So I’m thumbing through this month’s Cosmo ( I swear it’s not mine; my mom brought it over) and I’m reading about all the different ways to stoke his fire or rev his motor or feed his beast (are the Cosmo people serious with this?), when an advertisement for jeans catches my eye. I won’t mention the name of the particular brand of jean, but let’s just say it’s also a kind of drum and it rhymes with Congo.
Let me preface this whole rant. I’m no stranger to the notion of subliminal advertising. I did a lengthy research paper on the very topic for a Journalism class, which class I subsequently aced. During said research, I found that subliminal imagery in advertising is…oh, what’s the word…RAMPANT. However, this imagery tends to be just that; subliminal.
Dirty Pictures, Dirty Minds
For example, a beer company wouldn’t dare print ads depicting women overtly performing sex acts in order to entice men to buy their product, but they can print ads in which women are pictured wrapping their full, red lips around…wait for it…beer bottles. You think I’m crazy, don’t you? But think about the last time you saw a print ad which featured a man drinking from a bottle of anything.
My point here is simply that while sex sells, it’s not always appropriate to sell sex, which brings us back to subliminal advertising. It tends to be subliminal, right?
Wrong.
Dual Messages
Let me paint the picture for you: a beautiful twenty-something with long blonde hair and smoky eyes stares out at me from the page. She wears a cropped denim halter top that appears to be a couple sizes too small, which smooshes her glorious breasts together and whose buttons had better have a maximum payload of at least 540 cc’s. Just below her creamy bare midriff, and dangerously low-slung, is a skirt so short that it I nearly mistook it for a belt until I noticed that it had pockets. Kudos to your bikini-waxer, kitten.
Tres sexy, no? But there’s more! To the left and right of our smoldering blonde stands a tall, dark and shirtless man. That’s right, she’s smack in the middle of a beefcake manwich, hold the mayo. I suppose these guys are integral to the ad because they’re wearing jeans, but that’s just a guess. Strangely though, these brawny bars of mancandy have their backs to me, and are facing Blondie. Even stranger, her hands are outstretched and hidden in the vicinity of the men’s pelvic regions. She appears to be…I can’t really tell…zipping their flies, maybe?
Just, ugh. It’s not my place to tell people how to do their jobs, but I don’t think the intended message here was ‘Buy our jeans and pleasure two men at once!’ And yet (and yet), it’s the first thing that sprang to mind.
Of course, I could have this all wrong. Maybe the message is, “Wear our jeans and grab men by the onions!” in which case, I’ll take a pair.
