The Douche Distraction: Hail to the V, bye-bye Roe V Wade?

While the sturm und drang of the debt ceiling debate drowns out the howls of distress of the American public going down with the ship, we are being treated to an equally diversionary coverage of the significant women’s issue of the day. Did someone say douche? I didn’t say douche but someone said douche.

Not Safe for Work

It appears that Summer’s Eve, which I assume is the leading purveyor of wookie wash, has undertaken an amusing, “empowering,” provocative ad campaign, as long as you don’t question their basic marketing assumption that a woman’s vagina, au natural, is somewhere on the continuum of icky to disgusting.

I learned about this campaign from a very lively article recently posted in Salon.  There was certainly an internet buzz on the subject, and then I watched Stephen Colbert brilliantly turn the mother of all yoni memes inside out.

While Colbert pitches the case that there should be an attendant campaign launched at the male hygiene “down there” in Penisvania, I kept hitting the replay and watching how the Summer Eve campaign was being pitched to African American women and Latinas. For the former, a Lady Wowza approach, and for the latter “Lo he visto practicamente todo,” I have seen just about everything…

Summer’s Eve speaks to the diversity of American women at the same time that it has also been revealed that Latinos and African Americans are experiencing a disproportionate loss in wealth..  So while poor women–read predominately women of color–might derive a certain comfort from knowing that their lady parts are squeaky clean as they fill out an application for a pay day loan or submit their unemployment papers or try to stretch a food stamp budget, there is perhaps a more serious obstacle that these same women may end up facing. Beyond female hygiene, Summer’s Eve extols a woman’s sense of sexual confidence.

If you are a poor woman, how much sexual confidence do you really have if birth control is not available or unaffordable? How much sexual confidence can you have if your birth control doesn’t work or if you have been raped? How much sexual confidence can you have if you need a constitutionally protected abortion and your county or state has made it impossible for you to get one or has made the requirements so onerous that you can’t bear to go through that particular agony?

As I write this I have read that a Planned Parenthood Clinic outside of Dallas was hit by a Molotov cocktail and that Summer’s Eve has pulled its provocative ads. The Republican party, touting job creation as their number one task at hand since their midterm victories in the states and the House of Representatives, has created no jobs but they have declared war on women and their reproductive choice and health.

I’ll let you decide who is the douche in all of this.