The Tragedy Is That You Can't Touch Her Boobs. Bourbon?

Here is a slightly Dworkin-y blog. But! I happened upon it today (thank you, Google Reader), and it did shed some light on a rather lovely conversation between Jim Beam and the (Australian) Ad Standards Bureau. It turns out that a lot of female types got all riled up and protested this ad:

I guess they thought it implied that being lesbian was a "tragedy" or something? I don't know where they got that. Here, Jim Beam explains the ad's rich subtext:

In 'The Tragedy' TVC a beautiful girl who is dreamily attractive to any man turns out not to be attracted to men at all, but instead prefers other women. To most men this is the ultimate tragedy, in the same way that Jim Beam is the ultimate bourbon.

The Ad Standards Bureau mulled this over, probably whilst smoking heavily and drinking Old-Fashioneds and trying to hide their affairs with their secretaries from their wives, and came back with the following response.

The Board then considered whether the advertisement breached Section 2.1 of the Code dealing with discrimination and vilification... the label at the end, "The Tragedy," was not intended to mean that it was a tragedy generally for women to be lesbians, but that such an attractive woman was not available to heterosexual men.

Oh, well, I guess that's okay, THANK YOU FOR CLEARING THAT ONE UP.

Anyway, there are a lot of ads in this campaign, including "The Ultimate Neighbors" (spoiler: they're naked chicks), "The Ultimate Girlfriend," who doesn't care that her boyfriend is ugly, rarely wants to see her, and patronizes sex workers, and "The Ultimate Stalker," who, as you might guess, is a lady who follows her ex-boy around a lot. (Silly girl! A Jim Beam man doesn't even want to spend time with his girlfriend when they're still going out.) The Board ultimately pulled "The Stalker," as they thought it might encourage more women to, you know, stalk, but as for the rest of it, they reflected that, "while deliberately chauvinist, [it] did not of itself discriminate or vilify women generally."

These distinctions are so important, wouldn't you say?

Here, for your enjoyment, is "The Girlfriend."

Given this woman's utter indifference to the guy she's dating, and her enthusiasm for anything that directs his sexual or social attentions away from her, I like to imagine that she's about to come out as a "tragedy" any day now.