The commercials for Axe Body Spray have always appealed to men’s worst instincts, and recently they’ve taken an even more disturbing turn. See, Axe used to put out commercials like this:
This one is an absurdly ramped-up version of the standard body-spray commercial in which a guy puts on Axe (or Tag, or whatever) in a public place, causing a bunch of hot women to go mad with lust and physically throw themselves at him. The message is as clear as it is familiar: our product will compel hot women to have vigorous monkey sex with you. It’s a little gross, but it’s nothing new. I think they’ve found versions of this message in the ruins of Herculaneum. Even so, there has always been something vaguely sinister about the body spray ads, what with their focus on physical violence and pharmaceutical mind-control. And then the ads changed…
The basic formula is the same. A dude wears Axe, so he gets an unrealistic level of attention from a hot woman. But there’s a crucial difference: the woman’s response isn’t really sexual anymore. Instead, she just acts like an idiot and embarrasses herself. The earlier ads always implied that the Axe-wearer and the girl(s) that tackled him would engage in some protracted boinking just as soon as the commercial ended. The new ads do nothing of the kind. It’s quite clear from the expression on the woman’s face that she is mortified, and wants nothing more to do with the guy she just fondled. With these commercials, Axe has definitively stopped marketing to men who desire beautiful women and want to sleep with them, and started marketing to men who resent beautiful women and want to degrade them.
Great observation! But is there anything to be added about this recent campaign?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgfzdgWgEZ4
Or is that just weird and creepy without saying much about women?
I applaud AXE for removing “innuendo” from the marketers’ toolbox. I envision a gradually coarsening chain of ads (picture a montage a la Idiocracy) that make the AXE Body Spray Value Proposition more explicit.
2008: “AXE: Now With More Bom-Chicka-Waawaa”
2010: “AXE: Taking The Luck Out Of Getting Lucky”
2013: “AXE: You’ll Get Something That Rhymes With ‘Lucky’, All Right”
2014: “AXE: I’m Sorry, Were We Not Being Clear Enough? Women Will Have Sex With You.”
2019: “AXE: Girls Tits Sex Smell Spray”
Actually, if you google “girls tits sex smell spray,” the first two hits are videos of Axe commercials, including one in this post. No joke.
Pete – this lends weight to my privately held theory that humans will start speaking in Google search strings by 2017 or so.
That chocolate one Matt posted the link to is actually kind of touching. The women are physically ripping chocolate-man to shreds, and he’s just overjoyed that they’re paying attention to him.
And yes, the subtext is pretty distressing. “If you let a woman get close to you, she will boil the skin off your arm in a fondue pot.” Maybe they’re now marketing to guys who are afraid of women? Which might not be a bad idea. After all, they’ve always been marketing to the kind of guy who would rather use a magic hottie-attracting deoderant to pick up women, rather than actually (yikes!) TALKING to them.
But there’s another message that’s more blatant AND more offensive. The old Axe ads tried to get us to believe that Axe would make women want to have sex with you. And that’s just silly, because women don’t HAVE sexual desire. Instead, they have CHOCOLATE! Am I right, fellas?
It’s almost too stupid to get annoyed by. But it reinforces a harmful and persistant binary opposition: man=sexual-aggressive-dirty/woman=sexless-passive-pure.
Why can’t they make ONE ad with all the bullshit and get it over and done with? The waiter would be using axe AND he’d be carrying a tray full of chocolate, the woman would embarass herself and just shrug if off because… oh, her wonderbra gives her confidence? And the guy at the table… perhaps we could give him a beer and a wingman? And some pot noodles. In his new car.
Note you don’t see ads for women’s fragrances where men are a) rampaging after or b) stumbling in the presence of a woman wearing the fragrance being advertised. In all of the ads I’ve seen for women’s fragrances, if there *is* some sort of swooning man, the woman is never taken off-guard, but instead presented as a temptress, as if she planned it all from the very, very beginning. In the AXE ads (as well as ones for all sorts of other things, yeah), the man tends to be surprised, at least for a moment before he starts dousing himself in more of the stuff.
And that chocolate thing is just fucking creepy.
Minze — sounds like time for some crossover fanfiction!