"BEING CAREFUL IS VERY IMPORTANT to me," says an attractive, intelligent-looking young woman on a TV commercial that could be for wealth-management financial planning. Before I can pull out my checkbook, she adds, "Because I have genital herpes." Suddenly an attractive intelligent-looking young man steps out from behind her and adds, "And I don't."

There is something just a little too smug about both of them. Conditioned as I am by modern advertising I know that I am supposed to trust these poised confident spokespersons and whatever product they're selling. At first I was all ready to buy me some of those genital herpes because the careful woman has them. But why doesn't her boyfriend have them? Don't tell me there's a critical shortage of genital herpes!

TV commercials for these kinds of "intimate personal" products remind me of a joke that was going around when I was a teenager: a boy goes up to his mother and asks her when he'll be old enough to have a period. (This was years before the term "menstruation" was used in polite company -- let alone "genital herpes.") The mother tells the little boy that he'll never have a period and the boy begins to cry. "That's no fair! When girls get a period they get to go swimming and horseback riding and rock climbing and . . . " Drump-CHISH!

It was a more innocent time -- if not innocent, at least discreet. Young boys knew not to ask what those military field bandages in the Kotex box in the hall closet were used for. But today we are bombarded -- and I do mean bombarded -- by commercials that would have banished the TV to the garage when I was growing up. Today there's probably a generation of young boys who can't wait to be old enough to get erectile dysfunction because that means they get to wash a '58 Corvette or sit in a bathtub on the beach.

What gets me about the Valtrex commercial (that's what the genital herpes ad is selling, a drug to control outbreaks) is the creepy tone of superiority by both the herp-she and the herp-he. "Being careful is very important to me," she begins, leaving out "ever since I had that ankles-over-ears night of unprotected sex with a stranger who left me with an incurable sexually transmitted disease." And his declaration, "And I don't," leaves out "although I do wear a condom every time even though we've been together five years and while I may appear insufferably smug, in truth I am a cauldron of resentment and insecurity."