I Never Promised You A Rose....Scented Vagina?
On whether society has regressed when it comes to the depictions of women's bodies
I’ve been thinking a lot about the wellness industry and the rhetoric that has existed online for the past few years regarding the glorification of women. We’re told we’re all goddesses, and to maintain that we have to have a fifty step skincare routine and look into things like steaming our vaginas. Have we really moved on from bygone eras that are lambasted for shoehorning women into a pretty little image and nothing more?
The 1950s and 1960s were a time of rapidly growing consumerism. It was the era of creating new gadgets to seemingly make life easier. These ads promised things that would make lives easier for women, but the way they depicted women only seemed to ridicule them.
Advertisements painted a less than complimentary image of women and their lives. One casually depicted a man hitting his wife for not “store testing for fresher coffee”, while another for a Mini Automatic car had the tag line ‘for simple driving’ accompanied by a photo of a woman behind the wheel looking more than a little bewildered.
Some early 20th century advertisements that caught my eye were ones for a disinfectant, antiseptic soap by the brand Lysol, which encouraged women to use the product for douching. It contained ingredients which were related to inflammation, burning and even death.
One advertisement depicted a man seemingly leaving his wife as her vagina did not smell to his standards. Women were expected to be as close to a child’s doll as you could get, with no natural odours so as to please the wants of man. This tied in with something else I noticed about the other advertisements mentioned earlier. Within each one, every woman was impeccably groomed as they carried out domestic work, not too unlike the recruitment posters of World War I when women were depicted in the factories etc. with bright red lipstick.
It is easy for us nowadays to think isn’t it great that we’re so progressive to still not expect women to be wrapped up perfectly in a little package nowadays, but how true is this actually? In recent years, actress and businesswoman Gwyneth Paltrow used her business Goop to sell a candle which proudly proclaimed, ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ and promised notes such as Damask rose.
Now, I’m no medical expert but I’m pretty sure no one’s vagina smells of roses.
Why are we still so obsessed with constantly making all things feminine into things of beauty? Don’t get me wrong, the idea of all women being goddesses is lovely and while beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder, it seems pretty fair to say that genitalia isn’t something ‘pretty’ or that smells like the local garden centre.
So why are we so hell bent on trying to make it something it’s not and packaging it up all nicely in association with a candle of all things, just like the 1950s advertisements placed such beauty standards on its women? Under the guise of wellness that tells us to embrace our bodies, there still seems to be a level of underlying shame when it comes to vaginas existing exactly as they are.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel good in our bodies. Some people are happy to let their body hair grow freely, others feel better being hair-free. Some people enjoy the routine of their skincare, others are happy to just wash their face. All are valid.
The issue arises though when such wellness habits place a level of pressure on women to have their bodies constantly looking and smelling pretty, especially when it can cause physical harm to them.
Newsflash incoming.
Women are messy. We are not perfect and do not have all the answers. We have different opinions on things. Women can do both good and bad things. We do not always look perfect. We do not always have to be goddess-like. We do not always have to love ourselves. And our vaginas sure as hell do not have to smell like something they’re not. What we are not, are beings which can be so simply defined as constantly goddess worthy because underneath it all we are human who cannot be essentialised as just a pretty picture.
At the crux of it, we are not simply something that can be packaged up nicely into a little box with a ribbon placed on top, just like the Goop candle or the vintage advertisements.
It begs the question; has society really progressed at all or is internal misogyny still alive and well?