Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
Television commercials selling laundry detergent share a kind of Loving-Mother, Happy-Home snuggliness world-wide. Apparently that’s how we like to think of laundry: of Mom taking care of us.
And of it.
If you’re laundress-Mom yourself—the target audience—we’re looking at that extra-bright laundry as a kind of totalizing maternal success. Clearly, we are meant to understand that children (& society) most love mothers who get their whites really white.
No one sells laundry detergent with images of half-naked, smoking longshoremen scrubbing their ragged undies in the polluted harbor waters & hanging them on the sail lines to dry. Though having seen this at the Sunda Kelapa pier in Jakarta, I think ad execs really ought to consider it. Who needs laundry detergent more?
Better yet, I’m willing to be convinced that adding bleach to this harbor would make it cleaner.
Today I saw a TV ad for bleach that has the wonderful quality of being at once absolutely familiar & totally alien to the American sensibility. True to form, the commercial is populated with mothers & frolicking little girls all in white, all of them excessively happy, loving & well-scrubbed, enjoying their cleanliness in & of itself. The background music, as it does in US ads, assures me they have Good Values.
In this commercial, however, all the happy women & girls are in hijab, head to toe, with ruffled white jilbabs draping down over their shoulders, perfectly framing their angelic faces, & ruffled white dresses flowing down to the floor. The ad ends—& it’s a beautiful, striking image—with dozens of smiling women & girls all in white, assembling & kneeling in a bright mosque for prayers.
It might not convert me, but that would sell me bleach.
Now harken back to the dockyards for a moment, where we saw a great plastic banner swagged over the containers of coal, motorcycles, squat toilets, & cement (one of several signs we’ve seen around the city) admonishing workers (largely in vain) to clean up after themselves reading: “Cleanliness is part of Faith.”
And of it.
If you’re laundress-Mom yourself—the target audience—we’re looking at that extra-bright laundry as a kind of totalizing maternal success. Clearly, we are meant to understand that children (& society) most love mothers who get their whites really white.
No one sells laundry detergent with images of half-naked, smoking longshoremen scrubbing their ragged undies in the polluted harbor waters & hanging them on the sail lines to dry. Though having seen this at the Sunda Kelapa pier in Jakarta, I think ad execs really ought to consider it. Who needs laundry detergent more?
Better yet, I’m willing to be convinced that adding bleach to this harbor would make it cleaner.
Today I saw a TV ad for bleach that has the wonderful quality of being at once absolutely familiar & totally alien to the American sensibility. True to form, the commercial is populated with mothers & frolicking little girls all in white, all of them excessively happy, loving & well-scrubbed, enjoying their cleanliness in & of itself. The background music, as it does in US ads, assures me they have Good Values.
In this commercial, however, all the happy women & girls are in hijab, head to toe, with ruffled white jilbabs draping down over their shoulders, perfectly framing their angelic faces, & ruffled white dresses flowing down to the floor. The ad ends—& it’s a beautiful, striking image—with dozens of smiling women & girls all in white, assembling & kneeling in a bright mosque for prayers.
It might not convert me, but that would sell me bleach.
Now harken back to the dockyards for a moment, where we saw a great plastic banner swagged over the containers of coal, motorcycles, squat toilets, & cement (one of several signs we’ve seen around the city) admonishing workers (largely in vain) to clean up after themselves reading: “Cleanliness is part of Faith.”
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 12:42 AM
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