The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [99]
By the late 1960s, as the sexual revolution followed the development of the birth control pill, orgasms were definitely on the agenda. Unfortunately, there were times when the revolution felt more constraining and inhibiting than freeing for women. The message conveyed by the feminine hygiene ads was puzzling: Sex is natural and wonderful, but the “natural you” needs to be sprayed to be wonderful. Sex is natural and wonderful, but it leaves a woman in urgent need of washing, powdering, spraying and douching. Sex is natural and wonderful, but it means that the natural you can be rejected on the most intimate level. As an ad for Demure spray put it, over a picture of a girlhood bedroom, “Your Teddy Bear loved you, no matter what. It’s only when you marry somebody that you have to think about things you never thought about before.”
If spraying something on a woman’s external genitalia was so successful, why not go further, into the vagina? Douches had existed for millennia, but adding flavour—raspberry and champagne, in the case of the suggestively named Cupid’s Quiver—was an innovation. The magazine ad for Cupid’s Quiver showed an unclad model, who urged, “Relax. And enjoy the revolution.” The flavoured douche’s obvious connection with oral sex made some magazines and all television networks nervous, but within two months of its introduction in 1969, Cupid’s Quiver had sold $250,000 worth of liquid douche concentrate. Kate Kane, a feminist who surveyed the gamut of advertisements for douches and sprays, seemed to echo “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” when she wrote, “Taken together, these commercials form a picture of a people obsessed with physical intimacy, yet unable to achieve it without performing many elaborate, expensive daily purifications.”
After a brilliant start, sales of the sprays stalled in the early 1970s with reports of irritation and a ban on the use of hexachloraphene from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Somewhere between the 1970s and the ’80s, the sprays lost their cachet. Doubts about their efficacy, worries about aerosol cans, consumerism, the women’s movement—all contributed. Since the second wave of feminism began in the 1960s, at least two generations of feminists have tried to raise savvy, self-confident daughters, and it would be nice to conclude that women have become more skeptical about products that promise to smother their real aroma with a chemical “freshness.”
“Deep at the bottom of all our sense of uncleanness, of dirt, is the feeling, primitive, irresolvable, universal, of the sanctity of the body. Nothing in the material sphere can properly be dirty except the body. We speak of a ‘dirty road,’ but in an uninhabited world moist clay would be no more dirty than hard rock; it is the possibility of clay adhering to a foot which makes it mire.”
—Edwyn Bevan, “Dirt,” 1921
Eve Ensler’s acclaimed 1996 play The Vagina Monologues devotes a monologue to the question “What does a vagina smell like?” The answers include “earth,” “spicy, musky jasmine forest,” “a brand-new morning,” “no smell, I’ve been told,” “damp moss,” “somewhere between fish and lilacs” and “me.” But the people who take heart from The Vagina Monologues are far fewer than those who relentlessly spray their pillows with Febreze and plug in air fresheners wherever they spot an available outlet. In this climate, anxieties about what a friend calls, ironically, “the gamy filth of womanhood” are all too easy to rouse. In 2003, sales of feminine sprays at Wal-Mart rose 30 per cent from the previous year. In the year that ended in September 2005, the “intimate hygiene” category had grown by 9.4 per cent. These days, wipes—moistened disposable cloths like those used to clean a baby’s bottom—are more popular than sprays and are being manufactured by the makers of both condoms and sanitary napkins. Within the past few years, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson,