Let’s talk about investing wisely.
It was a chilly Friday night and I was out with a friend at Albuquerque’s best Italian joint, the Macaroni Grill. Just as I was raising a fork-full of perfectly measured and weighed-out corporate pasta to my lips, my attention was distracted by a conversation at the next table. I hate to listen in on the presumably intimate details of other people’s lives, but when the conversation just comes marching across your table like so much deep-fried mozzarella, what are you going to do?
“He’s so cute though!” The young lady I shall call Joy said.
“That’s true. And he’s pre-medicine!” Her friend Nancy responded.
They both giggled at that. I hadn’t the heart to let them know that as a statistical proposition, pre-med is nearly synonymous with pre-business. What came next got my attention for real.
“Well you know,” Nancy said with great sarcasm. “If you really want a thrill, try abstinence!”
Both of the women started laughing so uproariously that I thought for sure both Earnest and Julio Gallo were going to come out of their noses. The joke, I later figured out, had to do with an advertising campaign under way here in the Duke city.
Some of you may have noticed a number of billboards urging abstinence sprinkled liberally about our fair town, as well as radio ads. Abstinence isn’t necessarily a bad word. I personally abstain from lots of things, as do others. For example, I abstain from taunting evil-looking dogs, taking cheap shots at morons who write witless letters and eating things that were not at some point in the near past roaming about a barnyard, forest, pond, stream or otherwise.
Abstaining from sex is a personal choice, and I’m all for allowing people to do with their bodies whatever they want or don’t want to do. I, for one, have no concern about whether you and the one, two or however many you love do the horizontal mambo. If I can’t hear it, see it or smell it, I don’t care.
The folks paying for this joke of an ad campaign certainly seem very concerned. Teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are the direct result of abstinence from abstinence. It’s hard to argue that either of them are positive forces in our community. That’s precisely why the billboards and similar ads are such a joke.
If the people shelling out the money to inhibit teenage coitus care so much, why are they using the absolutely worst, and I capitalize worst because I want you to hear me shouting it in your sleep, advertising approach ever devised?
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The billboards in question show a bunch of teenagers floating skyward in the gondola of a hot air balloon. They look like they are having one heck of a good, wholesome time. The text says that if you want a real thrill, you should try abstinence. My guess is that they settled on this approach after rejecting a billboard showing young people cleaning a living room along with the slogan, “Don’t get bizzee, gut busy!”
I don’t aim to hurt the feelings of the person or brain trust that came up with this campaign. That’s the farthest thing from mind. Rather, I’m trying desperately to understand how it is that any adult could think for a moment that any teenager is going to think of not getting laid as thrilling. For any of us out there who have done the nasty, or the virtual nasty, at least one time, there really isn’t much of a comparison. In a thrill contest, sex wins hands down.
So to the folks at Griffin and Associates, the geniuses who created this sensational butt of jokes, I suggest the following advertising slogans for other potential clients. “Rightway Airlines: We hardly ever crash!” Or how about, “Dr. Raul Lopez, Dentist. It doesn’t hurt that much!” Maybe you could use, “Hernandez Chilies: They don’t smell bad ... yet!”
As for abstinence, the right-wing mattress Nazis need to invest in ads that counter the factors that make people want to knock boots. The decision to have sex is far more complicated than deciding if you want a thrill. Young men and women have sex for a myriad of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with thrills.
There’s personal pressure, peer pressure, relationship pressure, social pressure ... it is a lot of pressure to squeegee the love monkey. What sort of pressure balances that out? Uh, Temptation Island? Parents who care enough to talk to their kids about it? MTV? The answer is that there isn’t an answer. And when you have that big of a pressure imbalance, something is bound to blow. Which brings me back to Joy and Nancy.
The young ladies left the table giddy about events to come. It seemed clear to me that the real thrill would win out and that by Monday, Joy would have succumbed to the pressures. It’s too bad for the busy bodies that they didn’t invest a bit more wisely.
Questions? Comments? Outraged denunciations? Write to Brad at physhead@hotmail.com
