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.