Thanks primarily to the twin meteorites of feminism and the internet, the extinction of The Lad seems now to be near-complete. Though undiluted lads will always lurk in corners, plotting their return, it is no longer the done thing to openly read a copy of Nuts while swaggering crotch-first down the street, calling passing women “treacle’”.
This is progress of a kind. But wait, hush, hold on. There is a victim here: one who for 30 years has depended on lad culture for life, like a fly feasting on excrement. This victim is not Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson, it is Lynx. No longer able to market itself as it did in days of yore, it has had to radically change tack – one more gripe about an ad implying that what supermodels really like is pale nerds with gonads that smell like Lynx Africa and they might sink without trace.
Swallowing their pride, they claim in the advert for their Magic range that physical attractiveness does not matter, as you may have something else that sets you apart: a suit, a brain, a massive nose. In a commendable milestone for Lynx, the ad even features a nascent gay relationship.
This poses a moral quandary: which of Lynx’s Janus-like faces is the real one? Are we witnessing a confession of sorts, a sincere plea that all of the previous behaviour was born of a desperate desire to look cool? Or are Lynx merely cynically hiding their inner knuckle-dragger? Myriad questions abound, but as yet there is only darkness where answers should lie. It is a truly terrifying world we inhabit if even massive corporations trying to sell us things cannot be trusted.
