Are you beach ready ‘down there’?

I am annoyed. Media and it’s manipulation of women has angered me. This post is one that most women will understand but fellas – listen closely…

The amount of adverts on tele that are aimed at women are vast, and it’s usually all about helping us to improve ourselves – even if we don’t need to be improved. The more famous ones are the Special K adverts that run every year showing us a beautiful *thin* woman in a red dress – a colour that is notoriously hard to pull off – picking at cereal while smiling and looking flawless. We can look like that too if we eat Special K. Sadly all that is in a box of cereal is poor quality fibre, diabetes-causing sugars and disappointment.

What has annoyed me today however is the new Wilkinson Sword advert. Incase you haven’t seen it, it starts with a woman at a table outside, talking about a pool party. In traditional Wilkinson Sword style it’s all about whether she is beach ready ‘down there’. She assures us at the end of the advert that “of course” she is beach ready ‘down there’. Which is good because otherwise she would have been unable to swim in the pool. Because lack of pubic hair is directly correlated with your ability to float in water. The only thing that could have made this advert more insulting is if she had stood up and shown the camera.

Firstly, this ‘beach ready’ term can piss off. The most logical explanation of this absurd term would be;

Am I near a beach? Yes.

Am I ready to leave the house for the beach? Yes.

Beach ready.

But we all know this not to be the case. Oh no. You are not beach ready until you have bought all the beauty cream that you need, put on your 25hour Rimmel make up, used all the Wilkinson Sword products to scrape every last noticeable hair from your body and after you have completed your 2 week Special K diet.

How do I know that you are not beach ready until then? Because the media tells us so. Magazines show us pictures of celebrities with cellulite or stretch marks, people who have gained a bit of weight and make fun of them because they are human. But don’t misunderstand them, they hate thin women too. Any female celebrity that is ‘too thin’ is fair game for humiliation. We cannot win.

The media have successfully made us feel inadequate for generations and now it is not enough to make us feel self conscious of our skin, or our curves, or our grey hair. No, now they’ve gone ‘down there’. Clearly there is officially no body part for which we cannot be shamed. Also, on a side note, if you are going to advertise a product for shaving your pubic hair, you should at least take this opportunity to educate people on what ‘it’ is called. Have the guts to say vulva rather than ‘down there’. We’re not in the 1950’s anymore, if it is acceptable to advertise products to ‘improve’ it then it’s acceptable to use the correct terminology.

Wilkinson Sword are obviously advertising to women who do choose to shave, but they are also highlighting to those women who choose not to that maybe they are wrong. Maybe they too would get invited to the pool if only they would shave their vulvas and join the party.

There are lots of self confident women out there who are shaking their heads at this advert and rightly so. But what about the women and girls who are watching it thinking that this is a choice they have to make in order to be considered normal? After all we should all be running home at night to shave just incase we get a chance to put on a bikini, god forbid that we’re not all models, perfectly tanned, with flawlessly smooth skin and completely hairless from the neck down.

In short, Wilkinson Sword, keep your marketing out of my pants. I’ll do what I damn well please.