
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’.

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