Friday, June 10, 2005

Consider Yourself Warned

Have you seen these Tag Body Spray ads? I didn't think it was possible for a commercial to be so offensive to so many people simultaneously. The premise - a man sprays this crap on his body and women literally cannot control themselves sexually within a fifty foot radius of him. In one, our protagonist eyes a young vixen in the drug store - the best place to meet ladies in my world, I know - so a couple of pumps of the bottle, and before he knows it, women from throughout the store come piling on top of him, fighting to get a piece of that olfactorally-enhanced ass. In another, a man so desperate to put some order to the madness is forced to install a take-a-number machine outside his bedroom. Come on chickees, you gotta wait your turn!

There is a series of others (and to be honest, this might be a different spray, if you can believe it), in which women come out of locations with imprints on their backs - hangers (out of the dressing room), no smoking signs (airplane bathroom), etc. - under the pretense that they just got nailed hardcore wherever they happened to be at the time.

You can see where I'm going. It's obviously offensive to women because, you know, is it really possible that any woman alive today would be physically unable to keep her legs together even in the presence of say, Brad Pitt, if the circumstances weren't at least slightly socially acceptable? But it's offensive to men because, well tell me ladies - are you really waiting for the man wearing that perfect perfume? For that matter, do you even want a guy ensconced in a cloud of store-bought stink in the first place? So it's offensive to us that they would think that we're so stupid that we think that just any, no not any, every girl will want to fuck us because we're coated in some chemical stew.

But wait, it gets worse. In doing research for this piece, (is it considered research to drink whiskey and surf the web?), I went to the Tag website. There are games there. Send a pretend note (Mad Lib) to your friend from some skank who wants his jock because her hormones were so stirred by his scent. To answer the obvious question - yes, you have your choice of skank and pictures are included. There's a game in which you have to hide all the girls in your bedroom from your ax-wielding father. (Hide her in your dirty laundry sack!) Another where you have to find your way to the honey in her Rapunzel style bedroom, all the while dodging her family, even her dog, all of whom need your junk because of, you guessed it, the body spray.

Do I sound like some old fogey? It's not that I find the idea of wild anonymous sex offensive. I find it offensive that someone might think that some ridiculous perfume is going to get anyone laid. On a sidenote, why aren't the "family values" nuts attacking these ads? Does anyone want to take the time to see how much money Gillette has given to the Bush campaigns?

Please don't click on the links, ok? It will only serve to encourage them. I've done enough already.

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