In the least sexist way possible these adverts are aimed at stupid housewives. A recent disinfectant advert claimed that a kitchen chopping board has more bacteria living on it than a toilet seat. Shock horror, women everywhere were just about to take that evening's ingredients for dinner to the bathroom to resume chopping it up on the toilet seat. BUT WAIT, this new disinfectant can kill 99.9% of the bacteria on your chopping board making it safe for you to use it again. PHEW. Hang on, if this little fact is true then why have I not died as a result of a horrific disease caught from the bacteria on the chopping board?
As a fairly amateur biologist I can explain everything that is wrong with this advert. Firstly if there are more bacteria on the chopping board than the toilet seat then this has been the case for many many years and is clearly the way it is meant to be, there is more bacteria on the human skin than there is on the toilet seat and the chopping board put together, quickly, disinfect you skin now to the extent it burns off horribly, but at least those bacteria are dead! Secondly, not all bacteria are bad, quite the opposite, a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of bacteria are harmful in anyway at all, obviously certain places contain a higher proportion of the bad bacteria. The toilet seat obviously has a higher proportion of bad bacteria than a chopping board or the human skin, chopping board bacteria are completely harmless. Thirdly, the only thing preventing the bad bacteria from taking 100% of the chopping board is all the space already taken up by the good bacteria. So here's an idea, spray it with a disinfectant that kills 99.9% of all bacteria. Guess what, that 0.1% is almost certainly the hardiest, roughest, toughest bad bacteria going, and now it has the whole chopping board to itself "brilliant," it must think, "that daft old tart just killed off all the competition, this chopping board belongs to me!"
My next quibble is with automatic soap dispensers. I have no problem with soap, I would be pretty unpopular if I did. This soap may be in the form of a bar or in a squirt bottle, again, no problems so far. Advertisement, here is where the problem begins. A company has developed a new bottle that dispenses liquid soap automatically when its motion detector detects that something has been put beneath it. How did they market this? "Did you know that your soap pump harbours bacteria and may have more bacteria on it than a toilet bowl? This transfers on to your hands when you press the soap pump." Right, let me break this down again. Firstly, so what? Am I not about to wash my hand with the soap that you claim kills this bacteria on my hands? Getting a little bit of extra bacteria on my hands BEFORE I wash them is going to make no difference at all. Secondly, what about the tap? Surely this has the same amount of bacteria too, and I have to touch that to turn it off and that will be after I wash my hands. Oh damn, a conundrum, I could compulsively scrub my hands repeatedly, buy a motion-sensitive tap or GET ON WITH MY LIFE BECAUSE IT DOES NOT MATTER?! It just preys upon the germophopic and the uneducated.
My final grievance is with an advert for an oven cleaner. The product's slogan was "So easy a man could do it" I'm up for a bit of casual sexism but we live in a politically correct world and how would this be treated if it was in the reverse? Can you imagine the controversy of an advert with the slogan "This car is so easy to drive a woman could do it" or "This computer is so easy to use a woman could do it"? There would be absolute uproar so why is the oven cleaner one acceptable? This got me so worked up that I..I..I..considered writing a strongly worded letter. I didn't though.
Gah, adverts!
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