I have brought it to my own attention that this blog has been both sparse and all-work-no-play of late. Therefore, I am going to post about something very trivial and obvious which bothers me, in celebration of the fact that this is still a blog and it is still on the internet, and all this substantive stuff and serious business needs a little leavening.

So, people of the internet: I do not want to whiten my teeth. Seriously, I don’t want to paint whitening agent on my teeth or bathe them in a whitening wash, or even commit the relatively sane step of asking my dentist what whitening process he recommends. And most of all, I do not want to whiten while I brush. This should not be difficult to accomplish. I just want toothpaste that does what it says on the box: when used in a regimen BLAH BLAH BLAH, keeps my teeth from rotting and falling out. Because I like being able to eat a steak, because cavities make eating chocolate painful, because tooth pain can cause headaches, because tooth disease can cause other more systemic health problems. Because cleaning our teeth is a pretty basic hygienic standard we’ve mostly agreed on for decades (if not more).

Which is why it’s so frustrating to find more and more of the grocery store toothpaste aisle devoted to whitening every day. I actually have to read the fine print on each box before I buy it, to make sure that I’m not being accidentally whitened. Fates forfend I should try to buy a travel-size of plain toothpaste. It’s as if I walked into the canned veggies aisle and found that 80% of canned green beans now come mixed with diet supplements, because you can’t just want green beans.

We all have our personal capitulations and complicities with the beauty standard. But we don’t have to embrace living in a world where every single part of our body has an established yardstick by which its appearance is inadequate. “Clean” is a pretty good social standard: for hair, for skin, for teeth. If we accept that the default version of a simple toiletry should include extraneous “beautifying”, we’re accepting that the standard isn’t just clean, it’s also “shiny and manageable”, “toned and tightened”, or “white and glistening”. There are enough channels telling people they aren’t good enough in America. Why does toothpaste have to be one of them?