Whilst I’m fully aware that this has nothing to do with anything, I’d like to comment on the latest range of Lynx deodorant adverts. You guys in the states will know the company as Axe but I know for a fact you get the same adverts a couple of months after us. I don’t know why it’s called Axe, though. Maybe it’s because they thought you wouldn’t know what a Lynx is. Still, a lynx is sexy and stylish… in a big cat kind of way. An axe, on the other hand, has no obvious sex appeal, unless you’re a dwarf. But I digress. I don’t know if anyone has seen these new ‘Spray more get more’ adverts on television recently. Something about them disturbed me to my core.
In the past, Lynx adverts have operated on the simple, if preposterous, principle that spraying this brand of deodorant on your body will make you irresistible to the opposite sex, as if the very absence of smell is inherently attractive. Every advert has presented variations on this theme: if you spray it on you the women will think you’re nice. How does it work? Magic. No further explanation is needed. Until now, that is. Now they’re writing more rules for the magic system. They’re world-building, in other words.
The latest advert shows a guy spraying Lynx on some mud. Two passing women (I think they’re horse-riding) smell the mud — yes, the mud — and feel the urge to wrestle together in this swill before inviting the guy to join them. The tag line reads as follows: spray more get more.
Sooooooo there are rules now? If you spray more on yourself, you get more women? What? The advert implies there is a scientific process at work, that a principle operates: the amount of Lynx sprayed is directly proportional to its effectiveness. Of course, there’s more. It doesn’t just work on humans. If you spray it on some mud, women will want to have sex with the mud. God, what happens when you spray it on other things like walls and mugs? But the women in the advert aren’t just attracted to the mud, they feel the weirdly specific urge to mud wrestle. How does the Lynx know? Are there special chemical receptors which detect what type of matter the spray has come into contact with and, based on this information, calculate what it can make women do that will turn a guy on the most? Can’t we go back to how things used to be?
Of course, the target audience for these adverts has always been desperate single men who can’t get a date; men who don’t think they’re attractive to women. The adverts aim to convince these men that spraying Lynx on themselves will get them laid. And they offer nothing more than that promise because these men ask for nothing more. Now, however, these pathetic singletons are being told that by simply spraying the Lynx on their environment they can turn their world into an improv porn film.
This is unfair, it’s patronising and, worst still, it could lead to all sorts of trouble. If someone sprays Lynx on the back end of a bus by mistake they could unwittingly causes the deaths of the hundreds of women who run in front of traffic in an attempt to screw the exhaust pipe. These adverts need axing with a big, sexy axe.