When Charmin’s first Mr. Whipple commercial aired in 1964, toilet paper was still a relatively new invention. The first roll was sold only 74 years earlier, so it was understandable that a certain excitement continued to attach itself to the product category—any housewife could walk into a supermarket and fill her cart with the kind of luxury ass-care product not even Europe’s richest kings and queens could obtain a century earlier.
But the housewives who shopped at George Whipple’s grocery store for more than 20 years and never once obeyed his command to please not squeeze the Charmin were more than excited. They were obsessed, ecstatic, crazy with lust for Charmin’s irresistibly squeezable softness. And Whipple, their ostensible nemesis, the least effective dominatrix to ever patrol a midsized supermarket, was their faithful conspirator, a sexual revolutionary on the order of Hugh Hefner, a radical feminist on the order of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.
Last week, Dick Wilson, the actor who portrayed Mr. Whipple in 504 Charmin commercials, passed away at the age of 91. If you caught a glimpse of any of those spots during the TV coverage of Wilson’s death, then you know what strange artifacts they are.
In the midst of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, as women went on the pill and burned their bras; as urban sophisticates lined up to watch Deep Throat in public theaters; as every subculture in the land sought liberation from its various oppressors, television advertisers were bound by a strict code that, amongst its many checks and prohibitions, made it taboo to merely show a toilet bowl, much less discuss, with any degree of candor, the actual purpose of toilet paper.
This weird dichotomy of liberation and repression is apparent throughout the Whipple canon. Years before best-sellers like The Sensuous Woman and Fear of Flying urged America’s women to claim their sexuality for themselves, Charmin commercials were depicting plain, plump, grandmotherly types as hedonistic hellcats trolling supermarkets in search of the kind of toe-curling ecstasy only a four-pack of premium toilet paper can provide.
To keep full-blown sapphic orgies from erupting in the paper-goods aisle, Mr. Whipple waged an endless but ineffective War on Squeezing. The signs he posted were ignored. A mirror he installed to shame brazen tissue-fondlers into more chaste behavior only gave them a new exhibitionistic charge. Even state-of-the-art technology, in the form of a giant robot named Squeezak, could not keep these lusty women from turning Mr. Whipple’s store into a steamy hothouse of distaff eros.
“I never knew softness could be like this,” one lady purrs in post-coital bliss after her supermarket sisters introduce her to the thick-rolled pleasures of Charmin. Mr. Whipple obviously wants in on the action too, but he’s too square, too bow-tied, too constricted by outdated, arbitrary codes of propriety to fully partake in the freer, less inhibited, more satisfying sexuality let loose in his store. When the lights go out in one spot, the ladies punctuate the darkness with theatrically orgasmic oohs and ahhs. In others, fresh-faced moms unabashedly hunger for “deep down squeezable softness.” They paw at Charmin four-packs like Tommy Lee judging a foob contest. Whipple, meanwhile, never manages more than a quick, embarrassed goose.
In addition to the emancipated female sexuality on display in these commercials, the Whipple canon also incorporated some pretty retro notions. Career women needed toilet paper, too, but they showed up in Charmin commercials about as often as toilets did. Instead, the vignettes featured housewives, mothers, grandmas, shopping for the homestead. These ladies, the commercials implied, knew a secret the career women would never discover: That no form of work was as fulfilling as keeping house. A mere squeeze of Charmin sent them into storegasms so intense that shopping was a perk, not a chore.
But if the sexual fulfillment of these ladies was ironically yoked to their domestic status, it was also independent from the physical presence of men; it was their own secret, sovereign thing. And Mr. Whipple, the ostensible eyes and ears of the patriarchy, there to keep things orderly, played along with them. He made a big show of enforcing society’s tight-assed rules—what was so wrong about squeezing the Charmin anyway?—but ultimately his protestations were so negligible, so half-hearted, that his customers were free to squeeze themselves into shuddery bliss day after day, year after year, decade after decade. The real housewives of America were so taken with this fantasy depiction of their lives that Charmin remains their toilet paper of choice even today.