Tanya Gold has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In the 2004 film Mean Girls Ms Norbury (Tina Fey) cries to her High School students: ‘Girls! You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores!’ Do we? I ask because Sydney Sweeney, an American actress, is selling her bathwater to men with unfathomable desires. No woman would buy it. We have an infinite supply.
Selling bathwater is hard. It’s the logistics. How do you distribute it? By fishing trawler? By pipe? Sweeney, who has marketing skills – and this is all marketing, she designed a Ford Mustang, which can’t be drunk, last year – has partnered, as they say, with a soap company, which will incorporate drips (dribbles?) of her bathwater into a soap. At least that is what we are told. I would use the water from the potatoes, but I am Generation X and we would never speak about such things in public. Gen Z has no such inhibitions, though I sense they are having less sex than we did. Instead, they do this.
To the goods: Dr Squatch Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss is ‘a very real, very limited-edition soap made with my actual [as opposed to theoretical?] bathwater’. Sweeney does it because she is a very pure capitalist, and also an idiot, and she rationalises it like this: ‘When your fans start asking for your bathwater, you can either ignore it or turn it into a bar of Dr Squatch soap.’ The publicity material has her sitting in a bath against a backdrop of generic Alps. If you squint you might see Maria von Trapp. The soap, which has pine and fir ‘elements’ and smells of ‘a morning wood’, is, she says, ‘unforgettable’. ‘Hopefully,’ she adds, ‘this helps guys wake up to the realities of conventional personal care products and pushes them towards natural.’ Surely using ‘conventional personal care products’ is the least of the problems of the man who buys bathwater soap from a minor actress?
If this is an artistic act – and infants do them daily – we must name Sweeney a plagiarist. Five years ago, Belle Delphine, the ‘content creator’ who looks like a sexually aware child, sold her GamerGirl Bath Water for $30 a jar. Belle was inspired by burusera, a sexual fetish native to Japan, where men buy schoolgirls’ panties, swimsuits and even used sanitary products.
I interviewed Belle, who told me that at school she wanted to be liked so much, ‘I would injure myself just to make them [fellow schoolchildren] laugh. I had a swing in the garden, and I would fall off it to make them happy.’ She loved the internet because ‘I can’t start a conversation with anyone.’ She sold her bathwater because ‘I was trying to think of something more unique [than panties] so I went down the [route] of selling my own spit or hair. But I didn’t want to cut my hair and it’s very hard to produce a lot of spit.’ I feel protective of Belle and her bathwater, which fans drank and vaped. (One customer is a Spectator contributor.) Belle knows that being sexual is the only way to make money on the internet, and that is hard. Sweeney should acknowledge her debt.
I tire of saying this to young men: it isn’t hard to get a woman to give you bathwater
It also relates to a niche sexual fetish: mysophilia, or a longing for filth. Material filth. This isn’t well documented, because – well, who would want to do a PhD on it? In The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Adam kept droppings from Abba’s Agnetha Faltskog in a jar. Mysophilia appeared in Saltburn (2023), where a lower-middle-class interloper drank the bathwater of his aristocratic friend after he’d ejaculated into it. As ever in Britain, it was more about class than sex. Then he murdered his friend and shagged his grave. I wonder if the late restaurant critic A.A. Gill was mysophiliac. He was always well-groomed – surely a tell – but it leaked into his food criticism. Ale was Shrek’s bathwater. Pasta was chihuahua bathwater. Clam soup was Venus’s bathwater.
The obvious thing to say, and I tire of saying this to young men, is that it isn’t hard to get a woman to give you bathwater. Try a little charm; maybe ask a question. But I don’t think they want anything, not really, because intimacy is just too threatening. From behind a laptop, where these men live, the internet is one huge safe space. Just pay the lady, and you can imagine you lie in her bath, with none of the compromise and none of the pain. None of the joy either, but what would the grieving porn-addled know about that?
It’s just merchandise, said one fan, and I thought of medieval reliquaries: of kissing saints’ finger bones and finding God. This is not an act of connection, but alienation. Pay the $8, buy the soap and the false consolation. Nothing is real.
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