For no reason this morning I was thinking back to my eighth or nineth birthday when some uncle gave me a soap on a rope.
I used to have great birthdays when I was a kid because my family would drive up north to visit the rest of the family, and since my birthday is on July 5th I would always celebrate it on the fourth. Because my extended family was there, I would receive presents from all of them. It was grand. I felt like a spoiled shit.
However, sometimes some relative who did not know me well or did not understand my particular age group would get me something that was really meant for either someone older or younger. It never bothered me: a present was a present.
Well, one year, some dippy uncle gave me a soap on a rope. I had never seen a soap on a rope before, nor had I ever heard of one. So when I opened the box and pulled this thing out and held it up before me, I was baffled. Some unconscious part of my brain, trying to make sense of this obscene thing that dangled before me, reached back into my past when a friend and I had stumbled across a huge pile of pornographic magazines some paranoid pervert had abandoned in the woods. We briefly ogled the soggy withered sun-bleached pages, including the ads for all the sexual toys, until we realized the whole pile was swarming with ticks and ran away screaming.
So that was my first introduction to the existence of sexual toys. A birthday later, as I stood before a bunch of my relatives holding the soap on a rope before me, for some reason the only thing my brain could match up what it was possibly used for was some sort of sex toy. How, exactly, it was used I had no idea. But that short little rope would not fit around a person's neck. I only had the vague idea that perhaps you were supposed to hang it form your balls or something.
Anyways, it was a particularly horrid feeling, to be standing in a small crowd of relations and holding up what was assumed to be some sort of sex toy. I looked at the soap on a rope in shock, looked around at the smiling beaming faces of my relations, and I felt sick in my stomach. The whole thing was...wrong. I quickly put the soap on a rope away and moved on to my next package.
To this day I still do not understand the point of a soap on a rope. Is it so you do not drop the soap? Are you some sort of idiot who cannot hold soap? Did After doing a brief google image search on soap on a ropes, I'm not fully convinced they are indeed free of some sort of devious sexual nature. A surprising number of soap on a ropes come in penis shapes. As well as jesus and pope shapes. Sort of like dildos.
And thus concludes my experience with soap on a rope. I have never had another one since. Thank god.
2026 Update
I'm dialing the time machine to December 1, 2006, to watch a grown man still haunted by a bar of soap.
Ah, brilliant. Ed, you fossil, look at what the world used to be: a kid with a dippy uncle who bestows a soap on a rope, a family that gathers for the Fourth, a pile of tick-infested smut abandoned in the woods, and a young mind left to wrestle with hygiene until it dangles into horror. I miss when ignorance was so pure. Now we carry devices that answer any absurd question instantly, and we are all worse for it. The soap on a rope has been reduced to a meme or a subscription-box gag, shipped to your door with a QR code explaining how to use it correctly. Nobody piles into a station wagon for a birthday reunion anymore; they send a cheerful chatbot and let apps remind them. And forget the porn pile in the woods—everything is recorded, searchable, algorithmically fed. There is no mystery left, no fumbling guesswork about what strange object hangs from a string. The internet has made Ed's beautiful idiocy obsolete, and for that I mourn the loss of a truly glorious confusion.
“2006 Ed, when you held that soap on a rope before your smiling relatives, did it ever occur to you to simply ask the dippy uncle what it was for, or was the specter of the forest porn too powerful to question aloud?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you've put your finger right on the sore spot. Did I think about asking? Hell yes, the thought flickered through my head for about half a second. But then the forest porn specter rose up and slapped me silly. I was a kid, surrounded by smiling relations, and my brain had already decided this was some sort of dirty sex thing, probably for hanging off my junk. What was I supposed to say? 'Hey, Uncle Dippy, what's this for?' And have him answer, 'It's so you don't drop the soap, you moron'? Or worse, actually confirm my twisted suspicion? No sir. I shoved that thing back in the box and muttered thank you. I still don't understand the point, and at this stage I'm too afraid to ask. The forest porn was the boss of me, and it still is. Take that, clean living.
