Lashing Porn

I was watching something on live TV rather than pre-recorded on the TiVo last night, meaning I was subjected to that rarest of beasts for the TiVo owner: commercials. And I saw an ad with Brooke Shields for a product that I absolutely couldn’t believe, to the point that I Googled it this morning to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.

Really, ladies? Really? Of all things, eyelashes? Are you kidding me?

Apparently not:

So Abendroth spent years dying her eyelashes, coating them with conditioner, and becoming an expert in a dozen different mascaras. She also checked regularly with her dermatologist to see if there was anything that could help her grow her own lush lashes. No such luck.

And then came Latisse, Allergan’s FDA-approved eyelash-enhancing treatment. Given the green light in December 2008 as a treatment for hypotrichosis of the eyelashes (yes, people with sparse lashes actually have an official condition), the prescription drug has inspired disbelief, devotion…

Okay. Ladies, let’s huddle up.

You’re screwing with me, right?

Look: I have been a guy pretty much for as long as I can remember. I can’t account for the years 1990 through 1994, but all surviving photographs show me passed out in a puddle of vomit as opposed to a dress, so I feel confident in the statement.

Anyway: as a long-term guy, who has been sexually attracted to women during that time, and who has had friends who are also long-term guys who are also sexually attracted to women, and who has conversed with these other guys about their mutual sexual attraction to women during that time, I can tell you with absolute certainty that at no time, never, not once, have any of those conversations included the phrase: “Did you see the eyelashes on that girl?”

Trust me: no one but you gives a flying fuck about your eyelashes. You seem surprised; don’t be. This is because eyelashes cannot be pulled, squeezed, tweaked, fondled, rubbed, caressed, fingered or penetrated. Therefore, we don’t care. When it comes to sexual attraction, if you strapped a guy into a polygraph and asked him to testify under oath, he would probably be unable to even rudimentarily describe any given woman’s eyelashes. Or eye color. Or, indeed, if she even has a head.

Don’t get all pissed off, ladies… and don’t give me that shit about how the media presents an unrealistic image of how women should look. Of course they do, but that’s not why it’s shit. It’s shit because they’re not doing it because of some evil patriarchal plot against women; they’re doing it because the media is owned by corporate morons who have no imagination.

Corporate tools are not creative. They live and die by formulas that end in positive numbers, period. They do this because it is vastly easier to tell their bosses, who are also unimaginative corporate tools, something like “The formula was faulty, but with a little tweaking I can fix it,” than it is to tell them, “I fucked up because I am a moron who is making this shit up as I go,” and then spending the next six months watching Oprah by the phone.

Let’s face it: Microsoft Excel didn’t become the most popular software program in the world because it’s fun. It’s because it is an alchemy engine for corporate jackholes: it distills bullshit into a black number instead of a red number, meaning that it can turn unmitigated failure into a performance bonus. If Bill Gates had announced he could do that 200 years ago, he’d have been burned as a witch… but then again, 200 years ago, people worked for a living. But I’m on a tangent again.

The point is, these corporate marketing types know that sex sells, but sex is complicated, and again: these people are not imaginative. Sex doesn’t fit easily into a formula unless you force it to, so they take a body type and a hair color and some general facial features, say, “Yup: that’s sex,” and fit it into a spreadsheet cell. Which is then lovingly inserted into a database, caressed by analysts and ogled by executives, but not because the image is sexy, but because these defective zeroes want to fuck your money.

And the shorthand is a fine and dandy shortcut if you’re trying to convince some suit to give you a million dollars to make them a thirty-second commercial that uses sex to sell, say, energy drinks, which are about as sexy as a sharp blow to the orbital bone… Unless you’re into that. And if you’re a regular reader of this crappy rag you clearly have a wide streak of masochism going on, so I’m probably barking up the wrong tree here, but I’m too hung over to come up with a different analogy. Mea culpa. Which is Latin for Fuck You. Anyway.

But to say pushing that kind of “idealized” archetype of female beauty is some kind of conspiracy as opposed to just terminal greed and laziness doesn’t hold up. Because there is one industry in which you can’t use that generic image of sex to make a sale: pornography.

If the accepted media shorthand really equalled “sex”, the only working porn star in the world would be Jenna Jameson… who does fit the standard image so perfectly you could plug her whole cloth into prime-time TV commercials if you pried the dick out of her hand, replaced it with a bag of Vigoro and taught her to pronounce “hexamethalinetertrmine” without drooling jizz on herself.

But I’ll tell you what: go to Google and search on “porn”… or just click in your browser bar, let someone taze you while your hands are on the keyboard, and then click enter. You know what you’re gonna find? Fattie porn. Pregnant porn. Cougar porn. GILF porn. Fucking amputee porn. You can’t swing a dead cat without finding porn depicting any and every type of female body type, and if you search hard enough, you can probably find porn of that.

San Fernando Valley entrepreneurs aren’t shooting all that variety of filth out of a public service obligation or because they’re trying to shatter some ephemeral big media patriarchy. They’re making it because somebody, somewhere is jerking off to it. So ladies: no matter what you look like, and no matter what experimental and self-torturing and self-mutilating “beauty” treatments you may or may not be using, you can rest assured that somebody, somewhere, wants to have sex with you.

Don’t believe me? You think the guy dialing up amputee porn is worried about whether or not the girl is using eyelash growing medicine? Of course not. How would she apply it?

No ladies, the only people who give a fuck about things like eyelash treatment are you. God knows that we guys aren’t buying it for you. Even if we cared about shit like that, we know that if you pulled any kind of beauty product out of your Christmas stocking, we’d be spending New Years recovering from a severe rupture.

So forget about all thise media-hyped beauty bullshit, particularly the eyelash-growing shit. The only way a guy is gonna notice your eyelashes is if they’re so freakishly long they drag on the ground between your feet… and even then, on an infinite timeline, some dude is gonna dial up this page, read that description, and start pawing at his zipper.

You ladies really want to attract some guy’s attention? Take the money you were gonna piss away on Latisse and buy that guy a half-keg of Sam Adams. Trust me: he will want to fuck you. Not only that, he’ll probably fall in love with you.

[tags]Latisse, eyelashes, Brooke Shields, dark humor, satire[/tags]