One of the by means of traces in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Ladies, a rebellious clique of high-school ladies, repeatedly seem on-screen both smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. In 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 function 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 form of late-’70s teen insurgent: a slick excessive schooler who dons leather-based jackets, smokes cigarettes, talks overtly about intercourse, and masticates incessantly. In the second half of the twentieth century, gum additionally served as a distinguished signifier for grit or sexuality in movies like On the Waterfront and Pretty Woman, 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 p.c a 12 months in North America. The pandemic then intensified that pattern: Today, total gum gross sales are nonetheless down about 32 p.c from 2018, based on knowledge offered by the consumer-research agency Circana. Tellingly, Wrigley closed certainly one of 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 stage, the decline of chewing gum is simply one other knockdown impact of the pandemic. People chew gum after they come into shut contact with others, Dan Sadler, a principal at Circana who research confectionary merchandise, informed me—so fewer folks going into workplaces meant fewer folks munching on the product. At the identical time, e-commerce has proved robust for the trade. Gum purchases have a tendency to begin from the identical psychological house as a seize for a Kit 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. People simply don’t store for gum that means on the web—lately, solely 2 p.c of gum’s unit gross sales occur on-line, based on Circana.
But I believe for the chewing-gum enterprise, the issue goes deeper than all that. Gum has additionally misplaced a sure cultural cachet. In a earlier era of movies, the product was a bit edgy. Yet right now’s standard tradition has new symbols of stripling insubordination—and, maybe extra essential, it has fewer common symbols of insurrection total.
Chewing gum is an historic apply, and its affiliation with subversion predates Travolta, Brando, and Roberts by at the least a number of hundred years. In the sixteenth century, the Aztecs chewed chicle, a resin sourced from sapodilla timber that grew to become the inspiration for contemporary chewing gum. However, they frowned upon this apply: To the Aztecs, chewing gum typically connoted promoting intercourse, Jennifer P. Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University who wrote a e-book concerning the historical past of gum, informed me. In retrospect, 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.
Whatever 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 had been deliberately suggestive: Wrigley ran advertisements in ladies’s magazines that includes fashions in solely their bras and saying that double-mint chewing gum may erase “all those hard, tense lines so devastating to the soft contours of face and neck.” His company rival, American Chicle, employed scores of engaging “sampling girls” who fanned out throughout U.S. cities and gave away hundreds of sticks of gum. By the time the product unfold to Europe throughout World War I, its status was cemented. Older Europeans understood gum as “this dirty American habit,” Mathews informed me.
Gum-related anxieties weren’t distinctive to Europe—they usually centered not simply on sexuality, but in addition on the final distaste for seeing somebody’s open mouth. By the center of the twentieth century, colleges within the U.S. and the U.Ok. started banning college students from chewing gum. The etiquette specialist Emily Post lamented in a 1935 column that she discovered it “impossible to imagine a lady as walking in a city street and either chewing gum or smoking.” When requested about her opposition to chewing gum, she defined: “It makes an ugly face and an annoying noise.” Another newspaper columnist, Inez Robb, puzzled if it wouldn’t be potential “to organize for gum-chewers a compassionate group similar to Alcoholics Anonymous” to interrupt their “noxious habit.” Robb underscored her disgust for watching folks’s “jaws wagging” as they chewed.
Gum’s reference to subversion finally made its solution to Hollywood. Perhaps one purpose was that utilizing chewing gum to represent a personality’s brash sexuality was much less controversial than depicting intercourse on-screen. Until 1968, the Hays Code, which ruled Hollywood movies, outright banned “suggestive nudity,” and intercourse remained fleeting in teen films even after the code’s demise, partly out of behavior. For film producers, chewing gum was a handy image of insurrection that wasn’t really that scandalous, Stephen Tropiano, a screen-studies professor at Ithaca College who wrote a e-book on the historical past of stripling movies, speculates. “Teen movies speak a shorthand,” Tropiano informed me. “They magnify things and overemphasize things”—like gum chewing—“that [were] always seen as a symbol of rebellion.” The nexus of disapproval from well mannered society with glamorization within the films may solely imply one factor: Gum grew to become cool. This carried right through to the ’90s: In Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, who has a Valley woman accent and a closetful of pricey garments, pulls out a wad of gum and holds it between her fingers whereas delivering a speech.
Today, in an period when intercourse and gore are throughout streaming companies, chewing gum feels much less taboo. Plus, each era has its personal symbols of insurrection: Vaping, for example, might need supplanted cigarettes in popular culture. But even the notion of what constitutes a rebellious act right now could have gotten extra diffuse. As media have develop into algorithmically personalised because of TikTook and Netflix, “I wouldn’t say there’s a symbol that everyone could look at and read it the same way they used to,” Susannah Stern, a communications professor on the University of San Diego, informed me. Drinking is seen as mainstream, if not altogether undesirable, and frank discussions of intercourse or sexual identification are usually not notably stunning.
Rebellion in fact nonetheless exists, however folks have so some ways to specific it now. As a end result, 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 once 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 is perhaps one facet impact of the trendy smorgasbord of identities. There is nobody solution to be; thus, there is no such thing as a one solution to insurgent. In this tradition, our outdated symbols of boundary-pushing merely don’t have the ability they used to.