Okay, here's a good editorial from the San Francisco Chronicle. Stroke My Giant Hairy Armpit Massive, furry sweat glands, and the hot babes who want to have sex with them. Dry pits win! You know what chicks really dig? Armpits. Not normal armpits, silly. Giant, wooly armpits the size of miniature ponies that have weird stubby legs with three (?) bubbly round Play-Doh toes apiece, huge walking armpits with no head and no arms and no genitalia and no discernable reason for existing other than to spread their creepy and disturbing image far and wide in the weirdest and least appealing ad campaign since those cute constipated animated bears hawked Cottonelle toilet paper on TV. Have you seen these magazine ads? Have you already been assaulted? Here it is: Any one of a number of heavily airbrushed, pseudo-sultry, pneumatic chicks is posed in any number of pseudo-romantic settings: Bareback on a horse on the beach. Supine and beckoning by a roaring fireplace. Splayed across a moonlit Venetian gondola. You know, just like real life. And by the way I do mean chicks, you know, in the most sexist and degrading way possible, in keeping with the ad's attitude. Not women. Not ladies. Certainly not anything remotely divinely juicy and intelligent and potent and deeply feminine. Chicks. Dumb, giggly, interchangeable, "Man Show"-grade chicks who are all about Botox and t*** and cheeseball romance and enough mascara to gag a Hilton sister. This is what men really want, after all. Unless they don't. But that's another column. Our chick in the ad, she has company. Intimate, romantic company that we assume is a hunky virile male, despite zero detail indicating this. Because her companion is, yes, a giant hairy headless armpit. With feet. And our chick, she really wants this armpit, is hot for this armpit, is caressing it and tickling it and wrapping her silky smooth arms and legs around it, stroking it, craving it, clearly about to let out a mad yelp at any moment and tear off her skimpy outfit and throw the giant hairy armpit to the floor and mount it and scream out sweet Jesus's name. The ad slogan is "Dry Pits Win." The message is: Your chick is not really dating you, dumbass. She is dating your giant hairy armpit. This is all she really cares about. Screw emotional connection. To hell with chivalry and cooking her breakfast and remembering to bring the condoms. You really want to score with the babes? It's all about the sweat glands, dude. Huge, dry ones. With feet. The ads are for a deodorant called "Axe," which is some sort of mass-produced cheap-ass Wal-Mart gag-reflex men's body spray that doubtlessly smells like a rank synthetic admixture of pine cones and road tar and Raid Ant & Roach Death, the scent of which will likely remind you of something your drunk mulleted cousin might've worn to the Spokane Auto Show back in 1984. Mmm, carcinogens. These ads are currently molesting the pages of every men's mag from GQ to Esquire to Rolling Stone. There is, naturally, a website. With music. And games. And a Flash area where you can match up your favorite Axe scent with a chick's "personality." You will soon be able to help "Pitman" (that's his -- its -- name) manage his/its "lady friends." How sweet. Many thousand of dollars have been pumped into this website. Many people have dedicated endless hours of their precious lives working on it. Weep on, arbiters of taste and humanity. Of course, this sort of gross inverse sexist marketing is nothing new. Nearly every campaign for men's anything contains endlessly adorable sexist delusions and airbrushed cleavages and ridiculous scenarios, and every ad for the Gillette Mach 3 razor, for example, features roaring fighter jets and a skanky-hot girlfriend who slithers over to her hunky bulbous dork of a man just after he finishes shaving, and she strokes his smooth rugged manly GQ skin and coos and melts and shoots him a naughty glance that says she would like to be immediately stripped naked and bent over the bathroom sink and made mad grunting 1.7-minute love to before the second-half kickoff. You know, just like real life. But Axe is different. The giant armpit -- er, Pitman -- is intentionally weird and openly disgusting and is obviously meant to reek its way into your memory like a nasty mental stain. This has always been the most obnoxious of marketing ideologies, that it doesn't matter how flagrantly you baffle and annoy and repel the consumer, so long as they remember the product next time they're browsing the discount bin at Walgreens for something to spray on their floor mats. Then again, maybe there is no weird intent behind it. Maybe the Axe people are playing it straight, and actually think this campaign is clever and cool and gets right to the point and that no one will notice that these clearly lobotomized women are offering up their sex to a giant hairy armpit as though it was a fat Republican senator and they were a cheap hooker. It's just the strangest thing. And it falls right in line with that other, equally baffling marketing gimmick of animating the inanimate, of anthropomorphizing the body parts and the crappy everyday items around us and giving everything a mouth and pair of eyes and a funny accent and six bubbly little toes. All in an effort to endear that product to you, to make you say, gosh, this isn't just a toilet, it's a living talking creature that makes gross faces due to my lack of a post-bowel-movement air freshener! This is not a sandwich, it's a yammering jerk with a New York accent who demands Miracle Whip! This is not a merely a giant hairy headless armpit, it's freakin' Fabio! I need me some of that rank Axe stuff so I can score the babes like that macho armpit dude! High five! We have become used to it. We have become inured. We don't even blink an eye as we say, well sure, it's an enormous sweat gland, being groped by a skanky Maxim model. Shrug. We say sure, here, just take a significant hunk of my brain, scrape it over the invidious Madison Avenue cheese grater, pulverize it and liquefy it and inject it with a thousand visual toxins and a million corporate logos and countless inane slogans and then reconstitute it and shove it back into my head. And I'll just sit here and pretend like nothing happened, like everything's fine and that this endless barrage of surreal silly disgusting marketing swill isn't slowly leeching all the truth and beauty out of the sacred vaults of time and love and meaning. This is what we say. Well, some of us. And maybe you see campaigns like Pitman for the millionth time and you groan and wince and finally say to yourself, Jesus with a big fat can of happy Scrubbing Bubbles, when will it end? When will the global recoil kick in? When will the advertisers run out of nauseating ideas and when will they all be strung up by their small intestines and beaten with rolled up magazines until they cry? And yet, before you even ask, you already know the answer. It will never end. The giant hairy headless armpits and their ilk are here to stay. And you know there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Enjoy your reconfigured brain. Dry pits win. Mwwaaa hahahahaha. Shrug.
I think glynch hit it right. We went into Iraq and destroyed a great situation with a thriving country so we could promote christianity.
it's nothing but smartass commentary that somehow, even if completely irrelevant, references Smarty Jones from now on for me in the D&D.
and my West Houston Presbyterian church, led by Pastor (Smarty) Jones, led the charge!!!! why does someone hate someone else i can't think of to make this joke funny right now?
The cliche: The media isn't telling us all the good things going on. You led with that. That is what I responded too. I frankly didn't go to other web sites or read other things you might have posted later in the thread. I haven't read all of those, but based on your last couple of posts I can see how you could be upset as they are really diferent to me than your initial post. I think you are overreacting. Agreed our fight is not that interesting. The issues are. People often times repond to things posted on this bbs, you should expect that. I will read all the other posts and post after that. I certainly didn't mean to start such a flame war. Again, I apologize for calling your church conservative.
it's all good, glynch. i'm sure i overreacted. i'm irish...what can i do? (why does madmax hate the irish?)
Honestly, the thread was pure gold before this cheap shot. seriously, look at the thread before and after this page 1 masterpiece. Everyone has their poo at ready, loaded into an atlatl of rhetoric. The first flung piece gets everybody going again. And then B-Bob starts posting jokes and it's all downhill.
Atlatl... sweet. I can honestly say I never expected that word to be used on this BBS. B-Bob, you are THE MAN! For those of you who don't know...
Damn, Max. I'm Irish, too. Much more mild mannered than Gibson and the characters in Mad Max, the movie.
