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Have we seen enough naked people in bathtubs?
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You've seen it. You're sitting there with your kids watching Elf or some kid movie and here they come. A middleaged couple yucking it up over some wine and before you know it they are in the bathtubs in the yard holding hands, celebrating the fact that flaccidity has been banished with CIALIS. So you plow through that one and field the questions from your kids...why are they sitting in bathtubs in the yard. You have no idea and you mutter something about how they must like to bathe outside. The next one is even worse. A grinning woman is gushing about her man and some dopey guy in a sweater is talking about how once he took EXTENDEEZ well things were never the same. The grinning woman comes back on and gushes about how she just loves her man now that he took his penis enlarging drug.
You field a few more questions and call it an antacid. Now you are slouching on the couch as you are hit with middleaged and elderly people toddling around able to just have a ball while taking drugs for incontinence, constipation, depression, COPD, Alzheimer's, arthritis, joint pain, chemotherapy side effects, migraines, strokes, heart attacks, cholesterol...you name it. By the time Elf is over you feel like slitting your wrists. Since when did drug advertising become so heinous and pervasive?
And these are not just benign pitches to take their drugs. These are you better take these drugs or else! Take the black and white pitch of the guy who did not take his cholesterol medicine until it was too late. He had a heart attack and he tells us to know be stupid like he was...TAKE YOUR MEDICINE. Well, the pharmaceutical industry posts billions in profits. We know why. Are we ever more vulnerable than on the issue of health?
Back to the men who are taking all sorts of drugs so they can get it on anytime or anywhere. We see a couple skipping through Paris, on a boat cruise, a woman holding her high heels while Don, Harry, George leans back from reading the paper with a small smile. We assume that this drug has just turned them into lovers on a tear to just do it whenever they can. The kicker of this advertising is everyone keeps getting younger and younger! The suggestion is hey, this can happen to you at anytime. For men this is nothing short of terrorism.
You could say it is for our own good. But is it? We are an overmedicated society as it is. We reach for a pill to cure just about everything and are rarely told to change behavior or habits that might be causing our maladies. The drug industry is interested in one thing...scaring us to the point of taking their drugs or enticing us with the promise of a chemically altered existence that will usher in a second utopia (see couple in bathtubs holding hands.)
We do not need to be reminded of the ticking clock that is our mortality. We don't need to be told that one day when the mood hits us our performance might be off the mark. We know these things. We know it the moment we hit the antiseptic waiting room of some doctors office. We sure as hell don't need to be explaining to our children why a man is sitting in a bathtub next to a woman outside when he could just as easily take a shower inside. Preferably a cold one.
William Hazelgrove writes in Ernest Hemingway's attic. His latest book is Rocket Man
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