Have you seen these KY Intense commercials? They go like this:
Man: If we’re being completely honest here, I have to say I am a pretty good lover. Right honey?
Woman: [Noncommittally] Yeah.
Man: [Trying to convince himself of something he knows isn’t true] I’m the man.
Woman: [Placatingly] Absolutely.
[Pause]
Woman: [Blatantly trying to get him out of the room] Will you, um, go make sure the front door is locked?
Man: [Cluelessly] I will do that.
Woman: Thank you. KY Intense: it’s this gel that stimulates arousal so that big moment is like nothing I’ve ever felt.
[There are fireworks demonstrating what her orgasms are like. With KY Intense. Without her husband.]
Am I the only one who thinks that this commercial misses the mark by a small but rather important amount? It seems to me that the message this commercial wants to convey would be one (or both) of the following:
1) You love your woman and want her to enjoy sex with you as much as possible. Use this product.
2) You love your man and want to enjoy sex with him as much as possible. Use this product.
3) You love your man and want him to know you love and enjoy sex with him. Use this product.
Well how does it fare at these goals?
Item #1. Fail Utter fail. It doesn’t even make anything approaching an honest try at this. All we have is a guy desperately trying to delude himself into believing he can satisfy his wife’s most basic sexual needs. And everything about his wife, from her tone to her body language to how she treat him tells us that he is failing at both the satisfying and the self-delusion. You can’t watch this commercial and not know, with absolute certainty that, after most of their twice-weekly (“at least in theory, but, to tell the truth, something usually comes up so it’s more like once a week”), once he’s rolled over and fallen asleep, she goes into the bathroom and silently, guiltily, resentfully finishes what he should have.
Item #2. Marginal success. We get the feeling that, by this point, he’s been such a disappointment that she barely cares. She’s got a Hitachi Magic Wand, a clueless husband, and an hour between the time she gets home and he gets home.
Item #3. Impressive failure. Nothing says love and respect like saying “honey, go run a make-work errand so I can tell the audience you don’t satisfy me in bed.”
At first I wondered if maybe I was just channeling male insecurity by raising an eyebrow at this. But if I were married and my wife wanted to try this stuff out, I’d be perfectly happy to give it a shot.
So maybe it’s just that I’m too much of an idealist. That’s a frightening thought. Maybe I’m the one deluded thinking that they should do two things differently.
First: market this to men. “All the hot guys do it!” Take a page from Axe body spray. Have the husband pull out the bottle and have her get excited about it. Hell, you could even make a joke of it and have both of them “confide” to the camera that it’s the KY that’s the real sex machine in their marriage. They could both turn to the little bottle that they are jointly holding and say “Thanks, little buddy” or something equally ridiculous.
Second: market it to women as something other than a bottle of Liquid Cuckold. At least the guy in the commercial seems to have some enthusiasm about the conjugal bed. She sounds like the quintessential “I love my husband but he doesn’t excite me in bed” woman from Clichéd Fiction Publishing, Inc. Show her being enthusiastic about sex with him because of the product, not about the product itself.
I don’t know. Maybe the commercial is exactly what they want. Maybe the disaffected spouse angle is the way to go. That just sounds so sad to me.
Alternately, they could just make the slogan “KY Intense: it’s like Altoids in lube form… yeah, you know exactly what we’re talking about!”
Fuck, I’d buy it.
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