Outmoded displays of masculinity

Product: Big Brothers Big Sisters of America Summary: Shots of lonely men failing at traditional male activities, or staring dispiritedly into the middle distance, as melancholy music plays. A young boy provides the voiceover: "Filling their time with empty tasks and outmoded displays of masculinity. They're adult men, and each one is precious. Fortunately--" A balding man with a toolbelt runs out of his house, cursing and clutching his thumb-- "There's help." Children appear in the corners of the screen, directly addressing the viewer as the shots of male pathos continue. The boys, as it happens, are "ready to offer their wisdom and friendship as Little Brothers...It's not too late to help you." Themes: Male inadequacy, isolation See Also: Sally Struthers, sitcoms, Isaiah 11:6 First, I think this is a well-made and successful ad. It's a clever reversal of the typical "children in need" ads that desensitized us all to the plight of needy children in the 80s and 90s, and it's especially praiseworthy for how well it avoids the issues of pedophilia that by now enter the mind of every single person in the Western hemisphere when they hear phrases like "we match adult men and young boys in need of mentoring". By positioning the children as the source of demand for mentoring and, more cannily, by making sure that men and children never actually interact with each other, the ad creates a comfortable distance between them. Whether this merely plays into the cultural stereotype of the predatory and voraciously sexual male, I leave as an exercise to the reader. If you've paid much attention to popular culture at all for the last, oh, thirty or sixty years, you'll know where I'm going next: one of the reasons the ad can be this successful is that it uses the omnipresent trope of the incompetent husband. The men in the ad are in their late thirties to mid forties; presumably they have wives who are off tricking their children into believing that they cooked and cleaned for them. If you watch enough ads, and most of the programs on between them, you'll quickly learn that men can't do shit by themselves, and require constant supervision and feeding to keep from choking on Legos or barbeque grills or whatever. So here we see children as significantly more competent than men, and if you're not a man you get to chuckle and feel warm inside, and if you are a man you probably feel a little hollow and then have to go roll around on a pile of extra dollars or something.

The Sweet Touch of Love

Product: Axe Dark Temptation Summary: A guy sprays on deodorant and is transformed into a chocolate man with a grinning Easter Bunny rictus. He breaks off and melts down parts of his body to feed a large number of attractive young ladies. In traditional Axe ad fashion, the last scene sees him walking in front of a glass-windowed gym as women, so overcome with choco-lust as to have forgotten the existence of doors, throw themselves against the glass to get near him. Then someone speeds past on a moped and snaps off his arm. Themes: transubstantiation, cannibalism, black sexual potency, neoliberalism See Also: Be Aggressive; The Burger King; Mandingo; Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered I often feel uniquely terrified by advertising. Other people seem to be able to take these things in their stride; they do not suffer nightmares; they do not see the Burger King when they close their eyes. This ad in particular threw me for a loop--I quite enjoy Allen Toussaint's song, and when I heard it I looked up from my monitor excitedly only to see two women gnawing into the flesh of a brown man's face as he grins in that special clown/horror movie way. But I seem to be alone in my terror: other people either think it's "funny" or "bad" or "overly sexual". Everyone wants to be desired. But body spray ads are a whole different kettle of fetish. Here, above and beyond the traditional threesome, the ultimate goal is to be drowned in a sea of female flesh* -- or in this case, consumed wholly by the lust of women. In ads where a woman has been made irresistable, men stop and stare, fixed in place. In Axe ads, the women hurl their bodies at the irresistable man like zombies. This has traditionally been the end of the ad, but here we see the logical conclusion: the Maenads rip him to pieces and consume him. To me, with my simple lady brain, this is something I fear. It is fearful. But apparently it's a desirable enough outcome to sell chocolate cologne. *I say "flesh" but the more accurate term is of course "stick insects"