Author: Christy DeSmith

I saw the ad recently when, after a long, tiring workday, I was passing the evening as I often do: Snuggled up to the boyfriend on the sofa, flipping through an issue of Vanity Fair, and only vaguely paying attention to the television. But then a singsong remake of “We’re Not Gonna Take It”—yes, the Twisted Sister strain—snagged my ear.

I looked up to see a montage of smiling beauties. A blonde office-worker reclined in her swivel chair and used her strappy high-heel to boot at a floating word: Irritability. A kick-boxer jabbed at moodiness. Inside a fitting room, a shopper popped bloating as if it were a balloon. Finally, a sexy young thing strutting down a city sidewalk jumped in the air and dunked the phrase feeling anxious. “Yaz is the only birth control proven to treat the emotional and physical premenstrual symptoms that are severe enough to impact your life,” promised the voice-over. Oh, and it makes your skin look better, too!

“That strikes me as an irresponsible way to market birth control,” I said to my boyfriend. But of course, he didn’t particularly see my point. The medical establishment says birth control pills are safe and, by and large, the populace seems to agree. In fact, hormonal contraceptives have practically become a staple of contemporary living: like the timesaving microwave oven, so indispensable that it’s nearly pointless to argue their detriments. But how did the Pill ascend from mere contraceptive to all-encompassing lifestyle drug?

In the beginning, this pharmaceutical innovation was targeted to married women. But early adopters in the ’60s discovered the pill’s power against menstrual cramps. Soon, unmarried women caught on, feigning debilitating cramps wherever there was a need for a prescription. Still, the drug was not without its side effects: nausea, weight gain, and, in many cases, an obliterated sex drive.

Such word-of-mouth marketing among consumers—and, just as important, between pharmaceutical companies and physicians—held sway until 1997, when deregulation enabled the companies to begin advertising directly to consumers. When I joined the fake-cramps crowd and started taking Loestrin in 1992, I wasn’t told this particular drug would also diminish my periods. But that’s exactly what happened (after three years, they disappeared altogether). Back then it was alarming; nowadays, of course, Loestrin’s ads boast: “The pill with a short period.” Then in 1996, when a physician suggested somewhat half-heartedly that Ortho Tri-Cyclen might clear my complexion, I jumped at the chance to change prescriptions. This claim—“clinically proven to help your skin look better”—is now featured front-and-center on the Ortho Tri-Cyclen website, providing teenagers and other single women with another handy excuse to start dosing.

It’s what good marketers do, right? They pick up on consumer trends and exploit them to the benefit of their companies or clients. We, the people, shape the messages of these ads and those messages, in turn, shape us. These days women are sold birth control for every reason except preventing pregnancy. It seems like anyone with stomach pain or pimples is taking a contraceptive, whether she’s sexually active or not. In fact, this is likely how Big Pharma gets away with marketing to “good girls.” Today’s birth control ads invariably feature slender, hyperactive youngsters (often swimming or wearing white pants); the implication is that our periods prevent us from looking so beautiful and engaging in such fun, not that these beautiful, young things might be having sex. It goes without saying that menstruation is an annoyance, if not a curse, as it was once called. But I wonder whether today’s birth control marketing puts even more perfectionist pressures on women.

The message: Not only must we be professionally successful and effortlessly hot, we must also be cheerful, energetic, and sound of mind—even when it’s that time of the month.

The most radical marketing developments have come in the past few years with Seasonale, the pill that limits menstrual periods to just four per year, and now Yaz, which seems to cure everything inherent to the female condition: the monthly bouts of moodiness, fatigue, increased appetite, and water-retention that often go along with our periods.

These ads prey upon a particular cultural prejudice—that having this messy, punctuated hormonal cycle is not just a grave inconvenience, but a curable medical condition. Seasonale enables women to plan their periods around vacations or, in the case of a woman I know, running a marathon. As for Yaz, it starts to look a lot like an antidepressant. Of course, the insinuated correlation between femininity and mental illness is nothing new. (The etymology of “hysteria,” derived from the Greek for uterus, says it all.) I can’t help but wonder why the Yaz ad, which goes the furthest in characterizing women’s bodies as diseased, hasn’t triggered mass outrage or, at the very least, a few thousand bouts of extra-menstrual irritability. Perhaps our birth control is a little too fabulous.

Now that the male pill is in trials, a sick, moody, and yes, female mind starts to wander: What groovy side effects might it offer? Already, it’s been shown to curtail libido, just as the female pill does. Might it cure other pesky byproducts of manhood, such as aggression, overconfidence, and snoring? For the sake of all that’s good and decent, one hopes scientists can engineer it to tackle back hair and Male Answer Syndrome, that sex-specific compulsion to present as fact all educated guesses. And if there’s any justice in this world, rather than causing fellows to accumulate fat around their hips, perhaps this new pill will trigger muscle loss in, say, their biceps.

That first hit made my brain tingle. And so, a few days later, I found myself reaching again for the can of enriched oxygen—just a few huffs before heading to the gym. Normally, those initial minutes of exercise are somewhat skull-rattling. On this occasion, however, I bounced along the cushioned surface of a gentle high, as if my heavy head had somehow emptied, as if I’d resumed that habit from junior high: sucking sweet, buoying helium whenever I got the chance.

Contributing to this giddiness was the fact that Oxygen Plus, a new line of locally produced, concentrated oxygen-in-a-can, is so fashionably packaged. The O+Mini aerosol, a highly portable four-inch can that comes in metallic blue (peppermint-scented) and metallic pink (grapefruit) varieties, resembles a tiny can of Aqua Net. Then there’s the O+Stick: This foot-long refillable dispenser (made of recyclable aluminum) has a smooth, white surface and curved edges, and sort of resembles a vibrator. So long as these cutesy covetables were packed in the purse, I found, the party would go wherever I did.

But the market isn’t always kind to such far-out products, and so, over the next three weeks, I shared Oxygen Plus with a variety of subjects in hopes of finding fellow enthusiasts (thus ensuring the stability of my supply from the manufacturer, Oxygen Plus, Inc., which is based in Mahtomedi). My first guinea pig was a close friend, a classically trained singer in her mid-thirties eager to try the stuff: “I breathe for a living” is how Andrea put it over a recent lunch. “It says three to five hits,” she said, examining the dosage instructions on a pink O+Mini. After an initial squirt, administered as one would a blast of Binaca, she observed: “Boy, it really does smell like grapefruit.” Two sprays and fifteen seconds later, she remarked: “I’m waiting for something to happen.” Five minutes later she reported that, in fact, she had felt nothing.

The marketed benefits of huffing Oxygen Plus are not unlike those purported by Oxynate, the recreational oxygen bar at the Mall of America: relaxation, increased energy and alertness, relief from headaches and sinus problems, and improved performance for athletes. But time and time again, and much to this devotee’s chagrin, test subjects, including friends, family, and random passersby, were resistant to the oxygen’s charms. Subsequent trials on office mates, in the foyer of my apartment building, and even at the finish line of the Monster Dash half-marathon were equally discouraging. “But it can’t be a bad thing,” offered one of the random subjects, a thirty-nine-year-old businessman encountered at Uptown’s Green Mill Restaurant and Bar on a Saturday night. “I mean, you can’t get too much oxygen.”

One of Oxygen Plus’s claims—that it’s an effective tonic after a night of heavy drinking— went untested. But one thing is certain: Oxygen Plus provides a healthy, or at least harmless, way to indulge illicit fantasies; when used in public places, it was observed that decent, law-abiding citizens can get nostalgic for youthful delinquency by stealing a puff. Indeed, several subjects made the association with magic herbs, even if they didn’t say so expressly. When a thirty-eight-year-old IT guy was offered Oxygen Plus at a party one evening, he took his hit as if he were, in fact, toking a spliff. He inhaled very deeply, then held the peppermint-scented, enriched oxygen in his lungs for several seconds before finally letting it go in a long, slow exhale. Did that make a difference? Nope, he said, he never got his high.