There are a couple of things you should take away from Trump’s news conference yesterday, in which one of the suggestions he made
- A news conference is not the time for spitballing. You can do that in closed meetings and brainstorming sessions, but doing it in a news conference undermines its purpose: to get one to three messages across.
- This is only the most recent incident where someone has suggested to a nationwide audience that maybe disinfectants could be applied internally.
Case in point: Old ads for the Lysol. Today, we know it as a household cleaner, but when it first came out, it was marketed in different ways. In its earliest days, it was marketed as a way to help fight epidemics and pandemics — first in 1889, with the cholera outbreak in Germany, and then in 1918 for the flu pandemic of that era. But in the 1920s, it was billed as a feminine hygiene product — housewives were told to douche with good ol’ Lysol.
There’s also a connotation to the phrase “feminine hygiene” that a modern reader would miss — according to historian Andrea Tone, the term was also a euphemism for contraception, which isn’t surprising, given that the U.S. once had the repressive Comstock laws. She writes about it in her book Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America.
Here’s a selection of old Lysol ads. Read ’em, and give thanks Lysol isn’t marketed that way anymore.
Tap the ad to see it at full size.
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