I felt I really should alert you all to a scary new advert which lurched out of the TV at me last night. It featured two implausibly attractive young things, with long, golden limbs, cavorting about on a rug. You can picture it – they are carefree, gorgeous, they are so not fretting about whether they left the iron on upstairs or where the next mortgage payment is coming from. They are obviously In Love and it was all rather sweet, even though the girl was wearing the sort of weeny strappy top I haven’t been able to get for at least twenty years, due to bras, gravity, bingo wings, odd little spurs of back flab squeezing out of said bras and now, of all things, an incipient crepey chest.
Then the girl turned to the boy in the ad and said – wait for it – words to the effect of ‘which part of my body do you like best?’. At this point I lurched from my prone, peanut-eating position on the sofa, almost spilling my Chardonnay, to shout, ‘no! No! Are you mad?’
Everyone knows you should never ask a man a leading question like that! Admittedly, the reason I know this particularly well is that I made a similar mistake earlier in the week – after all my years of experience, doh! – and am still wincing over my psychological bruises. It’s not great when you don’t get the right answer.
The girl then leaps up, exposing several hundred yards of tanned, silky thigh, and pirouettes around, asking the guy if he likes her bum, her boobs, etc ….it’s really a bit of a questionable ad, now that I come to describe it. He shakes his head, she lies down again and finally he answers her, by wordlessly stroking her armpit.
Her armpit!!! I mean, WTF? As if it’s not stressful enough keeping some sort of handle on the major trouble spots, like legs, stomach, breasts, chin, face, facial hair, nostril hair, other creeping bits of hair too vile to mention ….now we have to work on our bloomin’ armpits as well!
This time, I’m simply not having it. All right, the ad was for a deoderant (Nivea I think) so some sort of glancing reference to armpits was, I suppose, inevitable. But I absolutely refuse to start stressing out over the less than beauteous state of my pits and be forced to treat them as yet another potential erogenous zone which needs regular preening. They are just armpits, so there.
Next time, I would suggest that the man turns to the girl in the ad and says, maybe in a jokey sort of way, ‘any parts you think I ought to work on?’ The girl could, by the very faintest movement of her eyes, indicate his groinage area. Hah! That would teach them what insecurity feels like.