All day, every day… staring into the mirror, taking pictures of my boobs. I could be in the middle of a vampire movie, and I’d be the only character you could trust, ’cause I’d be that chick who’s constantly ogling her reflection. My own body would file a sexual harassment lawsuit against me, and I would plead innocent by reason of being so fucking sexy.
And then, on my days off from salivating over my own awesomeness, I’d go the mall and help my girlfriends try on bras. Because I’m a helper.
Into every generation, a handful of hypnotically irritating advertising spots are born. They burrow their way into your brain like an indigenous lifeform on Ceti Alpha 5, and suck away your will to live while simultaneously programming you to walk around singing their fucking jingles all day. It’s the marketing version of a phenomenon best explained by a chick with big boobs and cat ears:
As a kid, the one that infected me most severely –and led directly to my vast array of gender issues– was this ad for some shitty perfume, one designed specifically to torture co-workers throughout a long, musky day:
Quick thoughts:
“The eight hour perfume for the 24 hour woman”? So best case scenario, what happens the other 16 hours of the day? Does she smell great while at the office, only to come home reeking like a mix of three day old Chinese food and hobo farts?
Did we not have technology like “showers” and “soap” in 1980? Is this why women of that era were constantly worried about “that not-so-fresh feeling”? Are you telling me we could put a man on the moon but we couldn’t hose our chicks down occasionally?
Bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan sounds like an excellent idea. Leaving the bacon at the store, or feeding it to me unfried with a side of intestinal worms? Not so much.
Is it wrong that I know the bacon-bringer-homer in question is 60 by now, and I still want to hit it?
But back to the subject at hand…
The modern version of this sorta thing comes from Education Connection, a company which initially made its commercial mark by reminding uneducated drop-out males that uneducated drop-out females can work on their degrees in their pajamas. But it was only when they unleashed this marketing Kraken upon the world that they truly became a force with which one might reckon.
For the longest time, I thought I was alone in suffering under the totalitarian rule of this mind-conquering Mussolini of a song. As it turns out, I wasn’t. Many pathetic losers innocent victims have been caught up in the madness, via an obscene contest sponsored by the site itself. The result? Well, just look:
That’s right: a home-made spot encouraging douches to get an education! Can you imagine what would happen to this country if our overwhelming stockpile of douchery was to attain sentience? It would be like SkyNet, only with liquid Terminators made out of hair gel and Jägermeister.
Almost as disturbing is this all-jailbait all-stars iteration, featuring out-of-sync, tone-deaf audio married to a strangely ambitious attempt at a single-take Steadicam shot. It’s like Scorsese’s Copacabana scene from Goodfellas, if Marty were somehow transformed into a field-hockey team full of giggly sixteen year-old girls. (An image which is –let’s face it– incredibly sexy. Mmmmm… eyebrows!)
This next one just blows my mind:
Dude, if you expended half as much effort on school as you do making cut-out puppets and smoking the reefer, you’d be out of your mom’s basement and into a supermodel’s panties by now! I mean, bonus points for creativity and all, but seriously, shampoo the smell of bong water out of your scruffy beard, rinse out your collection of crusty jerk socks, and move on.
Of course, this collection wouldn’t be complete without the kitschy gay auteur version:
…or the sassy gay auteur variation:
But I’ve saved the true horror for last. It’s like watching some sort of dark offering to the thousand-horned hellgod on his nightmarish video altar. Every second of viewing leaves me feeling as if icy shards of demon spittle are tearing at the stitches of my fragile sanity.
Or put another way… I’m not saying this guy is a creepy, homeless, pedophile cannibal or anything, but, y’know, I wouldn’t leave your tastier looking kids around him.
What the hell is SoBe Lifewater? Aside from an opportunity to drink imperceptibly flavored, corporate-branded water from an environment-choking plastic bottle instead of, y’know, drinking from the fucking tap like a normal person?
"Seriously, you guys? Isn't it at least a little insensitive to drought-stricken people for me to stand hip-deep in free water to promote this bottled sewer piss? Huh? Wait... what d'you mean, 'shut up and look naked'?"
Apparently, it is also an excuse to paint a mermaid bikini on a naked Ashley Greene and wait for the internet to descend into a masturbatory frenzy. Which, on balance, is probably okay, ’cause, well… naked Ashley Greene, right?
Excuse me while my consumerist shame takes a backseat to my sexual desperation. Which is also a sort of shame, when ya think about it, so at least I’m not a total sell-out.
I’m not sure what makes this gay. I mean, frolicking about with your man-friends and lip-syncing Miley Cyrus all the time…? I call that “Wednesday afternoon.” Of course, I also call it “Jorge’s turn to bring the lube,” so there’s that.
The interesting thing is how the online social economy has shifted. This chick’s been working forever to get 1.4 million Myspace followers, and now a tool like Kutcher can knock out a million followed in an afternoon.
The odd thing about Australian media is how conflicted the country seems to be. They’ve got more sex on public TV than we’d be comfortable with here in the States (and by “we”, I mean ex-girls-gone-wild soccer moms, closet-perv evangelical preachers, and Esme, the senile old lady next door who thinks my bedroom window is NBC), and yet they narrowly avoided setting up a China-style firewall to block their citizens from accessing porn on the net.
Just to give you an idea of how much cooler the Aussie tube is, check out this Sanyo spot starring model Imogen Bailey:
See? It’s not actually dirty… no T&A, no foul language. Just the implication of masturbation and a hidden erection. Well, that and the implication that this dude is so controlled by his shrew of a wife that he’s horny enough to rub one out to a TV commercial. I haven’t been that desperate since I was fourteen, a period of my life during which I would have happily married a JCPenny catalog.
(Yes, children: in those days, when a young lad felt the need to garrote the poultry, it was often a dire situation. We didn’t have hot-and-cold running porno on our computers. If we had a computer, it could probably only display sixteen colors on the screen at once. You know what could really use more than sixteen colors and pixels the size of your thumb? Photos of vaginas, that’s what.)
Anyway… here are some more shots of Imogen. I think I’m going to find a copy of an old Nair “We Wear Short Shorts” commercial and give Esme a bitterly nostalgic thrill.
Is there someone on photoshoot sets whose job it is to artfully cover a model's nipples with hair? If so, I must kill him and wear his skin like a suit.
You know what I like? A woman who dresses for practicality.
The modern version of this sorta thing comes from 
