Another Disgusting Thing I Do in the Name of Staying Clean and Sweet Smelling

This is a confession. My name is Oral Hygiene Queen (“Hi Oral Hygiene Queen!”), and I do unspeakable things in my bathroom. Yeah, I’ve admitted to flossing in public, but I do some much worse shit when I’m alone in what my husband and I euphemistically refer to as “the small room.” One of those things is cleaning my tongue.

Tongues need to be cleaned. I have a special instrument for the purpose, which looks like a small plastic tennis racket with no catgut. You brush your tongue a bit with a wet, pasteless toothbrush, and then stick the tongue out and scrape this device over it from front to back. It collects a thick, gummy substance akin to toe jam or smegma, which you then rinse down the sink. Repeat ‘til the tongue scraper comes up clean, or ‘til your tongue starts smarting like a sonofabitch (which for me usually happens after two scrapes). The tongue scum is off-white (unless of course you’ve been eating something especially rich in hue like chocolate or beets), and it smells like the matted hair under Satan’s scrotum. I’ve only smelled it once, out of a perverse curiosity (what did I expect it to smell like, a garden in spring?), but it was really an unhallowed odor. Actually, it smelled like the foul breath of an adult human, in a very concentrated form. And smelling it made me think “Damn! It’s a good thing I’m doing this!” and made me resolve to do it more regularly.

Supposedly, in addition to preventing bad breath, regular tongue scraping also reduces periodontal disease and tooth decay, and according to one ad I came across, it’s “700% more effective than tongue brushing” and “reduces bacteria that cause sore throats.” (I have no idea whether these claims have any merit, but I'll vouch for the fact that the thing takes the smell of Satan's ballsack off your tongue, a smell that can be so very incriminating.)

So, skip the minty-fresh breath strips and get yourself a tongue scraper. Doesn’t it sound like fun?