Probably the most via traces in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Contributors of the Crimson Women, a rebellious clique of high-school women, time and again seem on-screen both smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. Within the movie, gum identifies the rule of thumb breakers: It was once so core to Grease {that a} manufacturing fashion designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors. After the film’s liberate, Topps reportedly paid $1 million to function Travolta and Newton-John on buying and selling playing cards offered with packs of bubblegum.

Grease arrived when gum was once a part of the picture of a brand new more or less late-’70s youngster rise up: a slick excessive schooler who dons leather-based jackets, smokes cigarettes, talks overtly about intercourse, and masticates ceaselessly. In the second one part of the 20 th century, gum additionally served as a outstanding signifier for grit or sexuality in motion pictures like At the Waterfront and Lovely Lady, the place its presence conveyed that Marlon Brando’s and Julia Roberts’s characters, respectively, didn’t agree to social requirements. In recent years, then again, other folks had been chewing much less. From 2009 to 2015, retailer gross sales dropped about 4.7 p.c a yr in North The usa. The pandemic then intensified that development: These days, general gum gross sales are nonetheless down about 32 p.c from 2018, in step with knowledge supplied via the consumer-research company Circana. Tellingly, Wrigley closed considered one of its gum factories in 2016, and past due closing yr, Mondelez offered off its gum companies (which integrated Trident and Dentyne) within the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

On one stage, the decline of chewing gum is solely some other knockdown impact of the pandemic. Folks bite gum after they come into shut touch with others, Dan Sadler, a primary at Circana who reviews confectionary merchandise, advised me—so fewer other folks going into places of work supposed fewer other folks munching at the product. On the identical time, e-commerce has proved difficult for the business. Gum purchases have a tendency to start out from the similar psychological house as a clutch for a Package Kat bar: You don’t in reality want it however may lack the self-control to refuse when it’s in entrance of you within the checkout line, particularly at a low price. Folks simply don’t store for gum that approach on the net—at the moment, most effective 2 p.c of gum’s unit gross sales occur on-line, in step with Circana.

However I believe for the chewing-gum trade, the issue is going deeper than all that. Gum has additionally misplaced a definite cultural cachet. In a prior era of flicks, the product was once just a little edgy. But these days’s pop culture has new symbols of youth insubordination—and, in all probability extra vital, it has fewer common symbols of riot general.

Chewing gum is an historical observe, and its affiliation with subversion predates Travolta, Brando, and Roberts via a minimum of a number of hundred years. Within the sixteenth century, the Aztecs chewed chicle, a resin sourced from sapodilla bushes that was the muse for contemporary chewing gum. On the other hand, they frowned upon this custom: To the Aztecs, chewing gum ceaselessly connoted promoting intercourse, Jennifer P. Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity College who wrote a e book concerning the historical past of gum, advised me. On reflection, it’s just a little 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 dependancy first received traction within the U.S. within the past due nineteenth century, the ones connotations survived. After founding his eponymous corporate in 1898, William Wrigley Jr. became to newspapers, streetcars, and billboards to promote it his gum. Many had been deliberately suggestive: Wrigley ran commercials in girls’s magazines that includes fashions in most effective their bras and saying that double-mint chewing gum may erase “all the ones arduous, annoying traces so devastating to the cushy contours of face and neck.” His company rival, American Chicle, employed rankings of sexy “sampling women” who fanned out throughout U.S. towns and gave away 1000’s of sticks of gum. By the point the product unfold to Europe all through International Warfare I, its popularity was once cemented. Older Europeans understood gum as “this grimy American dependancy,” Mathews advised me.

Gum-related anxieties weren’t distinctive to Europe—they usually targeted no longer simply on sexuality, but additionally at the normal distaste for seeing anyone’s open mouth. By means of the center of the 20 th century, faculties within the U.S. and the U.Ok. started banning scholars from chewing gum. The etiquette specialist Emily Publish lamented in a 1935 column that she discovered it “inconceivable to believe a woman as strolling in a town side road and both chewing gum or smoking.” When requested about her opposition to chewing gum, she defined: “It makes an unsightly face and an stressful noise.” Some other newspaper columnist, Inez Robb, questioned if it wouldn’t be imaginable “to arrange for gum-chewers a compassionate crew very similar to Alcoholics Nameless” to damage their “noxious dependancy.” Robb underscored her disgust for staring at other folks’s “jaws wagging” as they chewed.

Gum’s reference to subversion in the end made its solution to Hollywood. Most likely one reason why was once that the use of chewing gum to signify a personality’s brash sexuality was once much less arguable than depicting intercourse on-screen. Till 1968, the Hays Code, which ruled Hollywood motion pictures, outright banned “suggestive nudity,” and intercourse remained fleeting in youngster motion pictures even after the code’s dying, partially out of dependancy. For film manufacturers, chewing gum was once a handy image of riot that wasn’t in fact that scandalous, Stephen Tropiano, a screen-studies professor at Ithaca Faculty who wrote a e book at the historical past of youth motion pictures, speculates. “Youngster motion pictures discuss a shorthand,” Tropiano advised me. “They amplify issues and overemphasize issues”—like gum chewing—“that [were] all the time noticed as an emblem of riot.” The nexus of disapproval from well mannered society with glamorization within the motion pictures may most effective imply something: Gum was cool. This carried during to the ’90s: In Clueless, Alicia Silverstone’s personality, Cher, who has a Valley woman accessory and a closetful of costly garments, pulls out a wad of gum and holds it between her palms whilst turning in a speech.

Learn: Towards a common concept of ‘cool’

These days, in an generation when intercourse and gore are far and wide streaming services and products, chewing gum feels much less taboo. Plus, each era has its personal symbols of riot: Vaping, for example, may have supplanted cigarettes in popular culture. However even the perception of what constitutes a rebellious act these days will have gotten extra diffuse. As media have develop into algorithmically personalised because of TikTok and Netflix, “I wouldn’t say there’s an emblem that everybody may have a look at and browse it the similar approach they used to,” Susannah Stern, a communications professor on the College of San Diego, advised me. Consuming is noticed as mainstream, if no longer altogether unwanted, and frank discussions of intercourse or sexual id aren’t in particular surprising.

Riot after all nonetheless exists, however other folks have such a lot of techniques to precise it now. In consequence, what feels edgy to 1 individual can simply be bland to some other. 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 typical blond. Painted nails on males was a transparent image of queerness. Now immediately, cis, male rappers and actors have embraced nail polish, in all probability seeing it as edgy. In a way, then, the decline of gum may well be one aspect impact of the trendy smorgasbord of identities. There’s no one solution to be; thus, there’s no one solution to rise up. On this tradition, our previous symbols of boundary-pushing merely don’t have the facility they used to.