Loud as I Want to Be

You know what makes me hungry?

A twenty-something blonde in a tight top loading straws into her mouth to prove how wide she can open for, er, eating a hamburger.

And during another advertisement by the same fast-food chain, we will call it “Lardee’s” for the sake of political correctness, I felt inspired to buy french fries after seeing a similar twenty-something shove her entire fist in her mouth.

“Lardee’s” clearly has the wrong idea about advertising. The jaw-dropping nature of the latest commercials, advertising a new hamburger, has effectively made a statement about who the target demographic is, but the chain has also tapped into a version of advertising that sells a lifestyle of sexual iniquity.

Of course the commercials are memorable – so memorable many can’t help but have a case of pre-teen giggles when they air – but the viewers (read:male viewers) also confuse evoking horniness with successful marketing.

Perhaps I am not the target audience, but it is sad that companies must use sexual innuendo, to put it mildly, to sell hamburgers. An advertising pioneer that single-handedly turned a failing company into a fast food legend, “Lardee’s” can certainly self-promote without sexist themes.

Yes, the media is sex-crazed, and it works for the most part. Nubile nudies strut around in silk underwear to sell lotion, and we buy. Burly, muscled men gyrating on a bearskin rug sell cologne, and we buy. A young woman puts a box of straws in her mouth, emulating oral sex, and we – wait, what?

Obviously the point is not to sell burgers. The point is to sell the lifestyle that makes the burgers so popular, and that lifestyle is for the “man’s man.” The man who is so – beat chest here – gruff, he need not worry that the latest burger peddled by his favorite restaurant has 1,400-plus calories and 107 grams of fat, for he is a man who enjoys watching the objectification of women while clogging his arteries.

Making no apologies for the nature of his restaurant’s reputation and products, CEO Andrew Puzder said his newest burger is “not for tree-huggers.” Though never having technically hugged a tree, I find the burger, the advertising and the executive in question disgusting.

Puzder asks viewers to kick back, buy into the man’s man lifestyle, and enjoy a little thinly disguised pornography.

Apparently, being offensive has become another marketing technique. If the product can’t be sold through conventional means, insinuate that only those of a certain caliber would be interested, anyway, thank-ya-very-much. Unfortunately for me, and what I would imagine to be a majority of women other than those who enjoy the recreational use of straws, being offended simply isn’t fun anymore.