Summer’s Eve…..All I Can Say is WOW!

Well, I remember being here on Feministing a couple days ago to find a talking vagina telling me how I need to be douching and showing my vagina a little love. Well besides getting over the creepiness of a talking vagina, I don’t think I need Summer’s Eve to show my vagina some love. I think we have a very close relationship. Now if you’re wondering what commercial I’m talking about, just click here.

Now I’m not really fully against Summer’s Eve because they are using shame to get women to douche but that they are passing off douching as something healthy and normal. Now in case of you who don’t understand the risk of douching, I will show the side effects that I had received from Women’s Health:

• Douching can change the balance of vaginal flora which are the organisms that live in the vagina.
• It can cause vaginal irritation.
• It can cause bacterial vaginosis and what happens with that is that your vagina will increase with bad bacteria and decrease when it comes to the more good bacteria.
• It can possibly cause STI’s.
• It can also cause pelvic inflammatory disease.

There are other risks as well but you can of course look towards the site I suggested and plenty of other sites. Now that’s only a portion of the Summer’s Eve commercial that annoys me. The first thing that pissed me off was that Summer’s Eve thought it was wise to have a different hand puppet as a vagina for every race (as if the first commercial wasn’t bad enough. Here is the link the the black version.

I can’t name how many problems I have with this ad. First off, I’m black and I don’t talk like that and honestly, I don’t meet too many black women that really do. My gosh this ad was so stereotypical that I was expecting the vagina to call me a jive turkey next. I highly even doubt they even had a black woman agree to do this. And what kills me is that I bet you the people who put this ad out probably really thought this was going to reach out to the black community. Well they were sadly mistaken.

Now if you think that version was bad. Wait till you see the latina version. Spicy isn’t she? With all the different vagina out there, I’m surprised they didn’t have an Asian version. Seriously though, what were these people thinking. Did they really expect all the women to jump on the bandwagon or better yet did they expect every black and latina woman to love these commercials? Well those people who thought this idea was brilliant were people such as, Stan Richard and Stacie Barnett. They claim that these minority vaginas were meant to be relatable and not offensive. Well then….call me “white washed” but I sure couldn’t relate at all. I couldn’t even believe they said that these commercials were also meant to educate women about their vaginas. That’s a new one. A company that advocates douching wants to teach me about my “lady parts.”

But thankfully the ads were pulled and hopefully Summer’s Eve has learned from this.