When the television first became available to consumers, it cost an average family several months of savings to own one. But they all would have destroyed their precious idiot-boxes with more prejudice than they would a Nazi-Commie with a sour disposition if they knew what today's TV would look like.
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| Above: Mad sexual tension. |
To an audience that got the heebie-jeebies from seeing a married couple share a bed or use the word "pregnant", even our modern commercials would seem like Satan had emerged from the television to poop in their eyes and make their sons gay.
Don't believe me? Here are just a few examples of the 50's-mentality-destroying ads we all know and love.
-Here's an ad for
Charmin Toilet Paper. Everybody poops, right? But imagine talking about the tiny scraps of TP that get stuck to your butthole during an episode of
I Love Lucy. Do you think it would make the audience uncomfortable? Does a cartoon bear s#!t in the woods and then get picky about the toilet paper it uses?
-This commercial for
Always Infinity stands in for all feminine hygiene product ads. Back when television was new, guys knew nothing about vaginas. Ask your grandpa when he learned about vaginas. Go ahead. Never, right? And he had to have had sex at least once. Nowadays, thanks to television even guys know about periods. They cause women to dress in white and spill blue liquid all over the place. Which is why you never buy blue Gatorade for a woman when she's on her period and why they warn you about stained sheets during that time of month.
-Even
Viagra and other pills for boners get TV time. I'm sure a soldier returning from World War II would love to hear, "Has your peen stopped working? Well here's a pill that'll make it roar like a Howitzer. Now if it works for more than four hours, leave your house, go to the public hospital with your rager, and tell a doctor to take a look at it." That's treating the troops with the dignity they deserve.
-Of course, if your husband isn't willing to take the Miracle-Gro pill, there's always the
Trojan Triphoria to blow your hair back. Yes, it's a commercial for a masturbation device. And it's advertised as being fun for guys, too. In an era where PDA was limited to Ralph Kramden threatening to punch his wife to the moon (Google
The Honeymooners, youngsters), I doubt the average TV viewer could have conceived of a machine to have sex with, let alone have the creativity to find out how to please a man with it.
-The commercials for
Ashley Madison surprise even me. Yes, little ol' me living in the modern age with period and vibrator commercials. It's a website where married people can go to have affairs. Surely, adultery happened back in the day, but I doubt anyone would dream that it would become a business with a
School House Rock style commercial. But time makes fools of us all.
In the future, who knows. Maybe our ridiculous commercials about bodily functions, Girls Gone Wild DVDs, condoms, and sex toys will seem as wholesome as commercials for apple pie. Sexy, filthy apple pie.
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