Not In My Name -You Dont

 (Disclamier: This post is intended for those above 21+ years ONLY. It contains explicit language, description of sexual diseases and their treatments. So reader discretion advised)

I caught a throat bug this week and with my old nemesis my tonsils flaring up- was kinda bedridden for a couple of days. Getting sick has its advantages. I have taken my first official leave of the year- two days absentee from duty, just eight months after the beginning of the year (and I am sure everyone else in the department are celebrating that) and I spent it all watching TV, lying down of course and trying to catch up with what’s going on in the popular entertainment world.

The internet doesn’t show you much of popular culture, it has a highly refined, highly niche, entertainment and views presentations based on previous preferences. Even hanging out with online friends, who most often have the same views and opinions prevents you from seeing and learning the diverse opinions which alone help to improve ourselves. Anyway to come back to my tv viewing, I happened to catch two interesting advertisements being played on TV, about which I am going to talk about now. I am sure a lot of you would have seen these ad's before- a quick internet search showed me they were trending as twitter memes and all, but even if I am late to the party- I can still sing and dance can’t I?

The advertisements I am talking about are the ones which address the issue of “Fairness”- yes, the same ones about fair armpits and fair vaginas (yep, I have gone ahead and said the v-word...so sue me). The ads are targeted primarily at women and is based on selling to the ladies the idea of to doing it for the men, to please them. Seriously? Fair armpits please me? Who told you that Mr.So&So Company? If any marketing research firm sold you this line, you have been punked, you need to sue them.

Men, don’t want this; take it from me, an authentic, card carrying member of the male race. Is there no real man in your company or ad agency, who had the guts to stand up and say the truth about what men want in a woman? Men, in case no one told you before, NEVER, EVER look at a womans armpit while appraising a woman. We do look at a lot of different other places- boys will be boys- but armpits are not one of them. I guess most women know this instinctively and I hope the sales of your abhorrent deodorant which targets women’s insecurity, so crassly, crashes and burns a horrible death (and you go bankrupt too).

And while you are at it, can you explain to me, why dark armpits are considered un-sexy? Or dark anything? Certain areas of the human body are naturally, naturally, differently pigmented compared to other areas -it’s all genetically determined and hormonally differentiated. Its nature’s way of identifying a child from a girl and a girl from a woman, without a man being required to go to a university and get a PhD just to learn the difference. Too much emphasis on retaining pre-pubescent looks (baby doll looks?) in popular culture by women (stick thin models and starving pop stars) has led to the blurring of lines of who and at what age women are considered as sex objects. More and more, younger and younger children are being drawn into this race of ad-commercial determined beauty standards and the space for a real carefree childhood is now being rapidly shrunk. But that’s for another day. Let me come to the other advertisement

This one really had me shaking and scratching my head, wondering if this was for real. A product which whitens and tightens vaginas? I couldn’t believe it. First of all what particular use could this be? Who would spend real money to buy something which sounds as bogus as this? But then I reflected this is targeted at those women who are insecure of their looks down there (maybe someone like that really exists?) and would maybe try this or try anything else too.

So I went on to the company's website to check out what really it contains- the active ingredients, so to say, which gives it its pharmacologically efficacy- that is what really makes it work. Among a group of unpronounceable botanical names- which are usually included by these kind of products, to give such products an ayurvedic/naturopathy cover, to prevent any rigorous questioning by allopathic specialists- hey, you won’t understand, this is our way of life for 3000 years, ever since the Indus valley civilization we have been whitening vaginas, you know? That kinda thing.

The only two names I could recognize and pronounce on that list were alum and gold. Alum as everyone knows a is a rock mineral- it contains a styptic which has a very mild and transient coagulating effect- that is it can stop temporarily minor bleeding, and when I say minor, I mean very very minor, like when you accidentally nick yourself  shaving and a small drop of blood peeps out. While most people use a dab of after-shave to stop the bleeding when doing home shaving, the local barbers sometimes use alum to stop bleeding and clot the blood. But this product is for whitening, isn’t it? And not for clotting bleeding vaginas, right? Any whitening product, designed and used for skin – contains strong and caustic chemicals like hydrogen peroxide and perborate - chemicals which can cause damages to any sensitive skin and open wounds and hence contradicted strictly in the presence of any bleeding at all, to prevent massive allergies, eruptions and large scale peeling of the skin (erythematous/muco-cutaneous eruptions they call it).

And I'm only talking about the skin. The vagina is mucosa-lined, like the inside of the mouth and cheeks. Will you bleach the inside of your cheeks with these harsh chemicals? If not, why would you do the same to your vagina? And not having bought the product myself, I would really appreciate it if someone who has it would let me know, whether there is indeed a similar warning/advisory on the product cover, warning the dangers of applying it on raw and unprotected mucosal surfaces? But hey that rules out the entire vaginal area doesn’t it?

And now for the tightening claim. As most adults know, the vagina functions like a sphincter with elastic tissues underlined by supporting musculature. The only possible reason for it to go a bit lax is after natural childbirth, when the trauma of the passage of the fetus automatically relaxes the vaginal musculature to permit the child to be born. The normal tone of the vaginal muscles is regained in a matter of 6-8weeks post-childbirth automatically and even if they didn’t, a few basic Kegel exercises, targeting the pelvic floor musculature and practiced for a few weeks would restore the vaginal tone back to its previous state. If on the very, very, very rare case of the tone still being lax, a small surgery to tighten the vaginal muscles gives a complete solution.

So I fail to understand how adding/rubbing gold to that area will tighten the vagina? I mean I have heard of people eating gold- Thanga Bhasmam they call it, to have fair children. The gold particles, thankfully, get filtered by the ever efficient kidneys and never passes the amniotic barrier separating the mothers blood from the child, and till now no golden baby has been born and the only result is that the person taking the gold passes some very, very expensive urine. That’s all- straight in and straight out the other way.

And I really don’t understand how applying gold particles externally is going to tighten musculature, well protected inside the body by layers of skin and mucosa covering it- wont the gold particles which enter through the skin pores, be immediately surrounded by the WBC’s and phagocytosed as foreign objects? That’s my understanding of it, and I can’t think of any other alternative way for externally applied gold to work inside, unless, I happened to cut that class in pharmacology and went off to see a film? Anyway, if this really works, there would be so many body builders applying this cream to get tight muscles without any hard exercising right?

And that’s exactly what I want to mention, a brief mention only, next. This urban myth about men looking for tight vaginas- and the cause for so many child brides lives getting ruined in the quest for virginity. Like all urban myths it must have a kernel of truth somewhere, so I am not knocking it, except to ask all you (stupid) men to think over who has the tightest and strongest muscles? The ones who never use it? Or the ones who constantly exercise it? In the second case shouldn't sex workers have the tightest vaginas? I am not suggesting anything here, just asking...

And finally the whole concept of men approving of the whiteness of vaginas is so, so absurd, I find myself running out of words to describe the grotesqueness of this ad The only person who cares about the color of a woman’s pigmentation down there, is a gynecologist, who has to rule out cervical cancer in any sudden and abrupt change in colouration. Men don’t care. They literally DONT CARE. There are so many other interesting things down there to think about than color.

And what is this about this whole fairness thing? And where will it stop? We are a nation of mixed populations and we don’t have a single homogeneous color among us. We are from all shades of pale yellow to dark black and we have all been perfectly content with it till now- otherwise all the darker shaded people among us would have disappeared long ago due to selective breeding and not finding mates. Why is this sudden explosion of a preference for the whitest white women? Is it a creation, a bogus creation, of media and marketing? Or is it an authentic manifestation of changing social norms? Only the fairest should survive, let the dark disappear from the world thing? I am not a sociologist, so I can only raise such disturbing questions and not answer them.

Finally, where will this craze for whitening products end? Will we have creams to whiten our tongues, our eyeballs etc? And hey, what about hair whiteners? Wouldn't that be something to look forward to? A lot of early grayer's would heave a sigh of relief if hair whitening became a craze, right?

So to summarize, real men don’t care what color is a woman’s armpits or vaginas. What we judge women on is, when we gaze into their eyes, is there a light shining there, indicating intelligence, empathy, care and concern- a real womanly thing so to say (the kind you take home/get married to). Or are the lights switched off in there, indicating a non-functioning brain, empty headed, so to say? That’s what men want in women. Or wait, that’s what I want at least, speaking for myself.

So if you are going to sell something so obscenely wasteful and useless, please leave me and all men out of it. We don’t want it, we don’t like it and we certainly won’t endorse it. Leave us out, now.

(P.S. this post is based on the preferences of normal men and does not reflect the weird fantasies of creeps/perverts/sadists/psychos…for who can understand their minds?)

(P.P.S. Only genuine comments will be replied to, others are requested to satisfy their doubts by checking various other sources available on the net)