Cars and Girls: Sexy or Vulgar? (Pictures)

Remember when cigarette ads were sexy? Remember when you went to movies and you saw those incredible Monaco-yacht-filled-harbor backdrops to slick and snowy Stuyvesant ads or black and shiny John Player Special choppers and race cars? Well, we look back at that with a little nostalgia perhaps, but the bullshit marketing has been superseded by scientific logic: Scientists have calculated that each cigarette cuts on average 11 minutes off the life of a male smoker.

I saw an old full page newspaper advertisement for LIFE cigarettes - the newspaper was mid 80's. Now going that far back it's clearly ludicrous. Cigarettes called Life, with ridiculous copy: Light up your Life, or Get the most out of Life - smoke Life. In the same way, these associations - cars and girls being sexy work right now. The picture above with the large gas guzzling Chrysler is sexy, right? Actually, it's incredibly dumb. But it will take time for the zeitgeist to transform. Right now, driving is dumb. It fucks up the atmosphere, and it's propelling this planet into war and absolute ruin. Our absolute dependence on fossil fuels - which allows us to run suburbia, drive to work and run planetwide city highway systems - that's in jeapordy. It's not sexy. It's not a sexy idea.

In a sleepwalking society of course it IS sexy. And in a few years we will see a lot of cars the size of SMART pods. These bigger flashier ships will be FORD: First On Garbage Dump.

Of course it will take a while. In the same way that those Peter Stuyvesant ads about skiing the high life are STILL so seductive, it will take away to cleanse away the marketing bullshit around cars. If you've seen the BMW M3 ad you'll get what I am talking about. What is that commercial trying to say exactly? It's the perfect example of collective insanity, and this mantra: it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to look good.
When you don't have enough to eat, and you can't go anywhere, looks are the least important thing. It's logical but not necessarily a natural way of thinking. Unfortunately.