We all know how advertising works. Sex sells. "Buy our car. It'll get you women." "Try our aftershave. You'll have to fight the ladies off." And so it goes. Get your hair colored if you're gray, or get it styled if you're not. Wear clothes from this store. Buy just about any product at all because it will make you irresistible to women. One wonders if there are limits.
In the last week of 2008, the Valley of the Sun opened its light rail system. Okay, it's not much. It goes through downtown and maybe a quarter of the way into both the east and west valleys. Still, it is mass transit. I rode it when it opened. Sure, it was an hour and a half commute for what used to be an hour's drive, but I was doing my part. It saved gas, wear and tear on the vehicle, that sort of thing. And it dropped me off within walking distance of work. So I rode it. At the end of May my place of work moved. What was an hour and a half would have become a two and a half hour commute ... minimum. No, five hours commuting on top of the 9-10 hour work day wasn't acceptable. So I'm driving again.
Now the light rail has started a new ad campaign. The TV commercial starts with a debonair young man walking down the sidewalk, greeting all the ladies with a suave smile. At one point he pulls a flower from his coat and hands it to a passing beauty. A couple of lovely young ladies are enthralled, following a little behind ... until he gets to his ride. It's a full-sized SUV. If they had dumped a truckload of cow manure on the fellow, it would have explained the look of disgust on the ladies' faces. But the announcer had another explanation. "Do your part for the environment," he told us. "Ride the light rail." And the two young girls mobbed another fellow getting ready to get on the train.
You see, if you do your part for the environment, it makes you irresistible to the opposite sex. Everyone knows that. How could you doubt it?
My wife looked at me quizzically and I reassured her, "In the whole time I was riding the train I never had a single time when pretty young things gushed at me about how sexy I was for working to save the planet."
Are there limits? Apparently not. The question for me is how much cow manure are we willing to buy about what makes someone irresistible to the opposite sex? Are there limits? I think not.
8 comments:
Oh great. My husband takes a bus and then a light rail train to and from his job each work day. I had never stopped to think about how sexy and alluring that might be to the women who know! And gee, I'm a woman! I guess I should have been thinking that all along myself! He HAS lost some weight from all that walking to and from the bus stops. If he starts tucking flowers into his coat to hand out, I'll worry. :o)
In a June copy of our city's newspaper, there was a full page ad announcing a "New product, now available!" At the top of the page it said "WANTED 37 People to try new Digital Technology in Discreet "Sexy" Hearing Instruments". I actually saved that page and am looking at it right now because I got such a kick out of the fact that even HEARING AIDS can supposedly be "sexy" now.
"Hey Baby, check out my new aid. It's the newest in digital technology!"
Hearing aids? I knew it. There are no limits to what they'll try to sell with sex.
I'm sure the mega-churches aren't far behind.
When we get to "selling the Gospel" with sex, we're done. (To be completely fair, I can't imagine even mega-churches using sex to sell the Gospel.)
David, I attend a church that, over the span of only about 20 years, became what's now called a "mega church". I can't imagine sex EVER being used there to sell people on devoting their lives to serving and loving God and people.
It started out a small gathering of only 12 people, then proceeded to grow like wild fire because of a mighty act of The Holy Spirit. I'm not defensive, just explaining. Mega churches probably most often become "mega" because of God moving mightily among the people in them. Our pastor was just a soft-spoken, humble man with a heart for God, sharing and reminding us of precious truths and talking about things like God's restoration, power, and love.
Hopefully this particular gathering of believers and all other Christian "mega churches" will always keep entertainment and other lures used by the world outside of their walls and stay focused on bringing people into new lives with Christ, growing in their relationships with God, and on fellowship. And, by the way, this church I attend has zero push for membership, which I find refreshingly unique. We figure we became members of THE church and worldwide body of Jesus Christ the minute we decided to follow after Him, so it is not necessary to then join a particular denomination.
Free classes are offered for people to be delivered from devastating addictions to pornography and sex in many churches these days, so let's pray that, mega churches or not, nobody in church leadership positions are ever foolish enough to use sex to "sell" something inside of them. We get more than enough of that outside of church.
Sherry: "Mega churches probably most often become 'mega' because of God moving mightily among the people in them."
I would guess (hope) that many churches that become mega-churches got that way by the moving of the Spirit. I do know that a significant number do become mega-churches by employing marketing techniques (including the entertainment approach, focusing on "felt needs", and more) or by having a charismatic preacher, but it would be a mistake to lump them all together that way.
Good thing that you go to a good church.
Yeh, I definitely should have used the word "hopefully" instead of "probably" in that statement. I'm certainly aware of pastors being inundated (whether they want it or not!) with "junk mail" and other sources of information on how to implement "proven techniques" to make their churches grow. As a result, it seems so many have become so much the same.
Just stay with plain old regular and decaf? Or get a coffee cart with lattes and pastries, and profits going to homeless shelters like so many of the other churches in the area do these days? Will our piano, organ, and song leader suffice? Or shall we "update" and get guitars, drums, and a worship team, drop the hymns, and go primarily with modern praise songs? Are we meeting the needs of every age group? If not, how can we???
It's got to be hard to keep your priorities straight 100% of the time when, by the standards of many, a large or growing church is too often considered a "successful" church. If I were pastoring a congregation, I'm pretty sure I'd want the people in it to desire to come back, and not just in order to receive a paycheck. I think it would be hard for me to get my flesh completely out of the way and not want people to like both me and the place I'd been put to work. Besides wanting "my" flock to be out there touching a hurting world with God's love, I would probably hope they were out there telling people what a good place to grow their church is, too. As an under-shepherd, I'd want people to have interesting, life-changing messages, enthusiastic youth leaders, wise counselors, good music, challenging home Bible studies, and warm times of fellowship in camps and retreats. If other people had good ideas for these things, I might be interested in hearing them, then implementing some of them. But using sex to "sell" anything in a church that identifies itself as "Christian"? Let's hope not, ever.
The Hooters restaurant in our area went out of business only a couple years after its grand opening. I usually feel bad when new businesses don't do well, but my girlfriends and I were fine when this one went down. Ah, too bad. We think it's crass to have a restaurant named after (and with focus on) a slang term for a human female body part. And we DO have a sense of humor, but not for sex being used to sell food.
There is a beer commercial on TV where the man at the table makes me look like a young whippersnapper in comparison. But the gray-haired fellow is drinking the right brand of product, see, so the 20-something beauties hang all over him.
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