Eminem's dilemma ... The Spice Girls' Tesco campaign
Watching the trailer to the new St Trinian's film, I did what I always do when presented with an array of women. I started pondering which one I might pursue. I realise, now, how pathetic this sounds, but I might never have caught myself in the act, as it were, if the women were not dressed as schoolgirls. There is nothing as shaming as feeling that one might be a pervert. I felt dirty for hours: right up until my mind began wandering again and I had to choose between Alesha and Flavia on Strictly Come Dancing, the models of the Marks and Spencer advert and the cast of Sister Act.
Why would a fairly level-headed, happily married, forty-year-old have such a moronic inner-life? All I can say is, I am not alone. Eminem complained "I can't figure out which Spice Girl I want to impregnate." At a TV award ceremony, Jerry Seinfeld debated aloud his choice between Miss USA and Miss Universe, saying: "I didn't know whether to go for the entire nation or the galaxy." On Friends, Ross Geller laminated his list of the five female celebrities he wanted to sleep with. The New Orleans singer Ernie K Doe is so confused in his song Here Come the Girls that he complains it's a doggone shame that he cannot have all of them. Boots use Doe's song in their Christmas advert which strikes me as a peculiar Christmas message for the women of Britain: you are all desirable, yet essentially interchangeable. In economic terms, it suggests that Boots' customers are an elastic commodity with a high-degree of fungibility. Like beer.
It is exhausting to be an idiot all of the time, but at least every other man appears to have the same problem. I suspect our compulsion to deliberate and select never goes away. There is no moment of maturity: except perhaps the maturity of knowing when to keep quiet. This article has raised a number of difficult choices, and though I have pondered all of them long and deep, I will draw a veil over my final decisions.
