Alright. I work in middle school which normalizes a lot of edgy behavior, but when TB was walking around today with a container of Axe and I had to ask him to put it away, his cohorts turned the conversation around to Chocolate Axe. “My dad wears that,” BT said, “but it doesn’t smell at all like chocolate.”
“Chocolate Axe, what?!” I said.
“Yea it’s a cologne. The ads are pretty stupid.”
On the Axe’s website it states that, “A way to a woman’s heart is with chocolate. Use AXE Dark Temptation body spray and be her hunk of man candy.”
Right now I need to be in a PhD program somewhere in a gender and race studies program deconstructing Chocolate Axe ads, that is if I could stomach the research. It would make a multi-volumed dissertation. There is so much here I barely know where to begin. In fact, I wasn’t going to post this video of the ad at all because it is so unsettling to me, yet I was curious how those of you in blogland would react to it.
So feedback, please. Unpacking this ad is going to take a team effort.
It’s obvious. A poor attempt at using chocolate and sex to sell cologne. Actually quite gross as it approaches limb loss, cannibalism, self abuse, inappropriate sex. But my guess is the youth of today (OMG I sound like my parents) are tickled by it.