Holy Cow, Lysol Saves Marriages!

Nope, this isn't a scene from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," it's a warning to wives from February 18, 1928.

We already know that a Lysol douche is the most important tip to pass on to your terrified daughter. But did you also know that it will prevent your husband from having reluctant sex with your sister?

Her husband and her sister are going to the country club dance. She would like to go...but hasn't the energy. She is "too tired"...as usual.

And, when they were first married, she was always the one who thought of interesting things to do. Now, so much of the time, she is listless, unhappy, bored.

The change came about gradually. But now, without understanding why, they both know that the joy and zest have gone out of their marriage.

These pathetic, "quiet tragedies" are very common, and so often they are unnecessary. They are caused, so often, because the wife is negligent about the delicate matter of personal hygiene--or perhaps because she does not understand the facts about it.

All those years that I spent watching douche advertisements on television, they were always focused on the aesthetic argument: "you stink, darling, so take some of this." Lysol, however, was telling women in 1928 that spraying their insides with watered-down poison would prevent lethargy, perhaps in the way that setting a cat on fire makes it run really fast.

Holy Cow! Lysol!

I remember running across this in an old movie magazine a few years ago, but here it is again in The New Yorker, February 19, 1927:

...it explains things so much better than I can.

There is much misinformation about feminine hygiene -- a subject so vital to health and happiness that it behooves every woman to beware of unprofessional advice and to learn the facts.

As a contribution to the proper understanding and practice of scientific bodily care the makers of "Lysol" Disinfectant offer a booklet which gives the facts -- frankly, explicitly and reliably. Its name is "The Scientific Side of Health and Youth" and its author is a woman physician who has combined sympathetic appreciation of woman's intimate problems with professional knowledge and experience...

Lysol didn't make a special "douche formula," they just wrote a booklet telling women how to spray a household cleaner into their vaginas. And what's IN that household cleaner? This book from 1936 gives you the details, and also provides some horror stories about its use:

It consists essentially of cresol, a distillate of wood and coal, which has been made soluble in water by treating it with soap. Cresol was discovered through the attempts of scientists to find a substance which would not be so poisonous as carbolic acid and yet as effective in killing germs. It is now recognized to be almost, if not equally, as dangerous as carbolic acid itself; swallowing Lysol has come to be a common -- but extremely painful -- means of committing suicide.

No wonder the kid in the picture looks so scared.

For another great Lysol douche ad -- a "love-quiz" that looks like it's from the late '30s -- click here.