Yesterday in my posting “Manscaping your junk”:
A tv spot ad (only 15 seconds long) for the Gillette Intimate Manscape Kit (Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Trimmer, Gillette Intimate Pubic Hair Razor, Gillette Intimate Pubic Shave Cream + Cleanser), released at least twice, under different titles:
— ‘It’s Not Junk, so Treat It Right’ [apparently it’s your “pubic region” instead], published 10/31/22
— “Respect Your Junk!”, published 3/11/23
Two matters of linguistic interest here: the noun manscaping and verb manscape; and the noun junk ‘male genitals’. The material I’ve collected on these is extensive enough that I’m not going to try to cram it all into one posting, but will split things in two, in follow-up postings on the noun junk and on the noun manscaping / the verb manscape.
The spot ads play with the claim that referring to your genitals as junk is an insult to them, as if the (mildly) negative content of disposable junk unavoidably carries over to genital junk, contaminating it — an idea I disputed in yesterday’s posting. Beyond that, calling genital junk an insult seriously overestimates the power of its negative affect: far from being an insult, like, say, garbage and shit, it’s just a minimizer, treating the genitals as of little worth, what I referred to as a devaluation in my 9/1 posting “A bulletin from Pejora, the land of derogation and insult”:
The [insulting] slur jerk [what we might call “assholish jerk“] developed from jerk referring to a fool or incompetent [“foolish jerk“] — what I’ll call a (mere) devaluation, meaning a term that refers to [someone or something] regarded as of little worth.
Now on the lexicography of the noun(s) junk.
