dangerous.
In June, when our group disbanded for the summer, I left it and went into therapy again. I am not going to write a tribute to therapy here. All I can say is that I was fortunate, I found a brilliant woman therapist, and at the moment I think that things might work out. At the same time, I don’t mean to write a wholesale attack on consciousness-raising. I hear of more and more groups every day, and some I hear about sound wonderful. They seem to follow the rules, they give women a real andnew sense of pride, they help them change in important ways, they have to do with feminism and politics and the movement as well as with personal trauma. Mine didn’t. My group thought the process could be used for something for which it was never intended. And that is the main point I want to make.
March, 1973
* I feel that a footnote is called for here, but I’m not exactly sure what to say in it. The marriage
did
end. I don’t really want to go into the details of that. But I do want to make the point that when it broke up, it broke up for the right reasons. When it was over, I did not think that I was a victim, or that I-was-perfect-and-he-was-awful, or any of that.
Dealing with the, uh, Problem
Leonard Lavin simply does not understand what all this is about.
Leonard Lavin is the kind of man who believes, almost to the point of religious fervor, in the free-enterprise system. In capitalism. In advertising. In this great land of ours. When Leonard Lavin sits in his Melrose Park, Illinois, factory, in the shade of a 75-foot-high can of Alberto VO5 hair spray, he knows that what he surveys is not just good but positive proof that America works. In less than twenty years, he has taken Alberto-Culver, a piddling drug company with sales of $300,000 a year, and brought it to its current yearly volume of $182 million. Leonard Lavin is proud of this, proud of every bit of it, and one of the things he is proudest of is the fact that there is a product on the market, a product that did not exist seven years ago and probably would not exist today but for him, and that product is going to gross over $40 million this year. Forty million dollars a year added on to the gross national product. Leonard Lavin deserves a medal for that. Right? And what he is getting instead is flak.
Leonard Lavin simply does not understand.
• • •
I will try to keep this from becoming gamy, but it is going to be hard. This is an article about the feminine-hygiene spray, and how it was developed and sold. I will try to keep it witty and charming, but inevitably something is going to sneak in to remind you what this product is really about. This product is really about vaginal odor. There are a lot of advertisements on television for the product that are so subtle on this point that some people—maybe not
you
, but some people—might not even know what the product
does
. There are a lot of men who manufacture the product who are so reluctant to talk straight about it that you can spend hours with them and not hear one anatomical phrase. They speak of “the problem.” They speak of “the area where the problem exists.” They speak of “the need to solve the problem.” Every so often, a hard-core word slides into the conversation. Vagina, maybe. Or sometimes, from someone particularly candid or scientific, a vulva or two. But mostly, the discussion of this product from industry spokesmen is vague, elusive, euphemistic. Here, for example, are the words of Larry Foster, a public-relations man for Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of Vespré and Naturally Feminine. He is speaking here of feminine-hygiene sprays and cunnilingus; I tell you this for the simple reason that he does not.
“What we’re talking about here,” said Foster, “is first, sex, and second, that segment of sex and how you react to it. Whether or not one needs something like this …” He paused. “If you were to really get people honest in terms of their
In June, when our group disbanded for the summer, I left it and went into therapy again. I am not going to write a tribute to therapy here. All I can say is that I was fortunate, I found a brilliant woman therapist, and at the moment I think that things might work out. At the same time, I don’t mean to write a wholesale attack on consciousness-raising. I hear of more and more groups every day, and some I hear about sound wonderful. They seem to follow the rules, they give women a real andnew sense of pride, they help them change in important ways, they have to do with feminism and politics and the movement as well as with personal trauma. Mine didn’t. My group thought the process could be used for something for which it was never intended. And that is the main point I want to make.
March, 1973
* I feel that a footnote is called for here, but I’m not exactly sure what to say in it. The marriage
did
end. I don’t really want to go into the details of that. But I do want to make the point that when it broke up, it broke up for the right reasons. When it was over, I did not think that I was a victim, or that I-was-perfect-and-he-was-awful, or any of that.
Dealing with the, uh, Problem
Leonard Lavin simply does not understand what all this is about.
Leonard Lavin is the kind of man who believes, almost to the point of religious fervor, in the free-enterprise system. In capitalism. In advertising. In this great land of ours. When Leonard Lavin sits in his Melrose Park, Illinois, factory, in the shade of a 75-foot-high can of Alberto VO5 hair spray, he knows that what he surveys is not just good but positive proof that America works. In less than twenty years, he has taken Alberto-Culver, a piddling drug company with sales of $300,000 a year, and brought it to its current yearly volume of $182 million. Leonard Lavin is proud of this, proud of every bit of it, and one of the things he is proudest of is the fact that there is a product on the market, a product that did not exist seven years ago and probably would not exist today but for him, and that product is going to gross over $40 million this year. Forty million dollars a year added on to the gross national product. Leonard Lavin deserves a medal for that. Right? And what he is getting instead is flak.
Leonard Lavin simply does not understand.
• • •
I will try to keep this from becoming gamy, but it is going to be hard. This is an article about the feminine-hygiene spray, and how it was developed and sold. I will try to keep it witty and charming, but inevitably something is going to sneak in to remind you what this product is really about. This product is really about vaginal odor. There are a lot of advertisements on television for the product that are so subtle on this point that some people—maybe not
you
, but some people—might not even know what the product
does
. There are a lot of men who manufacture the product who are so reluctant to talk straight about it that you can spend hours with them and not hear one anatomical phrase. They speak of “the problem.” They speak of “the area where the problem exists.” They speak of “the need to solve the problem.” Every so often, a hard-core word slides into the conversation. Vagina, maybe. Or sometimes, from someone particularly candid or scientific, a vulva or two. But mostly, the discussion of this product from industry spokesmen is vague, elusive, euphemistic. Here, for example, are the words of Larry Foster, a public-relations man for Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of Vespré and Naturally Feminine. He is speaking here of feminine-hygiene sprays and cunnilingus; I tell you this for the simple reason that he does not.
“What we’re talking about here,” said Foster, “is first, sex, and second, that segment of sex and how you react to it. Whether or not one needs something like this …” He paused. “If you were to really get people honest in terms of their
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