Share your intimate health concerns with your doctor. We don't need a national discourse about it

Telegraph

23-05-2025

This column comes with a health warning. You can bear with me or look away now. Because if you're a tad squeamish on some issues, like me, this could be one of my more revolting articles. So gross, indeed, that knowing what's coming, I can barely bear to look at these words myself.
The rot, which started some time back, is now festering, particularly in my case, in the evenings if I'm watching telly.
Things, words, images, voices lobbed in my direction from the box that make me recoil very much as if actual rancid human waste was coming my way.
A specific example being an advert for something called Sure Whole Body Deo, a group of short words formulated to cater for generations unable to cope with textual structures made up of more than two syllables, although as a thing of four words rendered meaningless to me. I get the first three but am stuck on 'Deo'.
As it plays I wince, then retch. There's the writhing groin of a man, albeit covered in green shorts, the scene of another hot from mowing his lawn and pulling the folds of his shorts out of his, er, intergluteal cleft, then a close-up shot of another hairy being in skimpy underwear, a hand actually, literally adjusting his tackle, before the camera pans out so we can see it's some fellow sunbathing on a beach. There's a shot too of someone squirting deodorant down into his boxer shorts, before cutting to a man in an office, again adjusting his bits, the camera, helpfully, shooting the view beneath the desk so we get a good look. And there are sweaty female breast cleavages, the backsides of elderly ladies in their underwear and from inside a steamy car, a sweaty foot bangs against a passenger window.
Then there are the words, large graphics emblazoned across the screen: muffin, jigglers, trotters, cheesers, goolies, nads, meatballs and nuts.
Deo, I quickly figure out is deodorant (a nine-letter, four-syllable nightmare for the infantile to pick their way across) and as the female voiceover explains, it's there for 'whatever you call them, wherever you smell'. Eurgh, I grimace. What is this revolting spectacle polluting my screen without warning? Where are the trigger warnings for me and my ilk?
As a food writer I'm averse – positively diving under my desk, clambering my way out of restaurants, tables, chairs and people knocked aside like a violent parting of the waves – when someone emits the word 'moist'. But sling me references to bodies – other people's – and before you've even suggested 'under-arm' I'm chundering into the waste-paper basket.
Yet my sensibilities and, I confidently assume, those of millions of others are being ridden roughshod over with a new trend of sharing, or indeed oversharing.
It's a fashion that goes hand in hand with the modern need to relentlessly express one's feelings, to emote on others as a way to forestall issues with one's mental health.
Thus, while the Gen Z office worker thinks it's entirely reasonable for them not to go to work on a Monday because they broke up with their boyfriend over the weekend, Andrex launches its 'Get Comfortable' campaign.
'Live unclenched,' it declared recently above the image of a man decidedly clenching. Traditionally it has, quite reasonably, attempted to convince people to buy its loo paper using fluffy Labrador puppies. But now it decides to ramp things up a notch and attempt to, in its own words, 'revolutionise public conversation about bathroom habits'.
The ensuing campaign intends to turn the taboos around the lavatory (they use the T-word – it rhymes with spoil it – but I'm sorry, I can't go there) into what they call 'open positive dialogues'. Or, as one of the brains behind the ad campaign, Matt Stone of Kimberly-Clark, puts it: '[Get Comfortable] will help us all have a healthier, more confident relationship with the bathroom.' He adds that, as a nation, we have a 'collective social constipation' and he hopes that this 'marks the start of a significant transformation for the Andrex brand and, we hope, for British culture'.
Well let's hope not, because while Andrex encourages this grotesque oversharing under the premise that it is raising awareness vis-à-vis bowel cancer, we all know that all it wants to do is grab people's attention so it can sell more loo paper.
British culture does not need to be transformed. I don't wish to hear people on trains either announcing their attention to poo or then discussing its quality, or lack of, afterwards. I don't wish to see men's midriffs, foreshortened trousers exposing lower legs, and neither do I need to know where someone smells. Only that they don't smell. Or if they do, they smell nice; Penhaligon's Blenheim Bouquet, for example (the preferred scent of Churchill) or Eau Sauvage, the go-to cologne of myself and his Majesty The King.
Now, before some of you start to howl at how I am brazenly trying to shut down dialogue that could mean someone misses the opportunity to have a deadly disease diagnosed, I would say, just go to the doctor. Be like me at the first sign of any ailment. A sore toe, tickly elbow, a very slight hint of a cold: seek urgent medical assistance, demand blood tests, scans and X-rays.