Medieval Attitudes in a Modern Comnmercial

I saw a television commercial for a new product. It is a body wash that is specially formulated to be gentle on a woman's vagina. The commercial  is humorous, showing a man in the shower who accidently uses this vagina-friendly product. He freaks out – perhaps out of fear that his man-card will be revoked if his buddy learned of his faux pas or perhaps out of fear that his penis will transform into a vagina after coming into contact with a feminine soap.

 To boost his testosterone, the man seeks out a series of "manly" activities, such as chopping wood, mowing the yard, boxing, and karate. He even ends his masculine pursuits by crushing a beer can. Funny stuff!

This commercial combines three points we wrote about in The Medieval Vagina; how men fear the mysterious vagina, how we are all skittish about using the word vagina, and how vaginal hygiene products are viewed. Although the ideas in The Medieval Vagina are more than 600 years old, according to this 30-second commercial, the concepts still ring true today.

In The Medieval Vagina, we explore the vaginal paradox – how men in the Middle Ages were so fearful of the one feminine body part that they were also most attracted to. There is also a chapter dealing with term, words and euphemisms for the vagina. It seems crude and vulgar to us now, but the c-word was the acceptable term in medieval days. The word "vagina" really didn't enter English vocabulary until later, when Latin influenced the language, yet we are still intimidated by it.

 I noticed this  commercial uses "V" in place of "vagina". Maybe "vagina" is one of those words one cannot say on TV. And lastly, we included a chapter in The Medieval Vagina about douching and vaginal hygiene during the Middle Ages. Like the  company, women in antiquity recognized the need to keep the nether-regions clean, but unlike the modern company, medieval women resorted to a plethora of questionable recipes.

Kudos to the company for developing vagina-friendly products and to their marketing department for creating a memorable commercial. But the time has come for women – and men – to get over their nervousness about the vagina, both the object and the word.