Keep your pants on

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Nov 17, 2002 | by Peter Ross

IT'S a rare advert that can send me cock-eyed with laughter, but the campaign for Yves Saint Laurent's new fragrance for men has taken the challenge a bit too literally. Despite having a name like a motorway (associated smells: child sick, exhaust fumes, Ginster's pasties) M7 is being sold via a photograph of a naked French bloke, un homme sans thong. And possibly with an eye to the festive market he is reminiscent of a Christmas turkey, legs akimbo, a stray chipolata dangling between the glistening haunches. Don't even ask about the roast potatoes.

Now, while it's always refreshing to see a taboo being broken, the question must be asked: why, why, in le nom de dieu, why? Unlike the famous Sophie Dahl portrait for Opium, YSL's advert is just not sexy. Surely everyone knows you can always rely on a penis to ruin a photograph? They won't stay still for one thing.

Okay, I'm straight so the campaign isn't particularly aimed - if that's the right word - at me, but the only thing the full-frontal male form is a good advert for is lesbianism. It's a simple question of aesthetics. And anyway, the French banned our beef; why should we have to stomach theirs?

In fact we don't. British magazines aren't carrying the M7 ad in its complete form so you will have to buy a French magazine if you want to see Samuel de Cubber, the model who donated his organ, in full fig. I think the French do this sort of thing just to keep up their reputation as priapic "Every night, Josephine" types. In any case, the advert may be the last hurrah of libertarian France as the right-wing government cracks down on what it sees as immorality, tilting at the windmills of the Moulin Rouge and attempting to remove porn from TV.

The vice is tightening on vice.

It's hard to know quite how to feel about this. On the one hand it seems a shame that the country who published Joyce's Ulysses, made a national hero of Serge Gainsbourg, and gave the world the word "sadism" should start censoring itself. On the other hand, have you seen French telly? I spent three weeks in France when I was 12, an impressionable age, and I was certainly impressed by the way they advertise cheese. Not for them little red balls of edam singing like a doo-wop band. No, the French prefer to flog their fromage with footage of a couple going at it like cheese knives then chilling out over a wedge of brie. In Britain, we'd give that a red triangle never mind a Dairylea one.

Of course, to a greater or lesser degree of explicitness all countries use these tactics to sell products; the French don't have a monopoly on sex (can you imagine French Monopoly? "Do not pass Go or collect 100 francs, go directly to the Bastille, where you will be decapitated by an angry mob of toothless old crones.")Actually, I'd like to see advertising agencies banned from using sexuality to shift products just to see what sort of ads we would end up with. What if a Flake was just a Flake? Chocolate manufacturers could embrace honesty with slogans like "Okay, it makes you fat but we're all going to die anyway so get stuck in", "Give your diet the finger, have a KitKat", or "Period causing you a world of pain? Have a Galaxy and watch EastEnders."

The fact is that 'sex sells' is not the truism we take it for. I really don't think that people are as obsessed by it as the media generally lead us to believe. And believe me, this idea that men think about sex every seven seconds is patently nonsense.

In the name of research I tried to think about it every seven seconds and thought about sandwiches by mistake, which got me thinking about Scooby-Doo, which led me to remember how awful that film was, but then it occurred that Sarah Michelle Gellar was in it, which kind of brought me back to sex, but then about two minutes had passed and I was hungry and there were those sandwiches again.

Perhaps I'm not representative of the average adult male, but I have a hunch we're more concerned with filling our stomachs than propagating the human race. Who wants to hide the salami when you can eat it?

Which brings me neatly back to Samuel de Cubber and his petit monsieur. Yves Saint Laurent doubtless think the campaign is provocative and edgy, just the thing to sell bucketloads of posh scent, however I think they may have made a big mistake. M7, I assure you, is a very nice fragrance but no one loves the smell of nae pants in the morningu Email Peter Ross at peter.ross@sundayherald.com