Saturday, June 23, 2007

I Like My Men Like I Like My Ice Cream: Cold And Hard, Dept.

So, by now, I've seen these TV commercials about a dozen times.
Breyers Ice Cream.
One features a pair of women sunbathing in their swimsuits by a sizable backyard pool. The brunette asks the redhead who's eating ice cream, "Don't you feel guilty?". Cut to a gigantic tub of Breyers with human legs cleaning her pool. Cut back to the MILFy redhead. "Nope", she answers as she smiles and flicks her tongue at the spoon in her hand.
In the other commercial, we see a schmendrick husband coming home from a business trip or maybe work. He opens the bedroom door. We see a look of shock and alarm on his face. Cut to his POV. His wife under the sheets eating a bowl of Breyers. Pan left, we see a gigantic bucket of Breyers with human legs by the dresser.

The obvious, superficial reference is to the guilt women feel when they eat ice cream. A sense of profound shame comparable only to that which they feel when confronted by the monthly incontinence of their menstrual flow and its ineluctable connection to the primal castratory wound. Or so I've been told by Freudians as they decorated portraits of their mothers with wax bananas. Anyhoo, yeah, got it: women feel bad about pleasuring themselves with full-fat goodness. Not unlike the crushing guilt they feel when they use their veiled organs for wanton, pointless pleasure, instead of, as dictated by the Judaeo-Christo-Muslim Trifecta of Fun, procreation.

So, Breyers--clever dicks!--thought to wed these two varieties of discomfiture into one TV ad campaign that explicitly links the pleasure (and guilt) of sex to the pleasure (and guilt) of eating, then zhuzhes it up with a li'l Karl-Marx-meets-Desperate Housewives-at-Lina-Wertmüller's house bourgeois-woman-fucks-the-studly-prole class-whorefare, and, finally, squirts atop this sundae the gooey cream of cuckold short-form porn usually titled something like "Her Hung Lover Makes Me Watch".

Brilliant, I call it.

It simultaneously flogs the benefits of Breyers low-fat ice cream, acknowledges the guilt American women feel regarding pleasure, and offers them winking permission to substitute an acceptable infidelity (to their diets) for an unacceptable infidelity (to their husbands). 'Cause Breyers low-fat ice cream is so good, it's like fucking the pool boy! Which may have been an early contender for this campaign's tagline.

Hopefully, Breyers will next tackle the gnawing sense of wrongness that men feel when they want to bang tween girls.
Oh, wait, someone's done it for them.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I call it brilliant, too. This whole piece..

How about gathering up about five of these and sending them to one of the most important magazines in the US- Adbusters, which I'm sending under separate cover in the very off-chance you don't know of it..

Anonymous said...

Oh no you di'in't!
You did not just say "zhuzhes it up", did you?

I hate to tell you, but that inadvertant Carsan Cressley reference caused my sexy pool boy fantasy to go unappetizingly and irrevocably flaccid.
Now I have to go have some FULL FAT ice cream to make it up to myself.
MMMmmmm oh yeah...who knew that two chubby Vermont hippies could provide such total satisfaction!

the sobsister said...

Thanks to you thoughtful readers and commenters.

And orderfire, are you telling me that Carson pricked--sorry--the bubble of your fantasy? C'mon, those limpid blue eyes, that suave manner, that kooky style sense...you luvvv him.