Monday, December 16, 2013

K-Y and the sexual objectification of fat middle-aged men


I'm not going to complain too much about this one, because it made me chuckle with a bit of self-effacing irony. But let's watch and see what issues this lube campaign from DDB Toronto raises:



You see, it's funny because the "warming" lube is so effective, the chubby old slob is irresistible to his more put-together wife.



While I think mature men like me can take the hit on our egos, there is another angle to consider here. In an AdWeek post on "Hunkvertising," my social media friend David Gianatasio interviewed another blogger peer, Sociological Images' Lisa Wade, about what the trendy treatment of men as sex objects in advertising actually says about women.
Many ad experts and social critics see the whole thing as a harmless turning of the tables following decades of bikini-clad babes in beer commercials. Double entendres abound when dissecting the trend, the overriding feeling being that it can’t be taken all that seriously because, after all, we are just talking about guys here. “We’re all in on the gender-reversal joke,” explains Lisa Wade, associate professor of sociology at Occidental College. “It’s funny to us to think of women being lustful.”


When the lust is treated even more ironically, as with these men who are not exactly Isaiah Mustafa, both the woman's lust and the man's sexual desirability are the gag.

As Dr. Wade added in her post about the post she was interviewed for, "the joke affirms the gender order because the humor depends on us knowing that we don’t really objectify men this way and we don’t really believe that women are the way we imagine men to be."

And here, the men aren't either. It's good for a laugh, but over the long term is it good for men and women?

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