The Air Down There

Ladies, did you know that the only thing standing between you and all the attention you can stand from your man is your feminine odor? Want to have him crawling all over you to do his business every night? Well, then look no further than your well-organized cleaning cabinets! See it there? That glowing bottle of chemical stink? There's your ticket to conjugal bliss! LYSOL. That's right, girls, Lysol disinfectant and cleaning fluid extraordinaire is all you need to wipe out any vestiges of your biological femininity and leave your naughty parts squeaky clean and ready for him!

That's my paraphrase of the ad to above. It incites on so many levels. I won't lie. I laughed my ass off the first time I read it. It's sick, but it's gotta be a sick joke, right? Nope. This is for real. And it stands as a testament to so many levels of ignorance that persist in our culture, not to mention that it reads like a textbook example of the unstoppable, manipulative power wielded by the advertising industry.

Let's start there. Advertising is the art of manipulation perfected. Before a company can sell you its product, you have to be convinced that you need it, on some level. This ad goes straight for the heart by way of the crotch. The wife is locked out of her husband's affections and she need look no further than between her own legs to know why. After all, he married her because he loves her. If he has stopped showing interest, the fault must lie with her. Don't waste your time, the text admonishes its female target, looking for outside causes for this dearth of marital frolicking. YOU are the problem. You and your hideous "femininity," code here for your vagina and all its myriad odors and seepages. Your vagina cannot be left to its own devices. Regular bathing is NOT enough to stop the tidal flow of heady and musky gyno-fluids and their attendant aromas. (I think here of Tom Robbins and his countless metaphors for the wonder and delight that is the vagina. He would be horrified by this ad and all its implications.)

Ladies, you stink. That's the gist of it. And all you need to cure that is the sterilized sting of Lysol. Funny stuff, no doubt. My husband and I had a good giggle envisioning a generation of geriatric old men who wax nostalgic about the enticing scent of disinfected snatch...

That's the latent humor which I impose on this ad from my post-feminist, enlightened, 21st Century perspective, but that same perspective was not readily available to the mid-2oth Century reader for whom it was created. The warning here is serious and is yet another example of the ways that "femininity," womanliness, female sexuality and even the vagina itself have been co-opted, controlled, defined and compartmentalized by a society that clearly fears the power that resides there. Convince women that they are inherently repulsive. That left to their own devices they would soon send their husbands running from the marriage bed, and you've got us where you want us. Suddenly we need your products to assure our feminine allure does not fade.

I'm not writing anything revolutionary here. This has all been pointed out before by minds greater than mine. But seeing this ad brought it into such sharp focus. And this sort of manipulation is still going on. If anything, it's more insidious, more embedded into our culture. When clothing lines make thong underwear for preteen girls, when an entire generation is repulsed by the slightest hint of vaginal pubic hair (Hey, I'm all for pube-scaping, but I don't tremble at the sight of a little hair down there), when the "feminine hygiene" aisle overflows with a pandora's box of tricks, treatments and sweet-scented aerosals--these are sure signs that the big V is still a marketer's dream. Oh yeah. We've come a long way, baby.

Sex on the School Bus

I learned about sex mostly on the school bus. This was the '70's and '80's so luckily I didn't have to watch any sex on the bus, but I certainly heard lots of talk, most of it painfully, blessedly inaccurate. No, I learned what sex looked like on TV, daytime soaps, most specifically. My larger point here, though, is that I learned nothing about sex from anyone whose job it was to teach me about it.

My mother operated on the philosophy of "what you don't know about you won't miss." "Sex" was not and is not a word that she can utter full-voiced. This philosophy flies in the face of human history and our inclination to charge full-steam into sexual escapades whether we know what we're doing or not. But she clung to it. Even as her little black sheep wandered bravely out on her own to taste what life had to offer. Lucky for her, I was too smart to get knocked up.

This is on my mind, though, because I've been writing about two characters who are having quite a lot of sex. (Hey, I go where the story leads.) And I am struck by how ridiculous it is that any two adults enjoying each other should be scandalous. I've had the realization that what I'm writing would be LESS shocking if the sex were either tinged with or completely overshadowed by violence.

Consider the "torture porn" genre that emerged full-force in film a few years ago: The Saw series, Hostel1 & 2, Touristas, yadda yadda. You couldn't pay me to sit through an hour and a half of watching people and, esp in Hostel 2, women getting chopped and sliced and bled to death. But those movies raked in the cash. No surprise. Violence has long been sexualized in pop culture. This stuff gets an "R" rating. But film two consenting adults making love, fucking, getting freaky, whatever, and it gets an "X." That really is a sick statement about our society.

How did we get it so backwards anyway? We point to the Victorians (back when women went to doctors for "nervous" conditions and were treated to a little in-office dildo action as a cure--I'm not making this up). We blame the Puritans, but, come on, how many Puritans have you ever met? That religion ate itself alive long ago. I do place the blame at the foot of religion in general though. Fundamentalist faiths, especially. How many times did I hear growing up that "women should be silent in the church," that Eve's sin was sex and that all our suffering due to her wanton ways? If I heard it once, I heard it a hundred times: a woman's place is in the home. Ugh. Made me want to be homeless.

Why are Christians so obsessed with sex, who's doing it, when and with whom? Especially when it's so obvious that everyone is doing it, wanting it or thinking about it? This is why it's so frakkin funny when evangelical ministers get caught with a gay prostitute and chrystal meth. Or when "Promise Keeper" blow-hard senators who wave the flag for "protecting marriage" get caught stepping out on their wives. That shit is hysterical. But it points to a deeper hypocrisy. The recent trend of "purity ring" ceremonies is a just plain creepy manifestation of that wierdness. I would have been scarred for life if I had been forced to stand with my father in front of our church while he placed a ring on my finger and I pledged my "purity" to him until my wedding night.

Wouldn't we be better off as a society if we just relaxed a little? I mean, what if we taught our daughters to OWN their sexuality, not deny it? To hold out, not for Mr. Right, but for themselves? To know that sex is a wonderful exchange of energy between two people, not something you sneak around to do just to keep your boyfriend happy. Would that be so bad? Have sex when you decide you're ready, on your own terms, and safely. What if we taught our sons not to just try to scheme until they could "get some" but to understand that it's about more than their own overwhelming urges?

But the truth is that patriarchal society and the religions that prop it up fear a sexually assertive woman. So women who enjoy it too much get labeled, get scorned. Hell, in many countries on this planet women are subject to "honor killings" should they have the misfortune of being raped. They are born and die as some man's property, no one ever bothering to ask what they want, or if they are happy, much less whether or not they have orgasms. So while I lament our backwards culture, I am also thankful to be a woman in the time and place I find myself. However I'm not blind to the fact that a sexually assertive woman even today still risks ridicule and a loss of her essential dignity if she is "outed."

It irks me, this perpetuation of ignorance and shame. And I have a feeling I'm not alone in that.