Friday, October 20, 2006

Tastes like my favorite sausage?!?












The above advertising poster has been irritating me for a good while. Better said, I hate it with a passion. Maybe it's just my vegetarian sensibility talking here, but I think even if I ate meat I would be incredibly annoyed by the use of a sausage as a phallic symbol. Does every heterosexual woman, or any other person attracted to men, get excited when she or he eats a sausage? Or does she or he think of eating sausage when kissing a man? Even as a vegetarian, I eat non-meat sausages composed of tofu and other things that have that approximate shape, like carrots and cucumbers, and at least for myself, I can give a resounding "no" to answer that question. Perhaps it's just a question of taste, and my taste says this whole campaign is disgusting.












Here's yet another example of this ad campaign. Maybe, just maybe, these ads are made to appeal to straight men. Should they think that if they should have the luck of bringing a woman home, all they need to do is serve her up some shrink-wrapped trash from the supermarket and she's all his for the night? With all of its suggestive imagery and text, I find this incredibly offensive.




















Fitting to the simplicity of the actual campaign, I came across a parody of these ads the other day on a walk about town. From the looks of it, it was made by an art student, and though it's not terribly inventive and the layout could be better, the baseness of it is the perfect answer to those perfectly horrifying Lieblingswurst advertisements. This artist has a statement! And there are some people around here who don't like his or her statement, for all the wrong reasons, I believe. Some of these posters have been destroyed. Was it done by concerned parents who don't want their children's innocent eyes to see a nude portrait? But why? This poster actually has a twofold value: not only is it a lesson in anatomy, but also in vocabulary! It's not just a parody that made me crack up while walking down the street, it's a little act of protest. Good work!