By David Futrelle
With safe, legal abortion and even some forms of contraception under siege, it’s worth revisiting one of the most shamefully misogynistic decades-long ad campaigns in advertising history, when Lysol — you know, the cleaning product — was marketed as a great thing to douche with.
If the idea of squirting Lysol into vaginas isn’t horrifying enough in itself, it gets worse. These ad campaigns weren’t just trying to convince women that killing the good bacteria in their vaginas would make them smell better (it doesn’t); they were also — perhaps even primarily — trying to hint that Lysol was an effective form of post-sex birth control. (It’s not.) Hence the references to using it “every time” in some Lysol ads — see below.
As sociologist Lisa Wade notes:
These ads aren’t frightening women into thinking their genitals smell badly. According to historian Andrea Tone, “feminine hygiene” was a euphemism. Birth control was illegal in the U.S. until 1965 (for married couples) and 1972 (for single people). These Lysol ads are actually for contraception. The campaign made Lysol the best-selling method of contraception during the Great Depression.
Of course, we’re not wrong to be horrified today. Lysol was incredibly corrosive to the vagina; in fact, it’s recipe was significantly more dangerous than the one used today. Hundreds of people died from exposure to Lysol, including women who were using it to kill sperm. It was also, to add insult to injury, wholly ineffective as a contraceptive.
But this is what desperate women have resorted to when they didn’t have reproductive rights.
Here are some of these old, horrifying ads for Lysol. I’ve done my best to clean up the images but they may be hard to read unless you enlarge them; click on the pics for a direct link to the images themselves.
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Well…who needs sleep anyway?
Also, this bullshit wasn’t all that long ago, we haven’t come nearly as far as some people like to (usually disingenuously) pretend.
Considering Alabama prosecutors are mulling over charging a woman who lost her pregnancy after being shot with fetal manslaughter, I’m pretty sure they’d jail any woman who used said toxic substance.
Maybe we should charge men who pull out with manslaughter as well.
No, it only counts as “murder” if it’s inside a uterus-haver’s body.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/why-alabama-s-abortion-law-includes-an-exemption-for-infertility
Yeah, if it can’t be used as an excuse to harm a woman (or women in general), it’s a-ok.
Any examples where they make the birth-control angle more obvious? I’d love to find a few, for the “ick” and shitposting-in-abortion-debates factor.
OT, and I know I don’t comment here much, but I thought everyone should know: I came out to my parents as trans about two hours ago, and it went far better than I was expecting. They are devout Mormons, so I expected that they would return with transphobic garbage. They didn’t, except for some noises about how they don’t “agree” with my “decision” but will support me anyway.
@Mabret
Congratulations!
I’m going to print out and send in that coupon. Maybe I’ll get a response.
It was very scary, as you might imagine, but I survived it, and I don’t have to hide from them any more. One other little transphobic thing they did that I just remembered is that they didn’t want my thirteen-year-old brother to be around for it because it was “age-inappropriate”.
@Mabret
Way to go!
I read The Jack of Jumps a while ago. It’s about a series of murders in London in the early 60’s, but there is some background stuff about how people lived, and how the victims would have lived, and the home abortion stuff was chilling. Women used to put a mix of cleaner and hot water up themselves and hope for the best.
Congratulations, Mabret!
Thanks, everyone.
Congrats Mabret!
And whilst here; O/T but I know some folks round here like cat stuff.
https://advocates-for-animals.com/blog/151
Congratulations, Mabret! This is huge!
Congratulations Mabret!
Congrats Mabret!
That being said, do not throw caution to the wind. Sometimes when very devout people react with surprising restraint, it can mean that they have started hatching contingency plans. Do not get yourself kidnapped to an intervention. Have a good friend keep track of you.
(sorry if that’s too paranoid, I’ve run across too many horror stories)
Congrats Mabret! I hope that your path is as smooth as possible.
Congrats Mabret, what wonderful news! I hope I can summon the courage to come out myself someday… but Evangelicals don’t have even a tiny fraction of the restraint or “niceness” of Mormons, so I’m dreading it. If you or anyone thinks they have any helpful advice, I’m all ears, because I’m thinking that I should probably tell them in the next few months….
@Mabret
Congratulations!
insert massive eyeroll
@dashapants
I live in Utah, and they in Washington, (more than 1000 km apart), so I should be safe.
@Mabret: If they still have any kind of legal guardian power over you, you might not be. Then again, I don’t think the whole “temporarily sign away your guardianship to a corporation and then have then kidnap you and put you in a torture camp” thing (forget what it’s called) is legal in Washington, so the groups which do that probably won’t risk it.
Congratulations Mabret!
I’m legally an adult (turn 22 on Saturday), so yes, I am safe. They can’t threaten me with conversion therapy at all.
Congratulation mabret. I wish you a life time of happiness and a bright future.