Friday, August 10, 2007

I'll Cialis, and Raise You One

Erectile dysfunction ads have always perplexed me. Not that I have a perfect record in that area; no one does. (Except maybe Barry Bonds. His never works.) It’s the ads themselves. To me, they never send the message they should be sending.

I’m thinking of an evening a few years ago. Levitra was running a television ad that consisted primarily of a man throwing a football through a tire. They never said what the product did. For all I knew, they were some kind of shoulder medication. Prevented rotator cuff inflammation, maybe. All I ever saw the guy do was throw the football. After several weeks of seeing this, curiosity got the better of me. The Sole Heir was thirteen or so, and chatting online with some friends. I asked her to look up levitra.com, just to see what it did. I’m sure most fathers would agree, there are few father-daughter bonding experiences like asking your barely teen-aged daughter to look up some dick medication.

Cialis has the current puzzling campaign. You’ve probably seen it. A middle-aged (of course) couple is walking through what appears to be an upscale restaurant district, presumably having just finished a dinner of raw oysters and arugula with ginseng dressing. Another middle-aged (of course) couple waves to them from a restaurant window. Damn! A social obligation, and Mr. ED has already dropped his lid of Cialis. What to do?

Never fear, says the sonorous voice-over. Cialis is good for up to thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours!? How talky are these people? You can’t find a way to graciously extricate yourself from a conversation is less than a day and a half? Let’s face it, within half an hour, one of the women will have to go to the bathroom. The other one will go with her. Mr. ED will lean over to his soon-to-be-ex-friend and say, “Dude, the clock’s running on my meds. When they come back, shut the fuck up.”

While the couples chat, the voice-over lets you know that Cialis also works in as little as thirty minutes. If it works so fast, why not wait until you get home to take it, thus eliminating the risk of some chatty asshole ruining your fun? Was Mr. ED planning to bend Mrs. ED over the trunk of a car in the parking lot? Show some class, people.

A written disclaimer near the end of the commercial warns that Cialis is not intended to prevent the spread of AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases. No kidding. Here’s a news flash: Cialis makes it easier to get an STD. What are your chances of getting AIDS if the hydraulics don’t work? Not none, but a lot less than if they do work and you’re not fussy enough about where and how you put them to use.

Like all Cialis ads, this one ends with the loving couple holding hands as they each recline in their respective claw-footed bathtubs in the back yard. I don’t know about you, but any time I’ve seen bathtubs in the yard, a car on blocks was nearby. Bathtubs in the yard are not an indicator of affluence; they would be found in any thorough compendium of “You Might be a Redneck If…” In addition, the people are always in separate bathtubs. Isn’t the purpose of Cialis to get them in the same bathtub?

Enzyte has much more effective commercials. This male enhancement product makes no bones about it: it works, Bob is happy, and Mrs. Bob is happier than Meg Ryan in the restaurant scene of When Harry met Sally. As everyone connected with the male enhancement industry knows, we only ingest these potentially dangerous chemicals into our systems to please our women, who, apparently, can’t get enough of us. Definitely guys who wrote these commercials..

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