Another candidate for Room 101. Advertising… 27, January 2008

I’m going to have a good old rant today and there’s some swearing and a lot of views many of you may find offensive. That’s why this is an anonymous (well… ish) blog because that way I get to be honest.

I always laugh at the euphemisms used in adverts for things which prissy people consider “not quite nice” or conversely insignificant things which they consider us too emotionally retarded to be able to face hearing mentioned out loud.

In fact a lot of the time, I watch advertising or soaps or the like and wonder if anyone anywhere actually believes any of this bollocks. I guess I’m feeling it a lot at the moment because I can’t help noticing that as a mum-to-be I am under the advertising cosh…

I find myself giggling helplessly when I am induced to try product x, y or z to combat “that bloated feeling”

Why don’t they call it what it fucking is?

Here’s how the ad usually goes. Two women in a cafe and one’s telling the other how uncomfortable she feels…

“Ooo, that bloated feeling?” Asks her friend.

“Yes.” Deep sigh.

“Here try one of these…” Hands over blister pack of pepto-bismol or some other burp-inducing remedy and we spool forwards a couple of minutes to the pair of them skipping lightly into the street like spring lambs with the bloated one saying how much better she feels.

What happened in there? Here’s a translation.

Woman A, rubs stomach.

Woman B. “You look terrible, what’s wrong.”

Woman A. “I’ve got terrible fucking wind!”

Woman B. Handing over Rennie. “Here! Take one of these, you’ll soon feel better.”

Woman A Gingerly pops pill in mouth and after several seconds lets out a belch like the MGM Lion. “Wow! That’s better!” Waving bubble sheet of wind medicine. “Can I keep these?”

Woman B. “Sure.”

Cut to them joyfully gambolling out onto the street… Woman B farts loudly as she skips down the steps… That’s my version.

Or alternatively, I’d stick with the first one but tell it like it is. When they come out, we know woman A could only be feeling that much better if she’d sat in that cafe and farted out more swamp gas then Shrek in the shower. So I’d cut to an interior shot of the other customers over come by gas and the waiter, struggling to drag himself across the floor to the window to open it… Or maybe someone lights up… BOOM!

Then there’s a completely hilarious one which all the pro-biotic yogurty drink people have jumped onto. It’s called.

“Uncomfortably slow digestion.”

Hmm… people. What do you think this one could be? Here’s a clue. Bran helps.

“Drink Danone Bio,” (pronounced Bee Oh like the smell, of course rather than correctly, like the first part of the word “biological”) “and you will fill your digestive tract with good bacteria which will aid digestion!” Says the voice of the announcer, talking down in a manner most people would be embarrassed to adopt with an educationally sub-normal 3 year old. Then he tells us that it is also proven to help reduce the effects of “uncomfortably slow digestion”.

Can you tell what it is yet?

Yes, that’s right, he’s talking about constipation. Drink probiotic yogurt drinks! They make you pooh regularly.

What the fuck is wrong with the word “constipation”?

It’s like when people die. They die! And what? We squirm and roll our eyes and tell each other they “passed away”?

Why? Because heaven forfend we should mention the word “death”. And yet “passed away” is marketing puff, spin, a euphemism to make the situation a little more palatable by being indirect and obfuscating the truth.

It’s just something else the person on the other end of the conversation has to mentally translate into meaningful English! And we’re doing it because we hope that will distract them from the pain and stop them from doing anything that might embarrass us or worse cause us to have to step out of our comfort zone, like expressing a genuine emotion to which we will have to make a genuine response. Crying, for example. Jeez. We need to lighten up.

Perhaps I’m being harsh, perhaps it’s just me but I’ve always sought the truth and confronted the facts head on. It’s bruising at first but in the long run it makes reality easier to accept and more importantly, if required, to change… We are uncomfortable with death but it’s a reality so surely it’s better to accept its presence rather than pussyfoot uncomfortably round it as if it’s a fart in a lift.

It’s there, it ain’t going to go away, it is real and present and a proper appreciation of its existence makes for a proper appreciation of our own existence, every day we are alive. I’d have thought that would be a good thing. Then again, I am a freak.

I am also suffering a double dose of the hard sell because as well as being a pregnant woman, I am ageing…

Ageing is clearly a particularly rich area for advertising shite. To me, wrinkles – oh I’m sorry, I beg your pardon, “fine dryness lines” are quite interesting. They give you a lot of information about a person.

If someone habitually smiles the lines on their face and crow’s feet round their eyes will reflect that. As I understand it, my great aunt was a bit of a society beauty in her heyday. She died aged about 90 and even then, she was beautiful because the older she got the more obvious it became that she was as beautiful on the inside as she had been on the outside.

I think about people like my Great Aunt and I wonder why anyone would want to have plastic surgery to try and look younger. I find the whole thing perplexing. It smacks of desperation. Like death (yeh, and taxes) ageing is a fact of life. Which bit of that do people not get? Bits of life are hard to take. Surely one of the most important parts of living and developing as a human being is learning to face them.

Yep, we are all going to get older and one day we will die. Are people really so vacuous they can’t face that? Get over it already Canute people!

Aside from being moronic, ignoring reality is a kind of social cowardice. It’s like suddenly trying to pretend that some basic obvious commodity like… air doesn’t exist. One day we may suss cell regeneration and live for ever… fair enough… but randomly stretching, pulling, stuffing and cutting bits off… nah, that looks like bollocks to me.

Then there’s the teeth thing. Yeh, if you have billy bob teeth it ain’t good for you and yes, they do look vile although whether or not, as mature human beings, we ought to be able to see beyond that is open to debate.

With all those nooks and crannies billy bob teeth are more likely to get holes and decay, they may cause their owner to chew wrong, which could lead to problems later on and so yeh, getting them straightened and properly spaced out is sensible and laudable. But teeth are naturally ivory coloured, they’re off white. A smile in bright sunlight is not supposed to give people retinal burns, not unless you are one of the Autons.

Why the fuck? What is the problem? Worse, if your teeth are white, they’re fucked. My teeth have been straightened out, I had braces as a kid but yep, they’re the colour of teeth. That is not white, or yellow actually, just… ivory. I’d never cut it on TV in the States or, most probably, here… but then, I don’t care because I’m a bit out there, I don’t want to have teeth which are so white and plasticy that when I smile people think I’m an android!

So how do sensible, grown up, well adjusted humans come to be bothered by all this completely irrelevant, vacuous, meaningless stuff..?

Well, I have a theory… (hem hem). It’s this.

They’re educated to care by advertisers. They’re taught that it’s unhygienic and antisocial not to. As if there’s something wrong with them for being unfazed by the transitory realities of existence. It’s not like we’re hunter gatherers any more, living hand to mouth and with important things to worry about like predators with big teeth and starving to death but a lot of that wariness must be programmed into our genes.

Maybe that’s how we are so easily persuaded to grow our little worries so they fill the gaps where the big ones used to be. It’s like there has to be a challenge and if existence on its own isn’t big enough we will warp it until it is.

I think the reason I’m so on the outside here might be because I was never beautiful in the conventional sense. I have always had a strong personality which, when you are young, is something that guarantees that people will only fall in love with you against their will.

When you’re a kid, you want to be different but not in a way that doesn’t conform to your peers’ interpretation of coolness. If you’re really, truly out there, especially if you compound the felony by being female, few young lads will have the balls to ask you out, or to bed, or if they do, to admit it to their mates!

It means you’ll probably end up with a much older or younger man because an outsider from an era less familiar and understood than your own means coolness is less of an issue. You don’t know for sure whether or not they’re cool… Or you do what I did and stumble jammily into the arms of somebody who is as much of an outsider as you are. Bless you, Mr BC!

So… gradually drifting back to the point. If you’re not physically beautiful you have to learn to use all sorts of other things to get by, humour, personality etc. That probably makes you about as sure as anyone can be who you are. You don’t self actualise through any particular thing, you’re not a mother or a marketing manager or a sports woman, or an x brand of car driver etc, you’re a person who just happens to do those things.

So I guess a lot of “beautiful people” have two problems. First they never have to make any effort because people always come to them so they don’t know how to use anything but their looks to get on. Secondly, that makes them less likely to explore who they are and more likely to self actualise through the highly transitory medium of how they look.

If they see themselves as “person x the society beauty” then when that beauty begins to fade, maybe they don’t know who they are any more. Perhaps that’s why they fear growing older so much, why they have to try and hold back the years, because the way they see it they ARE their looks and nothing else.

Blimey! That’s bleak…

…And if it’s true, how evil and wrong is it to prey on them?