My Favorite Ad

I am in the minority here, but one of my favorite Super Bowl ads this year was the Go Daddy commercial featuring the supermodel Bar Rafaeli and the actor Jesse Heiman (playing a computer geek) kissing.  The ad pretty much has become the most hated ad of this year’s crop but I love it and here is why.

Hidden and Exposed

I love it because it exposes people’s prejudices and they don’t even know it.  Here is an easy question to ask yourself if you hated the ad.  Would you have hated it if it was the supermodel Bar Rafaeli kissing the model from the Calvin Klein commercial that aired around the same time? Would you have hated it if it were Ms. Rafaeli kissing Ryan Gosling?  Or any other very handsome, sexy, and otherwise attractive man? I am going to take a guess that you would not have hated it. If you say you still would have hated it, then I suggest you wouldn’t have hated it nearly as much.  If you say you hated it, then do you also hate watching the Bachelor kiss 10 girls per episode with hot, wet kisses?

Taboo

I know there are all sorts of ‘reasons’ people have said it was disgusting. But what I think is the number one reason is that people made an unconscious judgment while watching that ad.  The judgment came because the visual image had broken a taboo, a taboo of status, beauty and class.  

Without knowing it, you just knew it was wrong. Why? Because hot supermodels are not suppose to like or be attracted to dorky, overweight, nerdy and unattractive geeks, that’s why. They do not belong to the same class. They are breaking as big a taboo as almost any other one.  It’s disrupts and upsets how the world is suppose to be.  And when that is thrown in your face, the result is anger and disgust. 

Truth

But the truth is it’s your problem, not theirs.  They are actors in an ad, yes. but I will take a guess that if they had been real lovers you saw on a park bench doing that, you would have had the same reaction. And in the park or watching it on TV, It is not they that need to change, it’s you.  You are the one with the unspoken prejudice, not them.  

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Drawing and commentary by Marty Coleman, who kissed his first girl when he was 12 at a dance.  Man, did I fall hard for her.

Quote by Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963, American poet and writer

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Trivia of the Day

Question:  what is philematology the study of?

Come back tomorrow for the answer

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