How to Produce the World's Dumbest Commercials

Do you recall Betty Friedan's brilliant remark? In The Feminine Mystique, she gave away the entire mystery of insulting advertising. As an expert on psychology, she observed that one way advertisers capture an audience is to offend them. Was that woman prophetic, or what?

While political correctness teaches us to respect cultural sensitivities 24 by 7, advertisers go out of their way to trade privacy for private parts. Their excuse may be the public's right to information, but what about the public's right to have this information at their beck and call when and where they want it?

Would it be too much to propose channels in the media devoted exclusively to the following:

1. more than you ever wanted to know about cervixes?

2. more than anybody needed to know about penises?

3. more than everybody deserved to know period?

Don't our knowledge bases runneth over, anyway? Do we really merit a lecture on the cervix during a movie? Just shove that content before my attention, and you will compete with unlawful intruders on my block. Who placed advertisers in charge of sex education in America?

If I wanted to major in cervixes, I am completely capable of pursing a degree and graduate work in what once passed for Human Anatomy. Where did Biology go? Is it extinct, too? Explaining the cervix to a kid in the middle of a Holy Mary Pass requires more ingenuity than can reasonably be expected of American parents.

The way to produce the world's dumbest commercials is simple: Just leave all those airy theories about Truth and Justice behind. Concentrate solely on what's inside underwear. Wasn't underwear invented because somebody got up and said: "Well, we need to keep this stuff under wraps"?

"Underwear" is different from "overwear," after all. "Overcoats" exist in our culture, but "overwear" doesn't. Still, advertisers keep dragging out what's under underwear and exalting it OVER everything else. I don't recall voting on this reorganization of priorities, do you? How far would a referendum on Viagra ads get in your school district?

NuvaRing is the absolute champeen of insulting advertisements. This is their method: Equate the freedom of the American Constitution to doing without birth control medication for a month. Boy, aren't you glad all those soldiers died in the Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq for that benefit?

The happy chick on the television commercial spins in her little ovulating basket as she celebrates: "Let freedom ring!" This girl's behavior suggests that Americans are morons. Who would reduce our debt to US soldiers by demeaning their sacrifice this way? Just being in the same room with her turns a patriotic stomach.

This commercial deserves a grade so low that it descends into minus numbers. Is she the moron for reducing "freedom" to so-called "free sex" in the age of AIDS, or are we the morons for accepting her intrusion into our lives? One cannot indict NuvaRing's producers for being morons: Despicable is more like it.

This commercial is especially demeaning to women. Do you see a MAN cavorting about a stage while he mistakes the American Constitutional heritage for a sexual happy-day pill? Do you rest easier at night knowing that such a moronic female might enjoy the right to vote?

If America is still a democracy, let's vote on when and where we want to see what. Let's begin with underwear. It's safe to say that our sacred Freedom of Speech did not mean a lecture on private parts in the middle of the Gettysburg Address. Or do you want to hear it during Bush's State of the Union speech?

As long as underwear is legal, what right does NuvaRing possess to dump the contents of private closets in our living rooms? How can any right to privacy exist while we tolerate the usurpation of our national costumes? Even the most ardent opponents of restrictive legislation haven't attacked the American right to guard its collective butt.