Underboob? Pits? How deodorant makers are targeting all body parts to stop the stench

“Americans stink!”

We do?

Sure! Just turn on your TV, wait five or 10 minutes and you’ll likely be overwhelmed by a new generation of deodorant commercials that address our many stinky limbs, nooks and crannies — and have no boundaries whatsoever.

I could be mistaken, but I believe a company called Lume started all of this last year, with its blond lady-next-door spokeswoman who looked directly into the camera and earnestly explained that her scented deodorant wasn’t just for “pits.”

Did she say pits?

Gasp!

She then went on to boldly go where no deodorant pitch woman had gone before, standing before us and waving her product up here, down there, all over her front, around her rear end … and to some mysterious place called The Underboobs.

(I’m pretty sure The Underboobs can be found in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, a few kilometers from the fabled mountains of Isengard.)

Recently, I mentioned the Lume ad to my friend Olga, while we were watching TV at my house. And, before I could finish explaining my objections to it, we saw a man, in a similarly bold advertisement, take a can of deodorant and spritz it down the front of his underwear.

IN MY LIVING ROOM!

“Did he just do that?” Olga asked.

“I think so,” I replied.

I don’t watch a whole lot of commercials, so I’m not absolutely positive that Lume was the first deodorant company to tell us that our entire bodies stink like bad ham and month-old cabbage. (And to refer to our stinky body parts with squirm-worthy names.)

But, it certainly wasn’t the last.

In no time flat, Old Spice, Native, Mando and assorted other brands began telling us far more than we cared to know about the various vile aromas we have emanating from here, there and everywhere.

On network television!

Even the once discreet and classy “ice blue” Secret joined the pack.

(What you can do with that sweet, ladylike anti-perspirant is no longer an ice blue secret.)

Am I being childish? Prudish?

Should these ads, filled with their near-endless streams of Too Much Information, bother us so?

Maybe. I don’t know.

I guess it all depends.

But the fact is, we all have a few words we’d rather not hear when we’re at home with our kids, eating our TV dinners, or chatting in our parlors with our friendly neighborhood Avon ladies.

(Do we still have Avon ladies? I’ll bet they smell nice.)

Is all this bluntness really necessary? Or just a fad?

My friend Anita insists, “It all started with those Charmin bears telling us to ‘enjoy the go.’”

Other friends I spoke with said they felt similarly uncomfortable with ads for feminine hygiene products, erectile dysfunction medications and men’s “manscaping” accessories.

All of this takes me back to a bus ride, roughly 52 years ago.

There I was, a cute, 7-year-old tyke, on the bus with his 30-something mother and about 20 other people.

Mom was contemplating what she was going to make for dinner that night. (Spaghetti? Meat loaf?) And her cute son was reading the cardboard advertisements posted over the bus windows.

At one point, I nudged dear old Mom and whispered, “Ma, psst … psst … psst …?”

“I can’t hear you,” she said. “The bus is too noisy.”

So, naturally, I screamed, “MA! WHAT’S HEMORRHOIDS?”

I’m sure I didn’t pronounce it correctly.

The second H has a tendency to confuse people.

All I can tell you is, that noisy bus suddenly grew completely silent — for about 15 seconds or so.

My mother stared down at me, slack-jawed and frozen.

Then, she and the other passengers began to roar with laughter.

This reaction encouraged me to resuscitate the story at home, every time my parents had company: “So, we were on this bus …”

Ha-ha-ha!

When I posted something about the deodorant commercials on my Facebook page last week, the respondents were overwhelmingly negative, including one woman who wrote, “This is all body shaming in a new form.”

Maybe she’s right.

Thanks to TV ads, I grew up with impeccable hygiene, lest I offend anyone with my dandruff, acne, bad breath and pearly whites that weren’t pearly or white enough.

My mother was a stickler for all these things. Her sons were allowed to sweat, but not stink.

As a teen, I used an antiperspirant that contained aluminum chlorohydrate, which kept my underarms dry but made the underarm area of my T-shirts turn black and fall apart.

Naturally, my mother was concerned.

“These shirts are ruined,” she said. “What if you get hit by a bus and have to go to the hospital with holes in your underwear?”

I was livid that she was more concerned about what the stuff was doing to my underwear than what it was doing to ME. My arms! My skin! MY …

“You smell fine,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: How deodorant company ads are now targeting the entire body