No one knows what it stands for, but everyone knows what it stands for. According to the K-Y Web site, the initials “K-Y” — trademarked in 1906 — are a mystery even to the company that makes this bestselling line of “personal lubricants.” Yet K-Y Jelly has become winkingly — and not always invitingly — synonymous with sex: sex requiring medical assistance, sex not endorsed by Sen. Rick Santorum. Despite its venerable, doctor-approved reputation, the frumpy aunt of all sex lubes still carries a high snicker factor.
K-Y is trying to change that. “Over the course of this summer you will see a lot of new things from us,” says Danielle Devine, director of public relations for Personal Products Co., the division of Johnson & Johnson that manufactures and markets K-Y. “Our goal is to make the brand more mainstream. We’re taking a little bit of the taboo off the brand. We’re trying to have more fun with it.”
Sure enough, K-Y goodies are no longer confined to that toothpasty old tube. New products include thicker UltraGel (in a handier soap-like dispenser), K-Y Liquid, and, raciest of all, K-Y Warming Liquid, which heats up on contact.
What’s next, flavors? Well, sort of. A splashy event at New York’s stylish W Hotel in June, featuring designer Patricia Field of “Sex and the City” wardrobe fame, is designed to highlight all of the other uses of K-Y Jelly.
Other uses? Yes. You’ve seen K-Y at your gyno’s office or ultrasound lab, maybe even at your vet’s. But did you know that it also works as lip gloss? Hair gel?
Those are just two of the “other” K-Y uses rumored to be in a forthcoming booklet — debuting at the W that will list nearly 100 more. Devine insists that K-Y is not making this stuff up, not trying to manufacture an Avon Skin-So-Soft sensation. (That lotion turned out, quite by accident, to also be a bug repellent, a brass brightener, a floor wax and a dessert topping.) Indeed, anecdotal reports of handy household K-Y uses abound: removing rings, price tags and grease (for the latter, add sugar for light sanding effect); loosening of tight nuts (as in bolts); inserting keys into cold locks (also not a euphemism). It’s often used by athletes such as runners and cyclists to prevent chafing, as well as by the two women in the movie Old School who compete in K-Y Jelly wrestling.
Why K-Y? Why now? The brand is still a Goliath with a 52 percent market share, compared with the 18 percent and 15 percent shares, respectively, of its closest competitors, Private Label and Astroglide. Nonetheless, perhaps K-Y is thinking ahead and trying to sex things up for the kids. In other words, the danger is that — without an image update — newer, younger lube-users might think of K-Y as the tube in their parents’ nightstand, which is gross on so many levels. Time, indeed, for a makeover.
But can K-Y really change its know-them-anywhere blue and white stripes? If so, how? For one thing, experts say, K-Y could stand to lighten up. “The people in the new market they’re probably going for are not people looking for ‘a trusted brand for my intimacy needs,’” says John Carpenter, chief creative officer of Benchmark, a Cincinnati marketing communications agency. “The best way for K-Y to do a 180 would be to start using humor.” What remains to be seen, then, is whether K-Y’s loony lip gloss and hair gel-type approach will be considered funny “haha,” or funny strange. (Or funny “There’s Something About Mary,” which is both.)
K-Y’s competitors, not surprisingly, are thinking funny strange. “You walk into a nightclub, take out a big thing of K-Y and smear it on your mouth? What kind of message does that send? Your mama would slap you!” laughed Lynne Merrill, a spokesperson at Biofilm, makers of Astroglide.
Astroglide’s inventor — the founder and CEO of parent company Biofilm — was more magnanimous. “I’m just pleased that [K-Y is] building market awareness. That’s good because people who are involved in intimacy can enjoy themselves more. And it allows everyone to have more market penetration,” says Daniel Wray, who after 10 years in the business can say “market penetration” with a straight face.
But if K-Y tarts things up, won’t the company tarnish its “good” reputation? That’s the challenge. “They are the old doctor brand, the medicinal brand,” says Jennifer Murtell, Benchmark’s senior copywriter. “The trick will be to get a sense of humor and keep that credibility.”
Many people do use K-Y precisely because of its no-nonsense, hospital-approved aura. “Let’s put it this way: it definitely would have given me pause if they’d used Astroglide on the ultrasound wand,” says one New York mother.
“I’m more inclined to buy K-Y because it’s tested better than most products,” says a female New York sex writer. “I find Astroglide on par as far as quality. Wet, Eros, and Jack Off, on the other hand, are skeevier products that don’t embarrass me, but make me worry about strange genital rashes.”
Says an attorney from Toronto: “I am more likely to buy dowdy K-Y than its skankier Astroglidier counterparts — but then again, I’m an uptight Canadian. There is a certain degree of embarrassment in purchasing any product that says ‘I require assisted lubrication,’ which is too much information to give the cashier who sells you Diet Coke every day. It’s even less dignified if the box has a cheesy picture or big sparkly letters saying ‘Astrogliiiiide!’” (She adds: “I’ve never used K-Y for anything else, but I bet it would be boss for calming frizz.”)
For many people, of course, K-Y’s unsexy medical connotation is precisely the problem. “He pulls out the K-Y, she thinks stirrups,” says Jennifer Murtell of Benchmark.
And that’s why some experts say K-Y would do to best to launch a whole new spinoff brand. “Creating a new brand would mean leaving behind some equity, but it would also mean shedding some baggage,” says Laurel Sutton, a partner at Catchword, a brand-name development firm in Oakland, Calif.
“It’s very difficult to change what you are,” says Al Ries, chairman of Atlanta marketing firm Ries & Ries. “You’ve got two strategies that will work: one, change very little and wait for things to come back around — which is what Hush Puppies did — or two, introduce a new brand.” Yes, with a new name, Ries says. He points out that professional builders shunned “Black and Decker Pro” tools (which they associated with the Home Depot set) until the name was changed to “De Walt,” and that teens shunned “Levis’ Tailored Classics” (which they associated with their parents’ closets) until the name was changed to “Dockers.”
Could a name change be all K-Y needs to prevent chafing? Possibly. “I hate K-Y Jelly and it’s all there in the name. Why a K? Why a Y? It sounds so Jiffy Lube. No one wants to have that slimy jelly feeling reinforced by, say, the very tube you’re staring at during a moment of passion,” says a Manhattan financial writer. “I use Silk. Every time I pick it up I think, ‘Aaah, silk. This feels silky! And whether it does or not, that’s the beauty of branding. Brands make you believe.”
Now, if they can just make pharmacy clerks believe us, when we try to call it cuticle softener.
For a few hours at Harvard this month, the dominance of the white male phallus was not just a concept. At around 10 p.m. on Feb. 11, a dozen rowers on the university crew team completed work on a 9-foot-6-inch tall penis made of snow, complete with according to a Feb. 19 article in the Crimson — “life-like veins, a urethral bulge, and a sizeable scrotum.” Rising into the hallowed air of Harvard Yard, the Snow Manhood attracted scores of supportive onlookers and, you might say, onlickers — not to mention inquiries about the identity of the sculpture’s model.
But it turns out they had trouble keeping it up. Later that night, offended undergrad roommates Amy Keel, 20, and Mary Clare Cardinale, 22, used cardboard tubes and shovels to knock the makeshift monument down.
Vandalism! Puritanism! Misogyny! Too much free time! Raging in dining halls, women’s groups, and in the pages of the Crimson, the ensuing — and ongoing — debate over the limits of 1) free expression and 2) feminists’ sense of humor has been a veritable winter carnival of overthinking and overreacting. Harvard men will be boys; Harvard women will learn, sooner or later, which battles to bother with.
That said, you don’t need a Harvard degree to understand why some folks there might have been put off by the single-entendre sculpture. Harvard has notoriously few tenured female faculty; its new sexual assault grievance procedure is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for being in possible violation of Title IX. Also, it was a giant white penis.
“I realize [the sculpture] was just a joke and that there was no malicious intent, but it propagated the notion that women don’t really belong here. It felt like it kind of put us in our place,” says Keel, who has received a blizzard of hate e-mail since the incident.
That snowy night, the crew team was actually trying to do something wholesome. “We don’t want to get into trouble for drinking, so we have to try to find other activities to bring freshmen into the team,” says captain Mike Skey, 23, a senior economics major from New Jersey. “So we thought, Let’s make a snow sculpture! Good clean fun! We can’t get into trouble for that!”
OK, but a penis? “The snow man is a little redundant. We thought the penis would be a good idea since we thought everyone would find it funny,” Skey explains. “We thought that at most people would find it immature, not offensive.”
When Mary Clare Cardinale happened by the construction project, she giggled at first, then started to wonder: “The whole community goes through here, tourists and old folks — what would they think? It wasn’t so much the feminist thing for me. [The sculpture] was not appropriate for where it was,” says the senior government major from Queens, N.Y.
“She came home and told me about it, and I was like, ‘Let’s take it down!’” says Keel, who claims that the two were threatened and shoved by male students during the process of deconstructing the phallus.
Keel defiantly took responsibility for the act in a Feb. 21 letter to the Crimson. “I, Amy Elise Keel, proudly own up to the fact that it was indeed me — with my roommate — who dismantled the obscene snow penis ‘sculpture,’” she wrote. “The unwanted image of an erect penis is an implied threat; it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not.” The paper went on to have a field day with headlines such as “Ruined Snow Penis Stimulates Debate” (Feb. 24).
Women’s studies lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld was “not anxious to comment further” on the issue, saying that the paper’s oversimplification of her comments had already gotten her enough hate mail. Can’t blame her: The Crimson makes her sound like a Lampoon parody of a feminist scholar. (Wrote reporter Hana Alberts: “[Professor Rosenfeld] said the snow penis follows a long line of public phallic symbols, including the Washington Monument and missiles.” Oh dear.)
But just a few days earlier, the Crimson ran an editorial that read like a Lampoon parody of a pretentious Harvard pseudo-scholar. Calling the snow schlong a work of “challenging art,” executive editor Jonathan H. Esensten asked: “Why did the enormous phallus elicit such iconoclastic fanaticism?” He then performed an irony-free analysis of the “long, and distinguished history of phallic imagery in art.” Example: Since the soldiers in Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” “can no longer fight because of their chronically-swollen members,” he explained, “the phallus is a symbol of peace.” Citing examples of phallic imagery in ancient Hindu and Egyptian culture, Esensten concluded that “the Greeks were not alone in their positive association with the tumescent male appendage.”
I guess the Harvard women didn’t take that class.
I recently went to Spain with my parents. I’m 32 years old. Sure, I would rather have gone with my husband, but I haven’t met him yet. But hey, free trip, can’t kvetch (though I do have the nagging worry that my parents have thrown up their hands and simply reallocated the wedding fund to the room and board account).
We toured the Basque Country up north, home to — among other things — the new Guggenheim, violent separatists and the most bizarre language on the planet. That’s a fact: Basque (Euskera) is a total anomaly, literally unrelated to any other tongue. It’s believed to be the oldest European language. That is, Basque was there first, all nestled in the Pyrenees minding its own business, but the languages that most of us are familiar with were the ones with bigger armies.
Basque is pronounced like Spanish (or, theoretically, Spanish is pronounced like Basque, the same way American Italian would be pronounced like English if the Romans invaded tomorrow), but it sure doesn’t look like anything on a label at your local bodega.
Here’s a sentence from a translation of an otherwise familiar work: “Ezin zezakeen jakin une hartan bertan, herrialde osoan, ezkutuan elkarturiko jendea edalontziak altxatu eta topa egiten ari zela isil-misilka: ‘Harry Potterri … bizirik geratutako mu-tikoari!’” Tons of k’s and z’s and scattered x’s, and lots of really long words. (It’s an “agglutinating” language, so all those little helper words like “at” get strung on in clunky chains of suffixes.)
Basque grammar also is Byzantine: You struggled with Latin’s five cases (nominative, genitive …)? Basque has 12 (comitative, inessive, allative …). It’s also an ergative language, meaning that the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are one grammatical case while the subject of a transitive verb is another. In other words, your linguistic intuition that divides the world into subjects and objects will, in Basque, always be wrong.
So my dad and I figured we’d learn Basque before we went. Languages, I’m good at. With fluent Spanish and formal French already locked in, I’d picked up Italian and even Catalan like lint; I can watch “Orfeu Negro” without reading the subtitles. What do all these languages have in common? Well, a lot. There you go.
Dad and I each ordered “Colloquial Basque: A Complete Language Course” from the Internet. I stared at the book on the subway; I did the exercises, biting my lip, and got most of them wrong. I made corrections, and the moment I’d finish, I’d forget everything. With no template in my mind, it was like trying to stick Velcro to particle board. Hopeless.
“Bet Dad can do this,” I would think, my inner child pouting.
See, my dad’s a famous linguist — a phonologist, to be precise — which means that, like, seven people know who he is. When I was little I thought that dinner conversation about “Romance languages” was about, say, “the international language of love,” and was tickled that my parents thought me mature enough to listen in. I wasn’t sure why MIT had a porn studies department; didn’t ask.
And Dad knows everything about Spanish. He can peg an accent from Paraguay; he can say “bus” in Mexico, Spain and Cuba (three different words). He once helped a writer friend of mine script a Latina catfight in a novel. (Dad’s e-mail: “For sociolinguistic accuracy with colorful expressions one would need to know where the ladies are from. For example, Spaniards — as opposed to Mexicans — don’t shy away from the jaw-droppingly blasphemous ‘Me cago en el coño de la madre de dios,’ which I blush to render faithfully as ‘I s–t in the c–t of the mother of God.’ Top that.”)
So I e-mailed my dad, “How’s the Basque going?” Reply from the MIT professor emeritus of linguistics: “F—ing language from hell. This is a waste of my time.”
We gave up. Our running joke was: “Well, we’ll be fine as long as we learn to say, ‘I support your cause. Please do not shoot.’” Really, it’s just a joke — I have no idea how to say that. And I’m thankful it didn’t come up.
One other thing: I had pink hair. Big fuchsia streaks, the rest orange. My parents hated it. Dad made his opinion clear and backed off. Not so Mom. She tried everything, from the direct order (“I hate your hair. Please change it”) to emotional blackmail. Example: I was one of only three single women at my recent 15th high school reunion. “What’s wrong with me, Mommy?” I whimpered. “Why I am I still alone?”
“Maybe it’s your hair,” came the reply.
Now, if there’s one thing my dad does not do, it’s worry. That’s my mom’s job. Her worrying is epic, Olympic, encyclopedic. She knows everything: the chemical composition of the pesticide on your grapes, the link between yogurt and breast cancer (“Eat only Stonyfield Farms,” she once intoned cryptically), how far away to sit from household appliances that emit hazardous electromagnetic rays. So when I got the following e-mail from my father, I knew I had to pay attention.
“Given the increased volatility after the recent Basque elections, my colleague Karlos thinks that while life-threatening danger is remote, it would be prudent for us (or anybody) to be inconspicuous and not flaunt our status as outsiders — which, tender subject I know, your present hair color does. Can you squeeze in a dye job to a more mousy or at least less flamboyant color before you leave? Given that we have a responsibility not only to ourselves but also to others, please take this seriously.”
Just like that, my pink hair went from impertinent experiment to international security risk.
You realize what really happened here, right?
Yes. My parents planned the entire trip to get me to change my hair. (And it worked. They paid; I dyed. I figured it would really suck to be grounded in Spain.)
But guess what: It turned out that bright pink and red (“Run Lola Run” red) hair are all the rage in the Basque Country. I am not kidding. With my new dull rust tone, I stood out. So it was all for naught, except for the part where I got to make a big display of having graciously obeyed my parents.
Still, it’s a slippery slope, because you know where this is going. Next they’ll invite me to a beautiful and interesting land where the natives are known to randomly slaughter civilians if all tourists do not quit freelance writing, apply to law school, get married and have children.
