Surely you’re familiar with the classic comedic concept of the double-entendre?
My apologies, my “smart ass” is stuck on ON.
‘Sucks’ being used to mean ‘is bad, is repugnant, stinks’, is based on the assumption that oral sex is degrading, etc.
It might be based on that, but like all languages, spoken English is alive. It mutates, with words moving away from their original meanings. “Sucks” just means “bad” to most people now, including me.
“Garcon, there is a hair in my wine!”
I suppose, but the use of sexually-connected terms to denote repugnance annoys me, even when it’s fairly remote. Which, of course, it often isn’t. In addition, some of these terms especially target those with nonstandard sexuality – ‘sucks’ being derogatory not only because it refers to oral sex but because it’s associated with homosexuality, which I think makes the usage especially questionable.
Is it possible the “degrading” part was the implication that a MAN would be performing oral sex on a woman instead of the normal, natural, as-god-intended blow job he should be receiving from her?
Actually, “sucks” most likely is shortened from “sucks eggs” which has nothing to do with oral sex:
at first I thought it might be some zombie themed commercial about eating the brains about Republicans with that name but then I realized two things
There’s no Republican named Bush with a brain worth eating
There’s no Republican named Bush that anyone cares enough about to make fun of any more.
Brit comedy fans, re-watch this video imaging the subject not as she is, but as Jane from “Coupling”.
[I loved that show! Another one that ended all too quickly.]
I’m pretty sure the ad agency made this and sent a copy to the regulator without ever planning to show it anywhere. And say what you will, that’s a more effective advertising strategy than “buy our wine because it’s super-cheap and tastes of vagina”.
For the kind of people to whom sex is degrading, the penetrated, recipient party is usually held to be the more degraded. If that party is male, so much the worse; he has been turned into a female. Hence the term ‘bitch’, which started out meaning female dog and then annoying woman, was transformed in prison slang to mean ‘catamite’ and ‘exploitable person, subordinate, servant, slave, punk’. As Nietzsche observed, ‘God is in the grammar’, and here in the vocabulary as well: which God it is in this case is pretty obvious.
Whereas the advertisement we’re discussing delightfully subverts a number of those ideas. Therefore it was censored. So how far away from the poison are we really?
Or, if you are bringing this interpretation yourself, then you might be supporting your own reading. Even if we agreed that she was embarrassed, I would argue that the motivations for the embarrassment would still be very much open to interpretation. I see it as supporting my opinion that this event is symptomatic of sexual repression. This might even be lampshaded in the advert. It is statistically normal for the average person to be embarrassed even about their own sexual desires and preferences, which they do not find degrading. Perhaps she feels a deep fondness for oral sex which she is embarrassed to find asserting itself when she feels pressured to remain “closeted”. In this case, which would be more degrading? The act of oral sex, or the coercion to entertain the value judgements of others?
As an attempt at humor goes, I am not much of a fan of this sort of double (or more!) entendre, although I acknowledge that it can be great for either bypassing or provoking prudes - as seemed to have been the case here. I find the tendency to be a result of or a commentary on repression, rather than a cause of it.
I don’t think it should be banned, but it’s a bit of a crap joke. There’s not really any connection to the visual gag and double entendre in the build up - it just looks like they had a couple of ideas and didn’t bother to develop them.
I did… and lol’d again. That was a great show for its very short run/
