Up in arms over armpits...

Via Dave Barry's Blog comes this article blasting the Axe deotorant campaign.

OK, so I find the little armpit with feet a little creepy. But I think it's hard to deny that women generally like men with good grooming habits, and would probably not want to date a guy who didn't bathe on a regular basis, unless the woman is French. And I don't think it's any secret that men like to look at attractive women, and I don't think that makes them evil sexist pigs.

But does any stupid ad really call for this characterization of a product?

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.

Would it have killed the author to buy the product instead of assuming what it smells like? But god forbid, he would have to go to a Wal-Mart to buy it, and who knows what kind of great unwashed (or maybe great washed, if she's offended by the idea that women like guys who don't smell like a locker room floor after the big game) he might encounter. And what's wrong with mass-produced deotorant? Should I be buying my deotorant in small batches from the local perfumery instead of buying whatever happens to be on-sale-with-coupon this week? And of course, anyone who lives in Spokane, and not a real city like NY or LA must be dumb, especially if they would enjoy going to an auto show. I mean, auto shows are filled with vile, pollution belching SUV's. A cultured person would never go to an auto show, they would go to an opera or something. And they evidently wouldn't put on deotorant first.

Then there is this line:

offering up their sex to a giant hairy armpit as though it was a fat Republican senator and they were a cheap hooker.

Because only Republicans are fat and visit hookers. They probably use deotorant too, those materialistic bastards.

And then there is this:

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.

Because, you know, girls don't like guys who work out, which is why my giant hairy beer belly gets so many chicks. Also, girls love it when you don't shave, or when you shave badly. So Michael Moore must be getting mad play. Also, girls are never sexually agressive, or initiate sex, and no guy would want them to. Plus, no guy who would want a clean shave could possibly last for more than one minute and 42 seconds. At least not in the world of Mark Moreford, San Francisco Gate columnist.


The end of the story is possibily the craziest thing I've ever read outside of IndyMedia:

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.

Because women don't really don't like guys who smell good, and guys would not enjoy looking at beautiful women, if it wasn't for the Axe ads. People don't buy products because they actually improve their lives, make them more enjoyable, and fulfill needs. We're all just following our advertising overlords, who aren't trying to make profits by selling people products that they want and can use, but rather trying to spread horrible myths like women would rather date a guy with the faint smell of deotorant rather than the strong odor of B.O.