Amy Lamé: Back off, Femfresh

According to a recent Evening Standard article, Vauxhall – or “VoHo” – is currently the trendiest area in the capital.

Why? Because Kate Moss once promised to DJ at a club there. She didn’t actually turn up, but apparently the mere hint of a whiff of La Moss bestows such glamour and salubriousness on a place that it becomes instantly hip.

If Kate Moss snubbing the SE11/SW8 postcode is the best we can hope for, then tie a brick around my neck and throw me hook, line and sinker over Vauxhall Bridge NOW.

Some of us have been enjoying the pleasures of Vauxhall for the past two decades. And we don’t need Prince Harry and Kate Middleton at roller disco nights at the Renaissance Rooms on Wandsworth Road to validate our existence.

My club night, Duckie, has been in residence every Saturday at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern for 17 years. We have seen trends come and go – and even led a successful battle against Lambeth Council, which wanted to demolish the city’s most famous gay pub to build – and I kid you not – an indoor ski slope.

Saturday nights in Vauxhall is a non-stop entertaining parade of club kids, Portuguese families out for a stroll, a smattering of drag queens, drunk homeless men from the local alcoholics hostel begging for beer money, and cyclists trying to weave through the crowds as quickly as possible.

The invented moniker “VoHo” is a misnomer too. Vauxhall has never seen itself in relation to Soho. Vauxhall’s demise in the mid-90s was partly due to the development of the gay village in Soho that left Vauxhall’s gay pubs in freefall. No one wanted to drink local anymore – they were too preoccupied parading their pecs up and down Old Compton Street. Now Soho is sanitised, the homos are like homing pigeons coming back to south London. Kate, Schmate…

I’m not sure what has been angering me more this week. Could it be the patronising article about an area of London I’ve been passionately part of for two decades?
Or perhaps it’s the latest ad campaign aimed at women that is the biggest pile of misogynist claptrap ever invented?

Femfresh is a commercially available product that we gals are being encouraged to use to clean our “kitty, nooni, lala, froofroo”. With warm weather approaching, apparently we should be worried that our Ph balance will be out of whack and our natural state of womanhood might offend.

You can see the ads on phone boxes all over London. Presumably so if you are suddenly overtaken by vaginal imbalance you can seek refuge and phone a friend. Just don’t mind the call girl cards. The mighty Miranda Hart, no less, has voiced the radio ads. Pretty persuasive stuff.

Are grown women really afraid of calling it what it is? Even my four-year-old niece is au fait with the word vagina. And the most popular – and rudest – description is nowhere to be seen. It may remain the most insulting of insults, but I’m all for reclaiming it.

If Femfresh can’t even use the word vagina, then it shouldn’t be preying on perceived insecurities. But that’s capitalism at work.
Why haven’t they invented an intimate willy wash? Maybe because penises are perfect the way they are.

Just in case you were wondering, every moment I am not spending deodorising my vagina I am dedicating to the feminist revolution.