This has to be the most disturbing marketing strategy I’ve seen since the Harry Potter vibrating broom was released and then quickly taken off the market as the people in charge abruptly sobered up and realized what they were doing. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…. the Spongebob Squarepants rectal thermometer.
I think that this conclusively proves that the marketing industry has done far more to create hordes of pansexual, sadomasochistic sex freaks than feminism, queer rights movements, or rock ‘n’ roll ever did. Readers are encouraged to tell us what they’d do with such an item in the comments area.
I’ve seen these in the stores and as someone into age play and anal play, I thought this was the most perfect thermometer ever invented for such play — well, with maybe the exception of, say, a Strawberry Shortcake, or even a My Little Pony thermometer.
I keep trying to decide if shoving Sponge Bob up a two-year-old’s ass really would make it any more pleasant for them or if it would just make them creeped out. :::shrug::: I dunno.
I dunno if a two-year-old is really cognizant enough of all the implications to be properly creeped out by such stuff. Any way you cut it, I always hated having a thermometer put up my butt as a kid. That being said, how many of these things that modern capitalism markets to kids seem deliberately thought up to produce perverts later in life? Have we forgotten the lessons of The Daddle? (Well, okay, the main lesson was me mocking it here on the blog.) The stuff that religious people make for their kids to play with is even freakier.
Maybe not properly creeped out in the way you and I would be, but certainly having the unpleasant experience of something put up their butts and then seeing the damn thing on television could be pretty scary for a toddler.
Your post on The Daddle was great! And your point about the sexuality of children an excellent one too. While they cannot contextualize their sexuality the same way adults can (or at least the way some adults do), something is definitely going on there. I imagine my own eroticization of rectal thermometers would be something similar to how the Daddle could lead to perversion later on. One of the few memories I have of my mother ever being maternal was me laying over her lap, a thermometer stuck in my bottom and her gently patting me on the back. Not a big leap from that to being a total spanko pervert (though it’s certainly not a definitive causal link). Not that I really think being a pervert a bad thing… 😉