Things Are Getting Interesting

Drive through any urban enclave and be seduced by the sexy-chic, beautiful people begging for your attention in the Remy Martin ads. Unless you’re blind or totally oblivious, you can’t miss them because they’re everywhere-- plastered all over bill boards and bus stops.
There are two ads. One with two women, one Black and one White and the Black woman has a chain in her mouth that extends from the White woman’s neck. The other features a Black man with two women of color. What’s interesting about these advertisements is hint at a funky kind of fluid sexuality that’s permeating our sexually-repressed-but-let’s-pretend-like-we’re not society.
It’s been said that one of the most popular male sexual fantasies is to have sex with two women and a woman’s sexual fantasy is to have sex with another woman. So, it seems that Remy Martin is capitalizing on these fantasies by pushing into the consciousness of certain aspects of society through its $3.8 million dollar ad campaign that is focused in five key areas: New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago and Miami with the brand’s core target market being “influential, social and urban males, ages 25 to 35.”
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Supposedly the tagline: “Things Are Getting Interesting” is a “metaphor for an exclusive place, an underground lounge, where multicultural people mix and mingle, according to Roberto Cruz, brand director for Remy Martin Cognac USA said in an online article on promomagazine.com. I guess the definition of mixing and mingling is being taken to a whole new level.
The more my psyche is assaulted with these images, the more bothered I am by them. They reinforce the stereotype of African-American people as hypersexual and animalistic. If the ads truly denote a place where multicultural meet, then where are the other men? Why does the Black woman have the chain between her teeth? I guess I should give them credit for progress because she is the one holding the chain as opposed to the one being chained. Last, but not least, the ads blatantly lie about our evolving sexuality.
In our homophobic, paternalistic culture we are sending the message that sex between two women is ok because men egoistically believe that the only thing missing from the sandwich is the meat. And as long as a man feels that he can insert himself (pun intended) between two women, then all is well in the world.
Well, it may seem like “things are getting interesting” but it's really much of the same ol’ same ol.