I Love Euphemistic Hygiene Commercials

TNG co-founder Zack spent some time over Valentines Day reevaluating what inconsequential things he loves. All this week he will tell you what he came up with. Check in tomorrow for "Things I Love" pt. 3.

I was cleaning my bathroom this weekend (a rare occurrence) when I started reading the fine print on a package of toilet paper (a less rare-occurrence, as I have some awful procrastination tendencies.) Instead of just calling the stuff "toilet paper" or "thin sheets you rub on your ass," the good folks at Whole Foods had decided to emblazon their packaging with the moniker of "bathroom tissues."

The word "bathroom" is itself a sugar coat — When's the last time you ran into a filthy McDonalds thinking "I'm going to bathe in my pants if I don't find a urinal right now?— so to invoke it on toilet paper packaging is doubly misleading. The actual tissue that makes up my bathroom consists of tile,porcelain and a plastic shower curtain. If I used any of those things for the intended purpose of the prepackaged "bathroom tissue" my boyfriend would kick me out and make me pay a hazmat crew to clean up after me.

Normally this wouldn't bother me so much but I've been overly sensitive lately to the euphemisms that marketers use to sell us the most objectively vile of consumer products. You can blame this all on those goddamn Charmin Bears. I understand that a company wouldn't sell very much of anything if their TV commercials consisted solely of some guy sitting on the toilet. But there's no reason to swing so far in the direction of palatability that you're paying some poor animator by the hour to create cuddly woodland creatures who exist solely to instruct the American public on the best ways to clean up their own waste.

There's one ad, which I should tell you airs at dinnertime, for an extra-thick "bathroom tissue" that won't stick to your rear quarters during use. Fair enough. No one wants souvenirs of their toilet paper. But the Charmin ad goes the extra mile by showing a bear with little bits of paper sticking to the backside of its fur. What's next? Ms. Butterworth teaming up with KY to combat vaginal dryness? The Geico caveman finding new and funny ways to treat a UTI?

That is why, despite all my protestation, I really do enjoy the creative heights that advertising executives must scale to in making it family-friendly to go number 2. There job must be neither easy nor desirable. I wouldn't want it.

And in case anyone is still reading this: any suggestions as to what that mysterious blue liquid is? At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, it's in every diaper commercial and I can never figure out what it is. All I know is that you want your hygiene products to absorb it. Everything else about it is a mystery.