The intellectual perils of the Louis Vuitton condom

Sex sells, the mantra that has fed generations of creative ad types, is a principle so time-honored that it has become a mainstay of a quasi-Darwinian philosophy: "The purpose of any metric of success is to prove you're a worthy mate." Wealth and class, education, physical prowess––these things are indicative of a person's fitness. When the suggestive power of sex became known (or, alternatively, when psychoanalysis told us sex is an end unto itself), the obvious thing to do was find a way to make it sell shit.

And that's precisely what it has come to do. Sexy people shill everything from booze to auto parts, and sexual imagery is literally ubiquitous. So what happens in a world in which sex is so commodified that it becomes meaningless?

I present to you the $68 Louis Vuitton condom. Louis Vuitton's ultra-posh handbags and luggage just scream, "I'm classy and hang out in five-star French hotels, and that means I'm loaded." But one thing its aesthetic wasn't screaming was, "roll that oil stain-colored condom down your hard cock and fuck me." Now it is. The thing even has the raised letters LV along the side for her pleasure, and if your lady's the real deal, she'll be able to tell princess and the pea-style that you're both paying too much for a place to put your junk.

We should be cool with this. After all, it's an uncommon bloke who can blow that many shekels on a condom. He's good for a laugh. What tickles my brain is that Louis Vuitton is now using its brand to sell sex, rather than using sex to sell its brand. We're used to LV and Mercedes and Campari being the means to reach sex, which is seen as an end. What the LV condom has done is transform the cold, stand-offishness of class into an end for the means of loud, smelly, sweaty sex. Whether this tactic will work remains to be seen, but my guess is, Louis Vuitton will not come out well from this adventure.

PETA, which has lately taken to using sex to sell its animal-friendly activism, has given us another example of selling sex gone wrong. Recently it unveiled plans to create an erotica site, PETA.xxx, where sexual imagery will––and here's where I got lost––complement PETA's message. I'm assuming, since it would be unethical, that this isn't "fuzzy" or animal porn; it's probably pictures and videos of women, like, nibbling suggestively on carrots or something. 

What's worrisome is that PETA's product, what it's selling, is an ideology. We subscribe to ideologies because of our ideas of what the world should be like. Communists believe that through socialism, we can bring about a utopia. Fundamentalist Christians want to bring about the Apocalypse so they can go to Heaven. PETA believes that animals are treated cruelly, and the world will be a better place when people stop eating meat and kicking their dogs. But we don't see Lenin or Jesus surrounded by babes on propaganda or in churches. Except, maybe, on Bad Religion album covers.

"American Jesus"

It seems fitting, then, that many of PETA's more sexually-charged ads undermine their own sexuality with messages about animal cruelty.

Canada banned Pamela Anderson's PETA ad for literally comparing her to a piece of meat.

There's a good reason for why PETA has chosen this tack: Ideologies tend to be asexual, and their partisans see sex as part of the illusion of reality or network of deceptions from which they're trying to escape. Sex distracts us from the mission at hand. (If we weren't too busy screwing, we could, you know, save the whales or something.) 

PETA's strategy is pure cynicism. Sex has nothing to do with what it's selling; indeed, vegetarianism is a kind of abstinence. Like the Louis Vuitton condom, PETA has confused the kingdom of ends with the kingdom of means, albeit for radically different reasons. I'm not saying we shouldn't use sex to sell things. I'm just saying that perhaps we should re-evaluate the universality of the sex sells mantra.

Ramen noodles every night for a year

I don't like to watch television. The movies on AMC tonight are "King Arthur" and "We Were Soldiers"––neither of which I have any real interest in––and leave it to cable to make the 15 climactic minutes at the end of any film last a whole hour.

It dawned on me that there was something vaguely inappropriate about all these commercials, and I couldn't put my finger on what it was. After all, the parade of commercials for cell phone plans and insurance and decongestants hasn't changed significantly since I started watching television. Some still try to be funny, or ingratiating, or matter-of-fact. Hell, some of them are even good at being funny or ingratiating or matter-of-fact.

Listening to NPR this morning and hearing Diane Rehm (in her sultriest, old-beef-jerkey-I-found-between-the-couch-cushions voice) discuss the unemployment rate, I realized what it was that irked me so much about these advertisements: They really hadn't changed since I started watching television. Advertising executives haven't realized that nearly one in ten Americans doesn't have a job, and really is living on ramen noodles, like the chipper upstart Emily in this Allstate commercial.

"Emily's just starting out." I wish I was.

"Emily" is a stand-in for all us bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young folk who don't have a pot to piss in. Never mind the usual cues that she isn't "one of us"––that she's perfectly manicured, that she drives a new car––; what Emily's missing is the look of someone who has somewhere to be. So like an unemployed person living out of her parents' basement, she has the trappings of a workaday jane, but is obviously not really "just starting out." She's stagnating, only she's doing it with an idiot smile on her face.

I would love to see an advertisement on TV telling me a company is hiring people, and that labor is urgently needed. It's a pie-in-the-sky idea, but I think a commercial like that would indicate that a new reality is sinking in. A lot of Americans aren't thinking about how they can save big on their cell phone bills by switching carriers. We're thinking about what we can cut from our budgets. That's how scarce money is. It's a scarcity that we don't see anywhere on television, and if one were to sit on one's couch all day long and watch sitcoms and advertisements, one might never grasp how dire the job and money situation really is.

I wish I had Emily's problems. It would be awesome to move out of the basement and starve a little, as long as I had places to be and things to get done. But apart from Liz Lemon on "30 Rock" and a few rare others, television is populated with people who have no ambition––people who viewers never see working, or changing diapers, or even cleaning their immaculate Manhattan lofts. 

It's disappointing because America is ripe for someone to produce commercials and television shows about the real drama of finding and keeping work.

Books on a desert island

Over the last few weeks, I've had a few small successes in my search for a job: I scored at interview for the business editor at one paper; I've made the "first cut" for a reporter position at another. Morale is high.

But the logistics of moving frighten me. I've moved before and I know what a hassle it is. I need a car and a way to transport my bikes. Money is also an issue. To distract myself from these and other considerations, I've begun to populate an empty bookshelf with the choicest titles from my extensive collection that I absolutely couldn't do without wherever my job hunt takes me. So, what books will I take with me to my "desert island?"

There are a few titles that come instantly to mind.

• Herodotus, Histories
• Stephen Bloom, Postville
• Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor
• Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems
• Arthur Clarke, 2001 A Space Odyssey
• R.D. Laing, The Divided Self
• Richard White, The Organic Machine

This list includes two novels, two historical surveys, a "place biography" and a book of poetry. What surprises me about it is its relative obscurity. When I walk into someone's home or office for the first time, I'm immediately drawn to the bookshelves, where I feel most comfortable acquainting myself with my host's tastes. This list would tell a guest of mine very little about me, and I'm torn between interpreting this feeling as meaning there are too few books on it, or these books are unrepresentative of my interests.

When someone asks me what book (or album) I'd take to a desert island, my answer, I've realized, has much to do with what I want the asker to hear as my own opinion. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Virginia Woolf: Will I take any of her books with me? What about Russian and graphic novels? Gödel, Escher, Bach? Nietzsche? Or does including these books unite me with my past interests more than with what I'm likely to read?

Perhaps a more complete list (added to the list above) would look more like this:

• Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf
• Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts; The Years; Moments of Being
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
• John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor; Lost in the Funhouse
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, The Idiot
• Roald Dahl, Roald Dahl Omnibus
• Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
• Neil Gaiman, Sandman
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
• Associated Press, AP Stylebook 2009

There. I've more than doubled the number of books I'll be taking with me, along with, like, all my clothes, electronic gadgetry, bikes, tools, etc. It remains, considering the hundreds of books I've read and have stowed in my room, a tight list. I hope to keep it tight.

In the meantime, I'd be interested in finding out what books you, dear reader, would take to your own desert island.