People Different From Us

I try not to insult the advertising people in this space, although it's difficult sometimes, given how consistently (and constantly) they insult the rest of us. It's amazing, for example, that the women of this country have not risen up en mass and disemboweled all of the people who keep implying that they have no value of any kind if they appear to be over the age of, say, 20. You would also expect some reaction from all of the athletes (or even just larger than average people) who are consistently portrayed as being stupid, people who live in smaller communities who are consistently portrayed at being either stupid or ignorant or both, and intellectuals who are forever being portrayed at socially inept and personally unable to form (or maintain) a romantic relationship. But even allowing for how common these biases appear to be, I'm still at a loss to explain certain other types of advertising...

Take, for example, the new television spots for Edge shave gel. I used this product for years, before I grew a beard, and I still use it from time to time when I clean around the edges of my beard. It provides good lubrication for the razor (prevents skin irritation) and can be purchased in a variety of formulas (for different levels of skin dryness) and scents (so you can find one you can stand). It's also one of the products that have traditionally featured implied sex in its advertising, most often in the form of an attractive female indicating approval for the performance and/or scent of the product through a positive reaction to a male who has just finished shaving with Edge. The implication is clear: use this product and women like this one will want to touch your (cleanly-shaven) face, too. They might even turn up in your bathroom in revealing costume in order to do so...

Speaking as a male consumer whose experience does not correspond to anything you see in commercials, I must say that I've never purchased a product based on the belief that it might attract women of any sort, let alone highly attractive ones who will then, inexplicably, also want to sleep with me. Nor have I ever met a man who will admit to doing so, although it must be conceded that there may be some who have and simply will not admit doing so. We should also concede that, for the most part, men do select personal appearance choices (including beard and hair) for the purpose of attracting women, or at least pleasing the ones we already have. The number of us who would actually believe that a particular shaving cream would make us significantly more attractive to the opposite sex, let alone make random attractive women want to sleep with us, however, is not significant, although it's apparently higher than the number who would be offended by the suggestion...

The current ads go much farther than the typical television spots (such as the ones for cars, for example) that attempt to make the product a surrogate for a (female) partner. In one of these spots, a group of tiny (much smaller than a man's facial stubble) but highly attractive and scantily clad women spray foam all over the user's face (and each other) from backpack canisters which represent the deployment of the product, while in another spot even smaller (apparently microscopic) women in similarly revealing costume ride jet packs into a man's nose, representing the smell of the product. Why, precisely, this is supposed to be attractive to men is not explained. I can think of many things that I might have wanted random scantily-clad attractive women to do when I was single, but shrinking down to microscopic size and then flying into my nose to hold a party is not on my list, nor would such a thing have occurred to me...

All kidding aside, as an attempt to make the product appeal to its target demographic by associating attractive women with use of the product, it's hardly the worst attempt I've seen, and as a self-referential joke about commercials that use this tactic, it's actually not that bad. Certainly it's nowhere near as blatant as the classic Old Spice commercial in which the older sailor (who has a girl in every port, several of whom are featured in the ad) gives a bottle of the product to a young greenhorn, who is then immediately hit on by an attractive woman. But when I try to imagine the sort of mentality it would take to conceive of making this sort of appeal in the form of microscopic women with jet packs flying up the user's nose in order to hold a disco party, I am forced once again to conclude that the folks who make these ads are quite different from the rest of us...