In a paper on fast food and obesity in America, a student of mine described McDonald's as hocking "portions that would make a caveman sick." I circled the word caveman and punctuated it with a question mark, and this was enough to make the caveman not appear in the final version of the paper. Which is a little unfortunate, actually. While she later told me what she was going for, that, according to her, portion sizes are not based on any measure of survival or physical need but rather a bigger-better consumerist aesthetic, I prefer to read the sentence a little differently, imagining a caveman watching an ad for McDonald's, shaking his head, and thinking: "these modern humans are really disgusting gluttons." I picture a figure like Cirroc, Phil Hartman's rendition of the unfrozen caveman lawyer, quietly judging us.
While I've more often encountered cavemen used as others to ourselves in such a way that we end up on top, whether more tamely calling upon the caveman as a primitive counterpart to our modern sophistication or more disturbingly imagined as racially inferior (as in the film version of Clan of the Cave Bear where Daryl Hannah figures the tall, Nordic blond who ushers in civilization), there seems to be some play with this as of late. I'm thinking specifically here of my favorite Geico commercials--which may be my favorite commercials of all time--featuring cavemen reacting to a Geico campaign with the slogan "Geico.com: It's so easy, a caveman could do it."
The first commercial follows the filming of the fictitious ad. After an actor cheesily utters the slogan the camera cuts quickly to focus on a disgruntled gaffer, a caveman in modern clothes, who throws off his equipment, points accusingly at the actor shouting "NOT COOL!" and angrily runs off screen.
While the (hilarious) paradox of the intellectual caveman is not exactly a new figure, we've entered a new and interesting realm of caveman portraits. A few commentators have picked up on the vaguely metrosexual aspects of Geico's cavemen, even wondering if they are indeed "just roommates." While Jessica Ramsay Golden's article "Cavemen and the Rise of the Modern Metrosexual"--which I find incredibly maddening, by the way--doesn't mention the Geico commercials, she uses the caveman as the opposite of the modern metrosexual. Apparently, cavemen are not only the grunting, unmanicured he-men of the past, but rather can be piano-playing members of the intellectual elite who roll their eyes in the face of our homophobia and racism, and possibly laugh at our fastfood induced lovehandles.
While at the end of Planet of the Apes Heston shouts "You maniacs! It was you! You blew it up!" The updated caveman quietly folds his hands in his lap, shakes his head at us, unable to even articulate in a way we would understand how much we disgust him.
Appendix 1. From the Minutes of the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners meeting on May 17th 2005:
A. Request for Approval of Resolution in Support of Kalama-Do Month
Commissioner McGlinn moved and that the Board of Commissioners approve the following
Resolution:
WHEREAS, physical activity improves health and saves lives; and
WHEREAS, 30 minutes of physical activity every day is recommended by the American Heart Association and the Centers for Disease Control; and
WHEREAS, grooving your body for 10 minutes, 3 times a day is as beneficial as 30 minutes of physical activity at one time; and
WHEREAS, we know that cavemen had no cars, no escalators and also had no love handles; and
WHEREAS, physical activity should be fun and accessible to all; and
WHEREAS, small changes in an individual's normal daily routine can lead to increased
physical activity; and
WHEREAS, dancing, raking, mowing, walking up stairs, shoveling, skipping, walking, running, jumping, riding a bike, skating, sweeping, playing tag, and many other types of movement can all be counted toward a physical activity goal of 30 minutes each day.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners does
hereby support the Do Campaign and encourages all Kalamazoo County residents to have fun and be physically active; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Kalamazoo County Board of Commissioners proclaims June 2005 as "Do Month" in support of the Do Campaign and increasing physical activity.
The roll call vote was as follows:
Ayes: All members present
Nays: None
Abstains: None
Absent: Commissioners Balkema, Taylor
The motion carried.
(I like to imagine "Therefore, be it resolved" uttered by an unfrozen caveman politician, perhaps a beneficiary of cavemen being added to the list of those to be included in equal opportunity clauses.)
The use of a caveman as an example is really interesting both because of the manner in which the caveman seems to be growing more popular in commercials and because of the peculiar way the caveman is mentioned in diet books. For commercials, cavemen seem to be the new moneky-figures (and I mean actual monkeys--new Pepsi commercials feature a caveman pouring out a Pepsi in the same way I would expect an older soda commerical to feature a monkey wearing clothes and drinking a soda). The caveman comparison also seems to come from dieting books--each of which seem to explain how our modern metabolism evolved from cave men and therefore mean that we should be eating in some particular manner. The “eat right for your blood type,” some versions of the high-protein diet, and Seth Robert's Shangri-la Diet (http://www.freakonomics.com...) all appeal to some form of the argument that if we think cavemen ate a certain way, then we should too. I'm not saying that this reasoning couldn't work, just that it never seems to really get further logically than the caveman in the commercials, where the entire point seems to be “Look, a caveman.”
Working from the idea of a caveman not being able to tolerate fast food, I wonder if we'll soon see a commercial with caveman sharing antacids.
I think what's interesting about the whole caveman line of argument is that it speaks, first of all, to a more general awareness of genetic inheritance and its differentiation from culture.
Anything with a caveman in it also techincally presupposes evolution, since there's no room in the Bible for the cave folks. But what's interesting is that the caveman example suggests that evolution has more or less ceased to function--we're “stuck” with our caveman genes--while culture has completely outstripped it.
This is presumably true at some large level--though humans continue to evolve, surely, evolution works so slowly that it doesn't make much of a difference--nothing evolutionary could compensate fast enough, surely, for the sudden rise of McDonalds.
That said, maybe genes that help protect against heart disease mean that in a hundred years or so the world's population will be substantially more resistant to the damages caused by eating a high-fat, fast-food diet. And you know what that means: they'll all be able to eat as much McDonalds as they want.
Dear M. Massino,
A. You spelled my name wrong.
B. You obviously didn't read my entire column, because you surmise my point as being the exact opposite of what my point actually was. Your article states that mine “uses the caveman as the opposite of the modern metrosexual.” However, my column reads: “I'm quite certain there were metrosexual cavemen. Metrosexual is just a new word for an old concept. Femmes, fops, dandies, dapper Dans - each term crested the height of vogue, hoisting with it all the connotative baggage unique to its time. Metrosexual is just another in a long line of homosocial handles.”
For me, both of these errors call the rest of your research into question.
Jessica Ramsey Golden
ABC is giving him his own show:
http://www.huffingtonpost.c...
I love it “WWCD” (What Would Caveman Do)much better than “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do).
Cavemen are getting their own sitcom on TV. Way-da-go!
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