Have I Slipped Into Prudism

I like to think of myself as an open minded, avant-guard and well adjusted, fun loving human with regards to sex (Heck, don't we all?). You might ask what this has to do with Domino's Pizza? I had to ask myself that selfsame question the other evening. Why would I ever question my ethical mores with regard to sex while watching some children's hour television commercial with my family you also ask? This latest commercial of theirs shows a dining room scene with her (the wife? girlfriend? sexpot?) setting the table and him (the husband?, boyfriend?, ignoramus?) futzing in the kitchen at something or other. The male voice-over proclaims that this man is tricking this woman by dint of the fact that she can have a healthy garden salad delivered with his pizza thereby enabling him to order pizza with greater frequency. This sensitive scene continues to such a point whereas the man is in the kitchen behind the woman's back with his hand in the refrigerator grabbing at a two-liter bottle of some heretofore pseudo disguised brand of cola while she is at the end of the table, back still to him, bending over facing the United States at large and exposing a very fair modicum of breast. He is in the background about to suck down a belt of cola from the bottle behind her back...she magically senses this and, without turning, elbows him in the stomach as the voice-over proclaims that this man is a dolt and gets away with nothing. So, let's look at this:

1. He is trying to deceive her because he may think she is not very bright and supposedly doesn't notice that he is ordering pizza every night because her salad keeps showing up. 2. She is obviously a paranormal exhibitionist of some sort with breasts in front and eyes in back. 3. He is obviously oblivious as to how disease is spread because of his insistence on drinking from the bottle. 4. The voice-over seems to be on her side, even though the man is the one who is subliminally purchasing the advertised product. This commercial follows on the heels of a Pavlovian endeavor by the same outfit that shows a lot of dumb men wreaking havoc in a hardware store when an innocent femme fatale rings a demonstration doorbell and the men think it is a Domino's Pizza delivery person and hence all and rush, hell-bent to the doorbell source in hopes that mystically a pizza has shown up there. I sent Domino's an email expressing my concerns about the implications of this commercial and was told they were glad I expressed my feelings and that my concerns would be noted in the formulation of future commercials. This I gotta see. To be fair, the good points about Domino's is that it's stores are small, making them more energy efficient and ecologically friendly. People don't usually drive to Domino's...Domino's drives to them. This results in an overall savings of total expended gas and a reduction in traffic. Their product is food, which gets consumed. Their packaging, mostly cardboard, is recyclable if the end user takes the time to dispose of it properly. The pizza is good, I especially like the Philly Cheese Steak Pizza. One thing I do know is that they are aiming these ads at you and me, my droogies. I don't mean to single out Domino's...but, once in a while an exposed nerve gets hit with a jolt of searing awareness that we, as a people, are being herded into an abyss where logic and reason don't exist. Novels like Brave New World and 1984 come to life and scream to us to wake up and smell the rancid baloney being force fed us. What is clearly needed at this precise moment in our planet's human evolution is an individual or group of individuals with a power and entrepreneurial spirit strong enough to buck this gawd-offal on-going blatant trend of denigration to humanity. A group that can come up with commercials that honestly show the more positive side of products that themselves have to be worthy of the people for whom they are intended. This is going to require corporate bigwigs who are daring enough to see how vacuous and devoid of real meaning most situations have become. People who are willing to try to put the reality back into reality. The trend they are going to be bucking is big...life as we know it, big. I recently read a comparison of the Earth to a space ship. If the Earth were indeed a space ship traveling through the limitless bounds of space and sustaining our precious lives we wouldn't be doing to it what we are doing to it. The final analysis of the piece was that it is and we are.

 

J. Jules Vitali is a sculptor, columnist, moral philosopher and poet who resides in Freeport, Maine. He is the creator of the art form Styrogami® which can be seen on the web at www.styrogami.com. He is also an Artist in Cellophane (www.artomat.org).