Gawker: infidelity

Rental Car Ads Are The Intellectual Issue Of Our Time

Hamilton Nolan — Wed, 07 May 2008 10:06:19 EDT

Stanley Fish—public intellectual, Times blogger, and man of secret ethics—has been doing a lot of thinking about rental car ads, and their relation to cheating on your wife and/ or gay lover. "The genius of the commercials is that they foreground the sexuality that informs the relationship between the car owner and the object of his/her affection," Fish wrote. That's what I'm saying! Because many rental car ads play on the theme of leaving your old car for a new one, Fish believes they are deserving of deep deconstruction. About his favorite Avis ad, he concludes "Lust is lust and betrayal is betrayal, whether the relationship is gay or straight." Others might just like the part with the car, and the guy, and the joke. The ad, and his deep, sexy analysis of its genre, below.

Strange to say, these are not good ads precisely because they are so good. The point of a commercial is to make the viewer fall in love with the product, in this case the hot cars Avis is pimping. But the viewers of these commercials are more likely to give their affections to the product's victims, for it is from their point of view that the narrative has been presented.
While Avis's intention is, no doubt, to advance its corporate fortunes through these commercials, the image the ads project is less than flattering. Avis comes across as the supplier of temptation, the enabler of seduction, a corporate madame. Its stable of "hot cars" lure men and women to default on their responsibilities, to throw away the tried and true, to surrender to the meretricious glitter of the new. But these wiles are defeated by the sympathy we are made to feel for those who have been harmed by them.

Who would have thought that in the early years of the 21st century, advertising would give us a morality tale of such power?

Sorry Stanley. You're not quite ready for the Bobosphere.

People Feel Bad When Cheated On

Pareene — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:05:52 EDT

A partner's affair is a terrible betrayal, but did you know that it is your own personal terrorist attack? "'9/11 always reminds me of how it felt — one floor collapsing into another,' said a woman in her 40s who lives near Seattle. Another woman, writing in an Internet chat room, compared her husband's affair to the Asian tsunami of 2004, which killed a quarter of a million people." Is it possible for an entire country to have Narcissistic Personality Disorder? [NYT]

Hodgkin's Man-Vixen Also Totally Creepy

Joshua Stein — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 10:45:55 EST

Today's Page Six leads with what looks like your average "I'm a friend of Richard Johnson's" book plug item, the heartwarming story of one Robert Schimmel, a comic, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2000. Schimmel wrote a book called "Cancer on $5 a Day" and it seems mostly concerned with how to get laid whilst coping with cancer. Whatever, kind of heartwarming right? Not really! The item veers between life-affirming and creepy, like a drunk driver caroming down the moral highway in a blizzard. (The blizzard is cancer, the driver is Schimmel, and on one side of the road is the sweet release of death and on the other is the married Schimmel's banging of his daughter's best friend.)

In today's Post:

Happily, his cancer finally went into remission after a long and difficult period of treatment and things got back to normal - although there was a bizarre footnote to his ordeal. During one of his hospital stays, his daughter, Jessica, brought her boss and best friend, Melissa, to visit Schimmel and the two fell in love. The comic divorced his wife and married Melissa, who is only two years older than his daughter. Schimmel writes: "Feeling horny is life-affirming... Without sex, where does that leave us? Spending the rest of our lives photographing butterflies and picking up seashells?"

Offense to malacologists and lepidopterists aside, that is creepy kind of move to shtup your daughter's boss/friend when she accompanies your daughter to visit you in the hospital.

Plus, you know: one's wife always just hates that.

Former Sixer and current novelist-pugilist Ian Spiegelman, baruch hashem, wrote this exact same item in 2004, back when Schimmel was trying to hawk a sitcom based on the novel concept that even dying dudes can be assholes. Except Spiegelman was a little more critical (barely but still).

Daughter Jessica wasn't always such a happy camper, either. She learned about Schimmel's infidelity with her friend when he discussed it on the [Howard] Stern show. Her reaction? "She didn't talk to me for over a year."