; stories told in a voice that are at odds with the realist trope in which most of us write. So, in personalizing this text, I hope to both problematise realist tropes, and actualize what Ellis and Bochner (1996) have called the therapeutic function of research and writing.

And here's the APA citation for ya:
Ganesh, S. (2009). OrganiZational communication and organiSational communication: Binaries and the fragments of a field. Communication Journal of New Zealand, 10(2), 6-17. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.