As if Viagra and Cialis don’t make guys feel bad enough about how they perform in the sack, here comes Brawny Man to sow the seeds of sexual inadequacy in a domestic nightmare. The second spot down on Brawny Man’s Web site (you’ll need Windows Media Player) opens on a couple in bed, watching the hunky Brawny Man on TV preparing a birthday cake for his sweetheart. “Why can’t you be like that Brawny Man?” the wife mutters absentmindedly. Disgusted, Mr. Inadequate rolls over and into a dreamland—the tiled kitchen of the 12-foot-tall Mr. Brawny himself, who promptly slings a suggestive dollop of whipped cream onto our hero’s cheek, then wipes it off roughly with a paper towel, uttering in an Al Green bass, “Brawny will take care of that.” In a fit of anger, the scrawny husband swings at Brawny Man, who calls him a “bad little boy” and lifts him onto the counter, as chicka-chicka-baum music plays in the background. Finally, Brawny Man gives the guy an oversized icing bag with which to decorate the cake—as the wife wakes up to find her man decorating the bathroom sink with a tube of toothpaste.
This goes beyond a mere ’70s lumberjack fetish (sans highway-patrol mustache). May we suggest Brawny Man has earned a bigger pedestal in the pantheon of erotic—and homoerotic—advertising?
—Posted by Deanna Zammit
