By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 14 years ago

“Women get bored easily”

Here’s the new commercial for Axe Twist, the body spray with a smell that changes as you wear it. The ad also ran in the UK, where Axe is called Lynx (but believe me when I tell you that Axe by any other name still smells dreadful).

Voiceover: Women get bored easily. New Lynx Twist: The fragrance that changes.
This woman is getting especially bored with sexist advertising.
I suppose that the assumption that men want women to find them interesting is a step up from the assumption that men just want women to get naked right now. I’m grateful, I guess, that Axe is giving the “women throwing themselves at men” thing a rest, and implying that sexual attraction might be about something more than nudity. But did they have to do it by implying that women are fickle creatures with tiny brains and even tinier attention spans?

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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