Epic Failure

This company has been advertising on the Yahoo! Sports pages for a couple of weeks now. The advertisements are no more or no less annoying than any others and generally I disregard them because I'm not in the market for a hot young mistress to make all my money evaporate and ruin my marriage. Besides, my wife is pretty hot, so a hot girlfriend on the side would be superfluous.

But, of course, there are men who seem to want that exact sort of thing. And this company claims offer that sort of a connection. So while it's a little bit unseemly, there's apparently money to be made making that sort of thing happen -- all it takes is a lack of shame about what you do for a living.

So I'm reading a story about the Milwaukee Brewers' pitching staff today when the "Seductive Search" advertisement shows up featuring a bit of eye candy, an attractive young woman who -- waitaminute, what the hell is wrong with her lip?

I see two possibilities here. First, maybe she has something like a cleft lip. Now, people who have physical abnormalities like cleft lips should have as much of a shot at getting love and/or sex as anyone else. If the model does in fact have a cleft lip, I wish her well in her pursuit of those things. I'm not criticizing her, I'm criticizing the advertisement. Indeed, the company should not hesitate to include this woman as a potential match for a customer who indicates a willingness to meet her.

My apologies those Readers who have or know people who have cleft lips, but advertisements sell fantasies. A shallow rich dude looking for a pretty young thing is not also looking to stretch his definition of "sexy;" he wants to have his fantasy of a sexually satisfying woman made real via the introduction he's paying the service a pretty penny for. In exchange for that money, he wants someone who he can show off to his male friends and get their instant approval. Unfortunately for people who have cleft lips, means adherence to a particular model of female beauty, of which facial symmetry is a very significant component.

With all that said, I don't think this young lady has a cleft lip. So the second possibility, much more likely in my mind, is that she's biting her lip because someone told her it's winsome and sexy when girls do that -- that it indicates a pensive longing that only the man responding to the advertisement can satisfy. She doesn't look like a pretty girl in a sexy pose to me -- she looks like a pretty girl making a dorky face.

And here's the amazing part: not only the model, but also the photographer, and also the graphic artist who put the ad together, and also the ad seller, all thought that picture was what they were looking for. Out of the surely hundreds of photographs of the model available, this was the one they all chose.

If that's the case, I'm calling this an epic failure.