In what appears to be a tribute to Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, Summer’s Eve has started marketing feminine hygiene products with hand puppets representing talking vaginas. The vaginas, which represent various ethnicities, have been characterized by outraged women as maudlin stereotypes. Furthermore, the suggestion that there’s anything wrong with a filthy vagina, according to some women (and the putatively male author), is highly offensive.
Perhaps it was a bit risky to portray the black vagina as a club-hopping, hair-obsessed freak, and the latina vagina as a spanglish-talkin’ baby-making machine, but in all likelihood this was simply a result of market research.
All I can take away from this is that women have entirely too little to complain about in this day and age, as the ads, which were probably created by female-saturated marketing teams, are neither particularly racist nor shaming of women, but rather simply crude and stupid, like the Vagina Monologues that inspired them.
A couple examples:
Jive-talkin’ vagina
Spanglish vagina
