One of many by way of traces in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Girls, a rebellious clique of high-school ladies, repeatedly seem on-screen both smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. Within the movie, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease {that a} manufacturing designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors. After the film’s launch, Topps reportedly paid $1 million to characteristic Travolta and Newton-John on buying and selling playing cards bought with packs of bubblegum.
Grease arrived when gum was a part of the picture of a brand new sort of late-’70s teen insurgent: a slick excessive schooler who dons leather-based jackets, smokes cigarettes, talks brazenly about intercourse, and masticates steadily. Within the second half of the twentieth century, gum additionally served as a outstanding signifier for grit or sexuality in movies like On the Waterfront and Fairly Girl, the place its presence conveyed that Marlon Brando’s and Julia Roberts’s characters, respectively, didn’t conform to social requirements. In latest instances, nevertheless, folks have been chewing much less. From 2009 to 2015, retailer gross sales dropped about 4.7 % a 12 months in North America. The pandemic then intensified that development: At the moment, general gum gross sales are nonetheless down about 32 % from 2018, in line with information supplied by the consumer-research agency Circana. Tellingly, Wrigley closed one among its gum factories in 2016, and late final 12 months, Mondelez bought off its gum companies (which included Trident and Dentyne) within the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
On one degree, the decline of chewing gum is simply one other knockdown impact of the pandemic. Folks chew gum once they come into shut contact with others, Dan Sadler, a principal at Circana who research confectionary merchandise, instructed me—so fewer folks going into workplaces meant fewer folks munching on the product. On the identical time, e-commerce has proved robust for the trade. Gum purchases have a tendency to begin from the identical psychological area as a seize for a Equipment Kat bar: You don’t actually want it however may lack the willpower to refuse when it’s in entrance of you within the checkout line, particularly at a low value. Folks simply don’t store for gum that manner on the web—as of late, solely 2 % of gum’s unit gross sales occur on-line, in line with Circana.
However I think for the chewing-gum enterprise, the issue goes deeper than all that. Gum has additionally misplaced a sure cultural cachet. In a earlier technology of movies, the product was a bit edgy. But at the moment’s in style tradition has new symbols of teenybopper insubordination—and, maybe extra necessary, it has fewer common symbols of revolt general.
Chewing gum is an historic observe, and its affiliation with subversion predates Travolta, Brando, and Roberts by at the very least a number of hundred years. Within the sixteenth century, the Aztecs chewed chicle, a resin sourced from sapodilla timber that turned the inspiration for contemporary chewing gum. Nevertheless, they frowned upon this observe: To the Aztecs, chewing gum typically connoted promoting intercourse, Jennifer P. Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity College who wrote a guide in regards to the historical past of gum, instructed me. On reflection, it’s a little bit of a head-scratching connection, however Mathews speculated that it had one thing to do with the lewdness of mouth actions when chewing.
Regardless of the genesis of gum’s associations with sexuality, when the behavior first gained traction within the U.S. within the late nineteenth century, these connotations survived. After founding his eponymous firm in 1898, William Wrigley Jr. turned to newspapers, streetcars, and billboards to promote his gum. Many have been deliberately suggestive: Wrigley ran advertisements in girls’s magazines that includes fashions in solely their bras and saying that double-mint chewing gum may erase “all these laborious, tense traces so devastating to the delicate contours of face and neck.” His company rival, American Chicle, employed scores of engaging “sampling ladies” who fanned out throughout U.S. cities and gave away hundreds of sticks of gum. By the point the product unfold to Europe throughout World Conflict I, its repute was cemented. Older Europeans understood gum as “this soiled American behavior,” Mathews instructed me.
Gum-related anxieties weren’t distinctive to Europe—they usually centered not simply on sexuality, but in addition on the overall distaste for seeing somebody’s open mouth. By the center of the twentieth century, faculties within the U.S. and the U.Ok. started banning college students from chewing gum. The etiquette specialist Emily Submit lamented in a 1935 column that she discovered it “not possible to think about a girl as strolling in a metropolis avenue and both chewing gum or smoking.” When requested about her opposition to chewing gum, she defined: “It makes an unpleasant face and an annoying noise.” One other newspaper columnist, Inez Robb, puzzled if it wouldn’t be doable “to arrange for gum-chewers a compassionate group much like Alcoholics Nameless” to interrupt their “noxious behavior.” Robb underscored her disgust for watching folks’s “jaws wagging” as they chewed.
Gum’s reference to subversion finally made its solution to Hollywood. Maybe one motive was that utilizing chewing gum to represent a personality’s brash sexuality was much less controversial than depicting intercourse on-screen. Till 1968, the Hays Code, which ruled Hollywood movies, outright banned “suggestive nudity,” and intercourse remained fleeting in teen motion pictures even after the code’s demise, partially out of behavior. For film producers, chewing gum was a handy image of revolt that wasn’t really that scandalous, Stephen Tropiano, a screen-studies professor at Ithaca Faculty who wrote a guide on the historical past of teenybopper movies, speculates. “Teen motion pictures communicate a shorthand,” Tropiano instructed me. “They enlarge issues and overemphasize issues”—like gum chewing—“that [were] at all times seen as a logo of revolt.” The nexus of disapproval from well mannered society with glamorization within the motion pictures may solely imply one factor: Gum turned cool. This carried all over to the ’90s: In Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, who has a Valley woman accent and a closetful of pricy garments, pulls out a wad of gum and holds it between her fingers whereas delivering a speech.
At the moment, in an period when intercourse and gore are throughout streaming providers, chewing gum feels much less taboo. Plus, each technology has its personal symbols of revolt: Vaping, as an example, may need supplanted cigarettes in popular culture. However even the notion of what constitutes a rebellious act at the moment might have gotten extra diffuse. As media have grow to be algorithmically personalised due to TikTok and Netflix, “I wouldn’t say there’s a logo that everybody may take a look at and skim it the identical manner they used to,” Susannah Stern, a communications professor on the College of San Diego, instructed me. Consuming is seen as mainstream, if not altogether undesirable, and frank discussions of intercourse or sexual identification aren’t notably surprising.
Rebel in fact nonetheless exists, however folks have so some ways to specific it now. Because of this, what feels edgy to 1 particular person can simply be bland to a different. Billie Eilish, a mainstream heir of emo and goth subcultures, rocked inexperienced hair for years. It didn’t learn as that outrageous; oddly, Eilish generated media consideration when she dyed her hair a extra standard blond. Painted nails on males was a transparent image of queerness. Now straight, cis, male rappers and actors have embraced nail polish, maybe seeing it as edgy. In a way, then, the decline of gum may be one aspect impact of the fashionable smorgasbord of identities. There isn’t any one solution to be; thus, there is no such thing as a one solution to insurgent. On this tradition, our outdated symbols of boundary-pushing merely don’t have the facility they used to.
