By Lindy West - Source
Good news, ladies! Society has discovered another new
thing that's wrong with you, which means another opportunity for you to make yourself
more attractive for your man. Score! Turns out, the colour of your vagina is
gross and everyone hates it. So bleach that motherfucker. Bleach it right now!
In this commercial for an Indian product called Clean and
Dry Intimate Wash, a (very light-skinned) couple sits down for what would
have been a peaceful cup of morning coffee—if the woman's disgusting brown
vagina hadn't ruined everything! The dude can't even bring himself look at her.
He can't look at his coffee either, because it only reminds him of his wife's
dripping, coffee-brown hole! Fortunately, the quick-thinking woman takes a
shower, scrubbing her swarthy snatch with Clean and Dry Intimate Wash
("Freshness + Fairness"). And poof! Her vadge comes out blinding
white like a downy baby lamb (and NOT THE GROSS BLACK KIND) and her
husband—whose penis, I can only assume, is literally a light saber—is all,
"Hey, lady! Cancel them divorce papers and LET'S BONE."
Needless to say, certain citizens are troubled by this product—which, in addition to just being
fucking insane, brings up painful issues about the hierarchy of
skin tone within the Indian community. As if it isn't bad enough
that darker-skinned people are encouraged to stay out of the sun and invest in
skin-bleaching products like Fair & Lovely, and that white actresses are being imported to play Indian people in Bollywood movies, now
everyone has to be insecure about the fact that their vaginas happen to be the
color that vaginas are??? Splendid! God, I was just saying the other day that
my misogyny didn't have enough racism in it.
So what are the pro-vadge-bleaching people thinking? Here's a hilarious explanation from a male ad exec:
It is hard to deny that fairness creams often get social
commentators and activists all worked up. What they should do is take a deep
breath and think again. Lipstick is used to make your lips redder, fairness
cream is used to make you fairer-so what's the problem? I don't think any
Youngistani today thinks the British Raj/White man is superior to us Brown
folk. That's all 1947 thinking!
The only reason I can offer for why people like fairness, is
this: if you have two beautiful girls, one of them fair and the other dark, you
see the fair girl's features more clearly. This is because her complexion
reflects more light. I found this amazing difference when I directed Kabir
Bedi, who is very fair and had to wear dark makeup for Othello, the Black hero
of the play. I found I had to have a special spotlight following Kabir around
the stage because otherwise the audience could not see his expressions.
See? It makes perfect sense. We just want our vaginas to
reflect more light—is that so wrong? I mean, WHAT IF MY CAR BREAKS DOWN AT
NIGHT AND I DON'T HAVE A REFLECTIVE ENOUGH VAGINA? Really, the ultimate
one-vagina-to-rule-them-all would glow in the dark like one of those deep-sea
fishes. I need my vagina to attract more krill so my husband will fuck me
again! (My husband is a whale.)
Basically the idea is to get as far away as possible from
any colour that vaginas actually come in. Because that's what's at the heart of
this type of thinking—the perfect vagina would be something that's not a vagina
at all.
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