Do you know why going to the dentist’s office sucks?  If you were raised Catholic, it should be obvious to you—it’s the guilt.  At least for the routine stuff—cleanings and cavities—it’s one of the few instances in life in which you receive medical care because of your own laziness.  Accidents happen—and they often happen because people do incredibly stupid things—but accidents don’t always happen out of sheer laziness. 

When the hygienist is hovering over your mouth, scraping out last Christmas’s turkey and stuffing, cursing to himself and sucking blood and spit out of your mouth with that little vacuum thing, you know that you are being judged.  It’s just embarrassing – you’re incapacitated, you can’t talk or respond to anything the dentist says to you because your mouth so wide open, you’re breathing in the dentist’s face, and they are scraping crud out of your teeth.  You can see it in their eyes – they are thinking to themselves (and sometimes muttering out loud), “Did this person grow up in West Virginia?  Do you think he can even wipe his own ass properly, because he sure as hell didn’t manage to floss these teeth all the way at the back of his mouth at any point in the last year?”  Having never had one myself, I maybe shouldn’t invoke this particular metaphor, but the cleaning seems like a gynecological exam for your face.

After the X-rays are taken and that surprisingly heavy lead vest is lifted from your chest, the weight is replaced with the far heavier opprobrium of the dentist and hygienist reviewing the shots and deciding on a plan of attack.  In fact, when the dentist herself finally gets involved is when the real guilt sets in.  “Haven’t you been flossing?”  “Been awhile?”  “You’re completely fucked.”  No matter how inevitable a cavity is, you still feel about four years old—that occasional night that you just didn’t feel like brushing thoroughly or those two days you forgot to floss are back to haunt you, in whirring, thumping, mechanical form.  As the dentist leers over your mouth with her mighty Novocain needle in hand, you realize you only have one person to blame – yourself.  No other medical profession can hang this guilt over your head like a dentist can. 

If you a break a leg, you’re not a bad person.  If you have dry skin, it’s not your fault.  If you’ve got the flu, it’s nothing you did—everyone’s catching it.  But when the dentist hands you that little plastic bag with the free toothbrush and Glide floss sample, you feel about five years old all over again—and you nod like a guilty little child when you promise to brush and floss more before the next time.  Maybe there’s a reality show in this—God knows there’s one for everything else unpleasant in life (dating, dieting, parenting, traveling, male modeling)—The Cleanest Teeth.  Watch as twelve toothy adults compete for the whitest choppers—and more importantly, the moral approval of their dentists.