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Had Ex Today?
Canadian television viewers have been treated to a baffling new ad campaign for a popular brand of beer lately. The beer is Molson Export, commonly known as "Ex", and the campaign tag line reads "Had Ex Today?", an obvious play on how the name of the beer rhymes with sex.
The ads feature a group of average or outright unattractive guys, all under thirty, whose mission is to prevent each other from having too much sex. Each buddy rescues the other from the clutches of his amorous girlfriend, and declares "it's all about balance" when lecturing the offender on how he should stop making love and head down to the bar for a brew. Once in the bar, the boys stick pretzels up their noses, gargle beer and otherwise make complete jackasses out of themselves. Women are banned from these festivities, and even the gorgeous blonde babes who approach these guys in the bar are ignored, or are complimented on the quality cotton in their t-shirts while their more obvious attributes are completely passed over. All the feminists who have been screaming about the use of women in beer commericals have finally got their wish, and as usual, what the've wished for has done far more damage than any girl in a bikini ever could.
These commercials are just part of a larger trend that I have noticed in recent years. For several years now, movie, television and commerical writers have gone to great lengths to depict less-than-sterling guys, guys who are unattractive, unemployed, unmotivated, uninteresting and, often, unhygienic, as being in relationships with the most unbelievably gorgeous and classy women you've ever seen. The mousy, sarcastic little David Spade character got to marry a supermodel on the tv show Just Shoot Me. The short, portly cop on Third Rock From the Sun became the love god of the statuesque and beautiful Kirsten Johnston. Neurotic and infantile Frasier Crane attracts all manner of gorgeous, intelligent women, and blunders his way through all of them.
While I find it impossible to believe that any of these situations would happen in real life, it didn't really bother me to see guys with nothing to offer dream about women who had lots to offer. I could understand that all guys dream of having a supermodel someday. Some guys need that kind of motivation to move out of their parents' basement and get a job. And neither did it bother me to see a physically unattractive man with character or ambition or charm succeed with a good looking woman, like Ben Stiller in Something About Mary. Without being good looking he still came across as a loveable, romantic, thoughtful soul a woman could love.
But then I noticed a slight variation on this supermodel-adoration craze. It was more like the supermodel-degradation craze, and I first noticed it on the tv show Seinfeld.
The characters of Jerry and George- one a nitpicky, neurotic, emotionally apathetic clean freak and the other a short, bald, stocky, cheap, dishonest, self-pitying rage-a-holic, spent just about every epsiode for seven years turning beautiful women down. The sheer number of gorgeous, intelligent, thoughtful women that passed through their lives was mind-boggling, both for the idea that these girls would have even the slightest interest in either of these two losers, and because these losers had the gall to think themselves better than every single one of them. There are far too many examples to go into each one- anyone who watched the show regularly will remember Jerry turning a great looking woman down because she ate her peas one at a time, or George blowing a relationship with a tall, slender, stunning beauty because he was obsessed with knowing more about her boyfriend, whom he supposedly resembled. The ways in which these two characters repeatedly hurt, insulted and abandoned these quality women left me with only one conclusion: the creators of this show must have been completely ignored in high school, and are now living out some elaborate revenge fantasy whereby they get to reject every woman who ever rejected them. That's the only reason I can find why anyone would make comedy out of such ridiculous, sad, and incomprehensible misogyny, why anyone would hold up as heroes men who must put down great women and feel superior to them to stroke their frail little egos.
And I'm sure that's the thinking behind this Had Ex Today campaign as well. Loser guys, whose problem is most certainly a lack of sex, not a surplus of it, and who ought to drop to their knees in a prayer of thanks if even one woman is willing to sleep with them, now suddenly have the upper hand and can reject sex altogether in favour of sticking pretzels up their noses with the boys at the bar. We're supposed to believe that a thirty year old who has worn the same stained football jersey for three days has somehow managed to win a sexy, attractive girlfriend but that he can't wait to be pulled away from her so he can go hang out with some guys and drink beer.
It must make loser guys everywhere feel pretty superior. It must puff them up with virile pride to think that not only should a babe come crawling to them for sex, but that they should now turn her down and make her suffer, let her wait at home until they're finished peeling the labels off beer bottles and catapulting those cardboard coasters into other guy's drinks.
Maybe the campaign should be changed to "Seen Your Ex Today?" since every one of these losers would find themselves with an ex-girlfriend if any of this stupidity ever happened in real life.
If people are ever going to find fulfilment in relationships and happiness in romance, we certainly can't take steps backwards like this one and degrade the most wonderful thing that can happen between two people: love making within a loving relationship. Too many men are already woefully ignorant of how wonderful marriage can be and are therefore afraid of commitment; we don't need them believing that even sex with a girlfriend is now something they have to avoid like the plague.
It may be just a television ad campaign. Seinfeld was just a tv show. But in an age when most of us live and breathe by our tvs, television has become a cultural influence, and we should think carefully about what the minds of a few frustrated people are broadcasting to the world. And besides, a beer company wouldn't risk millions of dollars on an ad campaign that it thought its customers - mostly young men - would react badly to. The fact that these ads are even on the air shows that there is at least some agreement out there, some nodding heads and some fists punching the air in triumph at the idea of putting a babe in her place.
I would much rather go back to the days when women were adored and wooed, when men tried to impress them and win their affection, when a man considered himself fortunate to have a loving, sexy woman in his life. I would much rather see women in bikinis whistled at instead of ignored or put down. And I sincerely hope there are far more men out there who would rather spend a randy night on the couch with their love instead of in a pretzel contest at the bar. If there aren't, we're all in a lot of trouble.
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