I’ve often found myself a bit confused here in America land. We are by some accounts the richest, most educated?, enlightened?, hip?, culture in the world. Yet we are entirely old-fashioned, puritanistic when it comes to sex. We do it like rabbits of course just like everyone else does, but we like it neat and tidy, and we mostly think it’s dirty, naughty, and at least verbally we announce, it belongs to married people only.
Thus the censor. For reasons known only to the FCC and that scary board that decides these things, most things sexual are still verboten in TV land. At least on network TV. Cable is another story for again, reasons that seem cloudy. Basic cable can be raunchier than free TV, but paying for “premium” cable, gets you off the hook entirely, except that if premium cable sells its old stuff to regular cable, they can show it uncut and uncensored. Beats me.
We are scared of boobs and bottoms, and most would faint to see the stuff located between the legs of homo sapiens, except that we, at least those of us not too obese, view it regularly in the shower. But on TV? NOOOO.
It’s not that I argue we should, mind you, I am fairly ambivalent actually, but we seem on the other hand to have such a penchant for other bodily things that I find utterly offensive, that I do begin to wonder. Let me explain.
It seemed, I think, to start with this. Kotex began advertising on TV. Now I remember as a young girl, that one acquired said pads and tampons on the sly, carefully looking around to make sure no guy was around. Tension mounted as you approached the counter, trying ever so hard to be nonchalant, hoping the check out clerk was not male. Hoping you wouldn’t discover that you had the wrong size, amount, and he would get on the PA and announce, “A BOX OF SUPER ABSORBENT TAMPONS, 36 COUNT, REGISTER 7 PLEASE.”
Undoubted it all started with “pads” which now come in thin and thick, wide and narrow, wings and unwinged, night time and day, super absorbent and “regular.” I always used the super super super, in case you were wondering, and I bet you weren’t. Yet you saw all this on TV, not a few times with an anxious, pimply, adolescent boy sitting by your side.
We moved on to pregnancy tests, which weren’t so bad but for the method of testing 
.
“Just put the strip in your urine stream.” Yeah, that goes well with the pork chop I’m eating at the dinner table! This is more information than I need or want to know. If I’m ever concerned about it, I’ll read the directions. But then again, now I’m told 1 in 4 women can’t read the results accurately. Perhaps the new one have a recording that announces, “you pregnant, you not.”
Peeing did not stop with pregnancy. Oh no, now we got to move on to uncontrolled peeing. When you gotta pee too much, too often. My favorite is the cardboard figure that urges women to have that “Detrol talk with your doctor.”
Imagine going into your doctor and proudly announcing, “Doctor, I want to have the Detrol talk.” He/she will be ushering you into to have the “crazy talk” with the resident therapist.
And don’t get me started with side effects. If you listen, as they race over them like they don’t really matter, you can often find references to heightened desires of suicide, sleepwalking while driving and eating, uncontrolled urges to gamble, and other rather bizarre and frightening things. Thanks, but an extra trip to the potty will do me just fine.
Men of course cannot be left out of this fun fest, so there are more commercials about men racing off of golf carts to porta potties and missing the key hits in the baseball game. Missing all the fun things that men bond over like canoeing and camping, though peeing in the woods seems rather easy to men.
But that’s not enough, let’s hear the symptoms on TV. Enlarged prostate, weak stream, stopping and going, not enough, too much, wrong color, tendency to spray, I dunno, it all makes me turn up my nose and wish I was somewhere else.
And then, should all else fail, why by God have we got the solution for you!
If you just can’t manage to contain your pee, then pee away in your grown up diapers. Plenty of help with how comfortable they are, how odor free, how you can “enjoy life once again.
Oh thank you I’m just so glad I know all this. I’d never have found out without your TV advertising. My DOCTOR would never have mentioned it surely if I had such a problem. No way. He’s being paid not to so the only way I can find out about it is while I’m eating popcorn and watching “All My Children.” Geesh.
It just gets worse after that. Now we gotta deal with really really disgusting stuff. 
Got an itchy Ummm tata? I won’t get any more graphic, but the TV ad will. Well solve that and get “long lasting relief.” Now I’m really off my feed. I don’t want to think about itchy stuff down there! If I get itchy stuff, I’ll go to a doctor, thank you, and again, he/she can tell me about what marvels are now on the shelves of my local drugstore. I don’t wanna know this when I’m calmly munching my danish over morning coffee.
If your itch be a bit further back, than do we have a deal for you. It’s hemorrhoid medicine. Now the Contrarian always thought that Johnny Cash should have sold the rights to his song “Ring of Fire,” for this malady, and he rues that that never happened. But Pleeeez, enough already. I’m quite adept by now at scouring in sunglasses the dark aisles of the drugstore in search of unmentionable ointments and salves for unmentionable bodily ailments.
Why do you think I want to watch this crap on TV?
Our tour of the body gone wrong ends with the usual big boy on the block, the dick commercials. Viagra, Cialis, and another one that is more dubious called an “enhancement.” 
We got singing Viagra bands and double tubs in meadows (how romantic is that?) and leering women all alluding to how much “fun” their man is now. The pill or device rectifies too small, too soft, or not hard long enough penises. Weee, I’m so glad I got all that information. I tend to like to inquire of every man I meet, how he penis is doing these days.
Well, I hope you get the point. Whatever happened to the “Jolly Green Giant,” “Tony the Tiger” and the “Doublemint Twins?” No wonder America is paranoid, and thinks Sarah Palin is “one of us.” We’re crazy as loons, and we have the commercials to prove it.
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Existential Ennui 