Poo-pooing This Trend
I watch a lot of video during the day, because sometimes when I’m writing something, I need to remind myself of the exact lyrics of a Hoodoo Gurus song, and then I’m going down a lyric video rabbit hole and clicking “play” left, right and center. And that means I watch a lot of 5- and 15 second pre roll commercials before the video starts.
Lately I’ve been bombarded by an advertisement featuring a prim and proper young British woman, dressed like she’s going to tea with the Queen. Only she’s talking about her bathroom habits in terms that would make a pro football player blush. It’s all in service to selling a spray that purports to eradicate any olfactory evidence of her visit to the loo.
I mean, I get it. Ad revenue is a necessary part of keeping the machinery of digital artistic expression and commerce moving. I also get that Americans can be a little, shall we say, prudish when it comes to discussion of the earthier things in life. There are situations in which calling something what it is can be refreshing, and nobody appreciates subversive humor more than I do.
But this toilet spray woman is just GROSS. She whips open the bathroom stall door and although her frock and petticoat cover up anything incriminating, she gladly tells you what you just missed.
I’ve actually never heard her whole spiel because as soon as I see her face, I’m grabbing for the mouse to find the tiny, nearly invisible “X” box on the ad that allows you to close it, and if I can’t find that I just close the entire browser and every open program, including my household budgeting software, for good measure. If for some reason I were unable to do that, I’d simply unplug my computer midsentence and hurl it out the window, rather than listen to this woman sell me toilet spray by describing exactly why she needs it.
Why, Poo-pouri, why? It’s not funny. It’s not subversive. It’s disturbing and stomach churning. Is there nothing that we can agree to leave to the imagination?
The bar of gross advertising has been dropping ever since the first Viagra-taking spokesman threw a football through a hanging tire swing. In the pages of magazines, in sidebars and interstitial ads, I’ve learned more than I ever cared to about toenail fungus and erectile dysfunction and vaginal dryness. It makes me long for the more inhibited and repressed ‘70s, when ads for Kotex never once mentioned the word “menstruation.” If you saw a woman laughing like she was on uppers and kicking one leg of her white bell bottom pants to the side, you knew it was a tampon ad. It was code. No one had to explain it.
My kids find Poo Pouri lady hysterical, which is, I suppose, a signal that I’m out of date. Once a door like this has been opened, it’s hard to close.
But when they’re my age and an ad pops up somewhere for Preparation H, I’ll bet they’ll wish they hadn’t given in to the lowered standards of decorum so easily.
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