The great air freshener debate

And now for something completely irrelevant. But fun, maybe.

Jonah Goldberg wonders how come there are so many commercials on TV for home air fresheners -- and why they're aimed at women. Jonah:

Could the demand for domestic air scrubbers be a small piece of evidence that harried working women are sweeping the stench under the air freshener rug? I'm not judging anyone. It's just that in my experience, if you have a persistent stink in your house, there's a problem that isn't going to be solved by trying to mask it. But it's pretty clear that millions of consumers disagree.

I think it has everything to do with the classic marketing ploy of creating anxiety then proposing a solution to it. Do some people's houses smell funky? Yes, of course. But most people -- OK, most people whose houses I visit -- don't have this problem, and it's not because they're spraying foo-foo all over their house. It's because they keep their houses tidy. I think that the air-freshener vendors play off the anxiety working women have that they're not doing everything they should to keep a clean house. Tell me, does anybody like the cloying, chemical smell of commercial air fresheners? Whenever I smell them, they make me think of men wearing toupees: they say more about the insecurity of the person who deploys them to mask a perceived flaw than they do about the flaw itself.

Then again, I'm super-susceptible to aromas, and they powerfully change my mood. The smell of magnolias, roasting pecans, and Bourbon whiskey are all Proustian madeleines that I associate with my childhood in the deep South (my father used to ask me to mix his toddies when I was a very small boy, so I associate the scent of Bourbon with making my dad happy, for example). In the winter, I love the faint smell of ash in our fireplace, and usually prevail upon Julie to buy a relatively expensive candle or something to make our cozy living room smell faintly of cedar. You have to spend money on these things, at least if you're me, because cheap candles smell all chemical and overpowering. Subtle is what you want. I remember back in my high school days, when all us dudes bathed in Polo by Ralph Lauren reading in GQ that your cologne should only be detectable by someone close enough to be intimate with you. Not that your average 16-year-old horny-toad American male is going to follow that advice, but I think I finally realized that it was true by the time I got to college. Subtlety is a virtue.

Anyway, the air-freshener industry is based on social anxiety, it seems to me. I wonder if they still make that toilet freshener you used to see advertised in the 1970s -- the kind that makes the water in your toilet bowl look blue. That, too, is a product that depends on social anxiety. I think we can all agree that it's a good and necessary thing to keep your potty unspotty. The key to that product, though, was the bright blue hue it imparted to the water: it told your guests, "You are in the home of people who care enough to keep the toilet spic-and-span."

Let's talk about other products created to solve problems that nobody knew they had until an ad campaign told them so.