Channel surfing the other night I came across something that I hadn’t seen for quite awhile. No, not Mexican midget wrestling; you can catch that on LA cable access Fridays at 2AM. I saw a Bowflex ad and I was a little shocked. This ad was well … I don’t quite know how to say this…straight. This made me more than a little nostalgic for those good ol’ man-on-man softcore commercials from the 80’s and 90’s. Now those of you old enough to remember “Frankie Say…” t-shirts surely also remember these spots. The young fair-haired man-child clad only in a headband, red gym shorts, tennis shoes and baby oil goes through a series of muscle flexing exercises while an announcer extols the virtues of the machine in his best Barry White basso. Then after nearly ten minutes of slow pans across taut, glistening man flesh, some sweaty girl enters holding a towel to frighten all the gay away. I’m sure that for 10 or 12 people this ad was an informative pitch for an expensive piece of exercise equipment. For the rest of us it was in fact gay porn. And for a kid growing up in southeastern Virginia the closest he would get to the real thing until he got out of town.
Having made it out of town the Bowflex boy faded from my memory. That was until 7 or so years ago when the company ran a new infomercial. We again had a shirtless young man (much more muscular than his predecessor) demonstrating the new and improved machine but this time instead of the ultra masculine voice-over we had a hunky authority figure explaining the benefits of resistance training. Now I’m sure that the folks at Bowflex and their advertising agency intended these men to be seen as doctor/patient, coach/athlete, or trainer/client, which is no doubt how some people saw it. Yours truly, and many other slightly pervy people, knew that this wasn’t as much coach/athlete as it was daddy/boy. Space doesn’t allow a full explanation of this dynamic so to those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about…ask your gay friends.
The new ads currently airing caught me off guard not in spite of all the previous homoeroticism but because of it. This was not your gay uncle’s Bowflex infomercial. This was straight people— straight, fat, white people to be exact. Instead of eye-catching beautiful people of either sex, you have Mr. and Mrs. Strip Center talk about how much weight they’ve lost as a result of thrice weekly workouts. But they saved the best (or worst) for last: a fat piggy man who is now a thin douche bag looks into the camera and says,
My fat clothes? I give them to my fat friends.
It is an amazing transformation, a physical transformation anyway. I just can’t figure out how he got such a large piece of apparatus into his trailer home.
Now I’m sure that this new tact on behalf of Bowflex sells a great deal more exercise equipment and that, in the cyber age, boy-loving-boys in the hinterlands aren’t looking to infomercials for daydream fodder, but the sentimental part of me misses the good old days when the guys in weight loss commercials were people who already worked out 5 days a week, hadn’t eaten a carbohydrate since they were 12 and knew that a layer of baby oil expertly applied was all that stood between a 15 year old boy and ecstasy.
Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles. He has no idea why.
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October 30th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Wow, you are pissed at the “thin douche bag” hogging the infomercial minutes. I recall their being a greased God in the new ad too. No? Although I could understand being upset about having your porn sporadically interrupted by Richard Simmons.
November 5th, 2009 at 3:36 am
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June 26th, 2010 at 6:27 pm
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July 2nd, 2010 at 1:51 pm
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July 4th, 2010 at 7:15 am
Brian Page
Thanks but some things here seems strange to me. Have a good Sunday anyway.