CARLTON FLETCHER: Please spare me the gross TV ads about embarrassing bodily functions

“I don’t wanna talk about it …”

— Rod Stewart

I’m no prude; I have a tendency even — as has been pointed out on a number of occasions — to be crass.

But I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I am more than a little disgusted by television ads that talk about … well, any bodily function — or malfunction — that you can find in an anatomy textbook.

There’s nothing quite like watching TV with your kids or grandkids and having to sit through an ad that discusses, in painstaking detail, women’s menstrual cycles. Or men’s misshapen … um, members.

Nothing, obviously, is off limits.

Thinking about the state of anything goes in TV advertising has me harking back to the days when sponsors would not support a program whose characters used expletives like “damn” or “hell.” A time when even the hint of hanky-panky was strictly forbidden. There was a time when, famously, men and women could not be in a scene shot in a bedroom unless both of them had at least one foot on the floor at all times, the logic being, presumably, that you couldn’t get up to something on a bed with a couple of feet on the floor.

Now, of course, you see flashes of nudity on network TV. Each year, viewers can mark the progress, so to speak, of swear words as more and more of the seven words George Carlin said you couldn’t say on TV become commonplace.

(It should be noted here that one of the biggest fears of hearing vulgar language or ads promoting products that in the past were not discussed in public has always been the embarrassment of hearing such while sitting with small kids. Now, though, the kids don’t even blink when the hear adult language. Where kids might once have asked their parents or grandparents what some of these words meant, now it’s the kids who explain them to the adults.)

These are words I never thought I’d hear on network TV and, quite frankly, never wanted to: diarrhea, period, erectile dysfunction, underboobs, condoms, yeast infection, poop, erections, urine stream, puke, hooker, fart, weiner, stool sample and Kardashian.

These were things you didn’t talk about with the kids present. Now they can sing along to catchy jingles about “… upset stomach, diarrhea” … or about how No. 2 shouldn’t feel like passing a porcupine or how this wonderful new deodorant can be applied to “the balls (too-long pause) of your feet.” Kids can learn to distinguish which feminine hygiene products can be used during “heavy flow” days and can watch an actor proudly declare, “I’m a woman, pooping on TV.”

We all kind of laugh and joke about these gross-out ads and find it comical when some of our favorite characters (the Belchers, for instance) turn pinworms or fear of using a strange bathroom or bouts of passing gas into an entire episode. But are there any such things as standards any more on network TV?

OK, I get it. This is the new age of enlightenment. The functions and foibles of the human body are nothing more than science, and by having characters or pitchmen and -women talk about them as such, we demystify them and open up what proponents call “adult dialog.”

But shouldn’t adult dialog be carried out by adults? And shouldn’t people who are a little less inclined to share their inner-most secrets about such private topics be allowed to enjoy their favorite show on TV without having to endure such?

So maybe I am a prude. That’s a title I can bear, and I don’t mind if you call me that anywhere in public. Just keep all that other stuff to yourself.