Language is a funny thing. But less so when we use it to shame women.
Driving home from a funeral last week I noticed a HEMA billboard for bras. In Dutch they're called behas and for some reason it suddenly struck me: Bee-Hah is simply the Dutch phonetic spelling of an abbreviation: BH. So what do the initials stand for? Luckily a friend traveling with us was old (and wise) enough to supply the answer: bustehouder (literally bosom holder).
It's the thing I most enjoy about learning to spreek in het Nederlands; the pleasant surprise when you learn how many things simply are what they are called.
Frogs are known by the action their legs make in water (kikkers), spiders are known for the webs they make (spins) and women's undergarments do what they say on the tin (so to speak). Dutch is a language ideally suited for advertising as the unique selling point (USP) is in the word itself.
And way before we advertisers invented shaming women to make them buy stuff (breath too smelly? thighs too fat? hair too limp?) the Dutch language was happy to refer to a woman's genitalia (more specifically her labia) as schaamlippen. Now the lippen part is easy to decipher (read my lippen) but what's always intrigued me is that schaam means shame in Dutch. Yes ladies, the Lips of Shame (and no, it's not a pornographic Indiana Jones sequel).
And it doesn't stop there: pubic hair is schaamhaar and naturally pubic lice are schaamluis. Now I can understand being ashamed of getting crabs but keeping the label stuck firmly on your pink bits doesn't sound much like the planet's most permissive people we all think the Dutch to be. And it isn't. Just because the word hasn't changed in centuries doesn't mean the people using it haven't.
But has advertising caught up? It seems when speaking directly to women we can simply call something that holds their breasts a breast holder but the closer we venture toward their nether-regions the more vague our language (and the more dire the copywriting) becomes.
On Dutch TV we have ads for a mysterious women's product called Lactacyd that talks about "protecting your intimacy". No, it's not a lock on your bedroom door but a "daily feminine wash" that seems to be designed specifically to make women feel anxious about using old-fashioned water to wash their vaginas. While Evian has for decades sold its bottled water off the promise of perpetual youthfulness, apparently if you wash your schaamlippen with it they'll shrivel up and fall off.
In a bold attempt to counter this squeamishness, one brave local agency decided to look hip and modern by filming their Lactacyd TV spot entirely from the vagina's perspective (I kid you not).
Now perhaps you're thinking the only c*#ts involved in this concept were the two agency dicks who thought it up - but ironically, it was two female creatives who had the balls to take a different perspective in the category (but not surprisingly, it was pulled shortly after airing and schaam is probably what the former brand manager of Lactacyd who approved it is still feeling).
But not all 'intimate products' aimed at women carry such shame and squeamishness. And in fact, two men are responsible for finding a unique way to talk to women (and their daughters) about the monthly crimson tide coursing between their legs without having to resort to ridiculous euphemisms like …er, crimson tide.
Their brilliant ad for Hello Flo is to promote a (wait for it) "tampon subscription service" that talks to women in plain language using a technique virtually unheard of in the category: humour.
Sometimes the best communication is like the Dutch language itself. Keep it simple. Period.