A Plea for Truth in Advertising

In my last post, I mentioned my ongoing admiration of The Daily Show for its consistent insight.  But there is one part of late-evening Comedy Central that frustrates me to no end, and that is the parade of commercials featuring straight men lying to women.  The men selling Twix candy bars gets women to sleep with them by denouncing books they enjoy or lying about having been burglarized; the men selling Jim Beam whiskey get women's interest with rented puppies.  The straight men in the Captain Morgan rum ad and The Hangover trailers lie to their significant others about drinking and parties, because apparently women Never Let Them Have Any Fun.

And with so many better-organized feminists campaigning against "objectification" and "exploitation," I have to explain that I'm generally not bothered by advertising that links products to sexy, scantily-clad women.  It's not clever advertising, but I like looking at sexy, scantily-clad women too.  When I go to dance clubs or the dungeon, I often intentionally dress scantily and hope that people think I look sexy.  I don't believe that finding someone physically attractive must be mutually exclusive to respecting their humanity.

What infuriates me is the repeated message that men have to trick women into sex with them.  In addition to the ethical problem, it paints an awfully bleak picture of male heterosexuality: doomed to want sex with anti-sex, no-fun people like women. 

The message is even clearer on Twix's main website, which has "interactive" versions of the commercials.  The boy in the commercial invites the girl back to his apartment, she reacts, "What kind of girl do you think I am?!" and the viewer has a choice between "Be shallow" or "Be deep."  The "shallow" option turns out to be telling the girl that he thinks she's sexy - the truth - to which she slaps him and stomps away.  Then the video rewinds and gives the viewer another chance to make the "right" choice, which is to "be deep" and lie to her.  Further on, clicking "Be honest" ("I just said all that stuff so I could get to know you a little better") will actually get you tased before the girl stomps away again.  (How this translates to "Buy our candy bars" eludes me.)

So with my credentials of actually being a straight woman, I want to explain to the ad execs that such trickery is both insulting and really not necessary.  Most of my sexual relationships started with telling each other something "shallow" or "honest" like, "I think you're sexy," or "I would like to get to know you better."  Directness is refreshing.  The gullible woman who pulls a taser on honesty does not speak for my gender.

I have a similar reaction to the woman in The Hangover spitting through the trailer: "Boys and their bachelor parties: It's gross."  For the record, my husband and I had a joint bachelor/bachelorette party, and it wasn't our wildest party because we were both exhausted from wedding planning.  But almost six months into marriage, we both still enjoy our whiskey and kinky play with other people.  I don't binge-drink or party as hard or as often as I did, say, in college, but I did have a wonderful drunken Halloween grinding with a guy whose name I never got.  Women can be hedonists, too.

So I haven't seen the movie, but I think the hero of The Hangover should get out of his lie-necessitating imminent marriage as soon as possible and find himself a woman who will go on the wacky hedonistic adventures with him, as an equal.  We're out there.

And we're a lot more likely to sleep with you if you're honest with us.