First came the fairness face creams. Then the skin lightening body lotions. Enter the whitening underarm deodorant, and finally – drum roll, please – the fairness feminine douche! Clean and Dry intimate wash “offers protection, fairness and freshness” for colour-challenged vaginas everywhere.
Our fairness obsession – at least in ad campaigns – now borders the ridiculous.

The fairer sex is now required to be literally so: fairer all over, all the time, from our pretty white brow to our bleached little toe, be it in the boardroom or the bedroom. The campaign to eliminate the scourge of darkness has extended to every nook and cranny of a woman’s body. A tiny little tan line? Perish the thought, says Anushka Sharma, as she flaunts her pristinely white finger. Tanned legs from playing tennis? Oh, the horror! As for the female underarm – long tortured and bruised by repeated waxing – the required hue is now a dazzling white once reserved for toilets and sports uniforms.

With women – socialised to fret over their appearance – the Fear Factor always works better. Reuters

So it was only a matter of time before we breached the final frontier: our long-neglectedyonis. Begone nasty purples, reds, and dark (Eeks, there is that word again!) pinks, cried the douche fairy. Let there be white, instead!

Do I think it’s dumb? Sure. For starters, none of the usual rationale of fairness product ads work here. While white is indeed right in the marriage market, this is one virtue that is difficult to list in that matrimonial ad: Khatri girl, 5’3″, convent education, working in MNC, slim, fair everywhere! And flashing your prospective employers is certainly not going to help you land that fancy, corporate job.

As for the bedroom, if a guy (or girl, if that’s the way you swing) is actually looking at your vagina, I can safely promise you, he’s not concerned with its exact hue. And if he is — brace yourself! — the boy’s most likely gay. The Indian male criteria for nookie is pretty straight-forward. He’s virtuously colour-blind if a) you’re pretty; or b) have big tits; or c) if you’re willing put out — in which case, he absolutely, incontrovertibly doesn’t give a damn!

So why bother with a fair and lovely douche?

Ask an advertising honcho like Alyque Padamsee, and you’ll likely get some version of this bit of received wisdom:

It is hard to deny that fairness creams often get social commentators and activists all worked up. What they should do is take a deep breath and think again. Lipstick is used to make your lips redder, fairness cream is used to make you fairer—so what’s the problem? I don’t think any Youngistani today thinks the British Raj/White man is superior to us Brown folk. That’s all 1947 thinking!