The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [98]
“Not so very long ago—perhaps within 40 years—more than a few UK homes did not have a bathroom. It was shocking then, because compared with our American cousins, we seemed to be the great unwashed. It is shocking now, because not since Roman times has a nation elevated the room in which it bathes to such temple-like status.”
—Lisa Freedman, Financial Times, 5 September 2003
Compared with Europe, Sissel Tolaas says, “In America, everything is more extreme, and everything turns into a rule.” Ironically, the product that most epitomizes the extremes to which the American deodorizing imperative could go was invented by the Swiss. In the early 1960s, the Swiss combined hexachloraphene, an emollient, a scent and a propellant into a spray for cleansing and deodorizing women’s external genitalia. Moist tissues for the same purpose had been around for decades, but the use of a spray was something new. Unlike the heavy, sticky sprays then available, the Swiss product added fluorocarbon 12, which made it dry and warm. The first American version, which was rushed into production by Alberto-Culver and flatly named FDS, for “feminine deodorant spray,” was launched in 1966. Although the Swiss spray was never more than moderately popular, FDS, thanks to the canny marketers and willing consumers of America, was a wildfire success. Twenty brands followed Alberto-Culver into the market, and in 1973, more than twenty million women were using the sprays, with sales of $40 million.
Not everybody welcomed the new product. Psychiatrists, therapists and feminists charged that the sprays and their ads exploited women’s insecurities. Noting that “I smell bad. That’s why no one likes me” is a classic paranoid statement, the psychoanalyst Natalie Shainess criticized the ads’ “horrendous image, of women being inherently smelly creatures. It undermines the sense of self and ego even as it’s supposed to do something about it.” To which the manufacturer had ready answers, usually a simple repetition of the irrefutable—to them—fact that women had a “problem,” and it was “down there.” As one of the manufacturers explained to Nora Ephron in her 1973 Esquire article, “Dealing with the, uh, Problem”:
Our whole approach was, women have a vaginal—odor problem and here is a product that will solve the problem. They do, you know. And panty hose contribute to it. Women’s liberation says that advertising is creating a need that isn’t there. They say it’s a nice, natural smell. That’s their right. But I would go back and ask them, do women have a vaginal—odor problem? I keep going back to the problem. The problem is there.
Other men involved in the making or marketing of the sprays bypassed the question of whether the odour actually existed and congratulated themselves on helping a woman feel more assured and attractive. Jerry Della Femina, the advertising executive whose company man-aged the campaign for a spray called Feminique, had his own dramatic fantasy:
Somewhere out there, there is a girl who might be hung up about herself, and one day she goes out and buys Feminique and shoots up with it, and she comes home and that same night she feels more confident and she jumps