Men lack value as revenue builders

A few years ago, I wrote and complained about men not getting equal time on television. It seemed like everything on the screen concerned the weaker sex and a secretly embarrassing tendency to develop feminine itch.

If it wasn’t two very attractive young women calmly discussing an itch, then it was one woman squirming on a chair in a business meeting wishing she’d used Preparation H for her hemorrhoids. Me too. Wishing she had, that is. That way, I wouldn’t have had to watch her squirm.

All this is bad enough, but then add in what must be the bottomless billion-dollar market for sanitary products, and it becomes obvious: men aren’t much value as consumers. Maybe one of the reasons is: Men don’t have a hydraulic system that falls apart every 28 days.

The truth is, if a tractor hydraulic system worked the way that feminine insides worked, we’d fix it. Women, however, have been saddled since time began with what has to be considered kind of a primitive way to lay an egg.

Even chickens could be accused of having a better life. I suppose all this is going to fall by the wayside once the new pill that stretches their 28 days out to three months comes out. Pretty quickly, we’ll be seeing those ads, one would suppose.

What men need is to go bald every 28 days, because male baldness is the only real market that industry has targeted, and it isn’t big enough to really compete with anything women need.

Maybe if the old male prostate went creaky and wept some noxious emissions that required periodical mopping up, we’d be more on the minds of the advertising geniuses, and could get equal air time. We’re not salesworthy, bottom line.

Admittedly, there was a furious burst of advertising activity a while back when Viagra came out, but it didn’t last too long, not even when their competition came out with something that they said was better.

How could something that increases erectile function be better? That’s like saying someone is “more pregnant.” Better in this case seems kind of irrelevant. The bottom line is: seven Viagra pills are consumed every second in the USA, according to something I read that pulled sales figures together and divided it by the number of men in this country. Some guy somewhere must be using eight.

Maybe what men need to do is concentrate on the things that we do well, like having heart attacks.

We could work on having one once a month. That’d give Madison Avenue a good working goal.

“Men! That monthly heart attack got you down? Does it make you feel ‘not so masculine? Buy our new Kotex cholesterol pads.”

The ad could go on to say: “No other cholesterol-absorbing pad will give you the assurance you need to go out there and eat greasy fried food and drink beer every night.”

Now that’s an ad. Men would jump at something like that. “I can’t be having a heart attack,” the man gasped as the early responders hit him with 40,000 volts, “I’ve been on the pad.”

It’s generally agreed that men don’t go to the doctor enough. Maybe Madison Avenue could do something about that by advertising an In-Home Cholesterol Test, or an In-Home Baldness Test. These tests would show you, even when you’re still in your twenties, whether or not you’re going to develop some of these reasons to go see your physician.

In the back of one of the magazines to which I subscribe is an advertisement that is trying to compete with women. It says: “Hernia appliances for comfort! You too can enjoy heavenly comfort night and day and at work or play! 13 million men know. Ask for our free book.”

Free book? What the hell do we need a free book for? Women’s sanitary napkins don’t advertise a free book, and that particular design and insertion problem is considerably more complicated that a bulge somewhere below your belly button.

You see, right there is the problem: Men with hernias are stupider than women with menstrual abilities. I’m truly shocked by this insinuation. I watch women parade around on television all night with high-tech bras that look like they’d need an engineering manual.

They don’t need a book, and they’re trying to assemble this gadget around not one but two bulges.

Men have to have a book to cover one little one? What would such a book say? This is the front? This is the back? What about before there was a book. Did men run around with this hernia thing on backwards, wondering why it didn’t work? Why they didn’t feel so fresh?

So here’s the deal: For every feminine ad, I want a masculine one. Everytime I see a push-up bra, I want some guy with a big beer belly parading around in his underwear.