Unhelpful

There used to be a time when making a meal involved dealing with raw food products. Now, not only do our mashed potatoes come from reconstituted industrial potato flake product, even heaving a goddamn spray bottle of glass cleaner is too much to ask of us.

We need a wipe for this.

(Pictures follow in the article, click them to enlarge.)

As far as I can remember (and god help me, I try not to remember much), we’ve always had the prototype wipe product around: baby wipes. Babies are, from even my mostly second-hand experience, fairly messy people and notorious for tricking other people into cleaning up after them.

This was the status quo for years, without much in the way of further development aside from the revelation that maybe baby wipes would be just as good in an unscented flavor for those people to whom the main drawback of having a baby around is the inexplicable fact that everything made for them seems to reek of sweet, nasty floral perfume.

That singular, deceptively simple development was the clarion call to open the floodgates. You can argue whether or not the baby wipe is even the initial development, but frankly if you’re going to bring up the “moist towelette” that you’d get in some family restaurants or worse yet, the alcohol pad, you’re missing the point of mass-marketed wipe-as-convenience, you’re just a sick individual, and I whole-heartedly suggest you seek some help. Now ‘wipes’ are everywhere now that they’re out of the baby bag. The first two places they colonized were obvious enough: the bathroom and the kitchen, two places that dirty things go to get clean. Windex glass wipes, Clorox cleaning wipes, Wet Ones–essentially baby wipes for the rest of us.

It all seemed convenient and innocuous enough, but it’s gone to the point of ridiculousness. Gone are our parents’ generation’s days where not only did you not have a wipe for everything, in many cases you even had to buy cleaning concentrates and dilute them with water yourself, before use. Go ahead and think of the last time you did this with any cleaning product that wasn’t related to mopping or car detail. If this doesn’t involve a lengthy trip down memory lane, you’re either stubborn or a cult member.

Don’t for a second think that mopping and car detail has been left wipe-free, however; quite the contrary. Now we have dry and wet “mopping systems” which involve a replaceable fabric head on a flat surface. This is to say, the mop has gone the way of wipe-on-a-stick. Armor All, not to be left out on the wipe craze, has much of its product range in wet napkin form, too. To my knowledge, you can’t do a full car wax and detail regimen without resorting to non-wipe products, but give it a year and we’ll see.

A scary development is the so-called “feminine wipes” and their bastard progeny, which are never called “masculine wipes” for reasons I should suspect are utterly obvious: wipes may have shed their image of being wholly associated with babies and women, but not to the degree where they’ve become a defining man’s product, alongside alcohol-laden burning aftershave, motor oil, vise grip pliers, Russian vodkas, and prostitutes. Old Spice uses the name “Cool Contact Refreshment Towels”, for instance, because as anyone who met Ford Prefect can tell you, a towel is a manly thing indeed. Regardless of gender, these personal care wipes are marketed with the notion that customers could use a little “freshening up” from time to time. Screw that, customers could use a damn shower from time to time. If your cooze or schlong smells like four day old baking grease, a little moist application of a perfumed wipe really isn’t taking care of the problem.

Things have, of course, come full circle. In addition to specialty wipes for cleaning just about every other part of your body, you now can buy laughably overpriced “moist wipes” and a wall-mounted container for them which compliments and holds your toilet paper as well. Yes, you understand me correctly: ass wipes. I know, with a resigned sense of certainty, that there is someone out there, possibly in India where toilet hygiene has never completely taken to the use of dry-roll toilet paper, that right now is sitting on an invention as obvious as it is stupid as it is a sure-win for those willing to overspend on anus-cleaning solutions: the toilet roll spritzer to ever so lightly moisten the end of your standard toilet paper.

Where does any of this end? It’s one of those things that’s almost risky to parody in the sense that if I had made the exercise of coming up with silly wipe ideas a few years ago, some of them would no longer be parody, having passed into the realm of real products: pet eye wipes, computer monitor wipes, laundry stain wipes, hemorrhoid wipes, printer-cleaning wipes. Risky or not, I forge ahead, and hope one day to be able to look back on these primitive times and laugh at the mere idea of being able to buy liquid products of any sort in an actual bottle rather than a box of overpriced wipes.

Like fake butter. There’s No Fucking Way That’s Not Butter