A few weeks ago the pangs of hunger gave me the brilliant idea of writing for magazines. Magazines like Cosmopolitan and FHM are big business, I figured they'd have some spare money lying around to give me. I was practically salivating at the prospect of the riches that would come raining down on me as soon as I sent them my brilliant, mind blowing, world changing article, "The Softness of Fingers: how you can get rich and lose weight by not using toilet paper." (It's a work in progress).
I can picture you reading this, nodding your head in agreement and saying something like "Wow, that is an amazing article. I can't wait to read it. What a brilliant plan Sam." If you're a woman you may find yourself becoming spontaneously aroused from reading the title. How could this possibly go wrong?
Well, early on I ran into a slight technical problem. I've never bought a men's/women's magazine. Not once. Ever. I've seen them, I've flicked through them, I've heard the stereotypes, but I've never read one properly. This had to be rectified. I went to the newsagents and bought issues of Cleo, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, FHM and Zoo. I took them home and started reading through them.
It's a strange experience looking at magazines for men and magazines for women side by side. They're a strange mirror image of one another; each with their articles on "what he/she means," and "How to lose BLAH kilos in BLAH days." Where women have ads for perfume and makeup, men have ads for deodorant and games. Where women have ads for fashion, men have ads for... fashion. Seriously, for magazines that tout themselves as manly magazines for manly men, they aren't half into dress-ups.
At this point my whole "I'm going to write an article and get rich" idea was a distant memory. I already have an attention span somewhere between "goldfish" and "chicken", and the sheer volume of swirling colours in the magazines was making me dizzy. It was like a carousel going round and round with perfume-clothes-fashion-BOOBIES-clothes-food-BOOBIES-clothes-advice-fashion-perfume-BOOBIES-perfume-advice-clothes-clothes-BOOBIES-perfume-BOOBIES!
And then I saw IT.
The carousel stopped.
It was an ad in one of the men's magazines, and it was one of the most in-the-closet ads I've ever seen in my life. It was plastered with pictures of tanned, oiled-up muscle men. Fully nude.
Yes, in a magazine where the women are all in bikinis as a minimum, the men were letting it all hang out. I could practically hear the sounds of guilty boyfriends saying "I swear it's okay honey, look, there are chicks in this magazine too!"
There was one particular picture that was the worst offender. It pictured a fully nude muscle man, looking down at his own biceps with undisguised lust. His leg was positioned in such a way that it hid his junk, but he was giving the camera a generous dose of butt cheek to make up for it.
My description doesn't do the picture justice, but I don't really want to put it up because I'd like this site to remain relatively safe for work. As a compromise, I decided to draw you a picture in MS Paint. It took me all of three minutes.
When I saw this ad I remember thinking "what product could possibly require the inclusion of Mr Thigh-hides-the-sausage?"
Muscle supplements (of course).
The ad was trying to say "Use our product and look like this man" (Or possibly "Use our product and spend time in the gym with this man. Watch his muscles ripple as he lifts the weights. See the sheen of sweat on his tanned body. Perhaps you shower together after your workout. Perhaps all the showers are taken and you have to share one. We're not here to judge.")
If you've got a product that needs to emphasize how manly it is, you need to pick a name that sums up everything you need to say about your product in a single word. The ad started with a tagline explaining that, if you used their product, you'd become hardcore like Mr Crouching-tiger-hidden-man-parts. It was followed by a block of text the used the word "science" like a serial killer uses a machete. Finally, they came to the product; the miracle supplement that would turn you from zero to muscle-bound hero:
It was called Testoroid.
The perfect mixture of testicle and haemorrhoid.
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