In case you can't read the text on the photo below, it's selling, along with girl-on-girl strap-on sex shows:
"Extreme Games/Anal Ring Toss: Two girls on all fours with glow-in-the-dark sticks in their butts while you throw glow-in-the-dark hoops." And if you're good at human anal ring toss, you can win their world famous t-shirt.
This ad was in the back section of the LA Weekly. Those of you who live in LA will be familiar with the back section of the Weekly, but if you're not, it's that part of the paper always packed with all of the escort, massage, strip club and phone sex ads, along with the classifieds featuring women seeking "benefactors." Given that company, this ad fits right in. On the other hand, the front of the paper is where we can find all of the discount cosmetic surgery ads. It may be worth exploring the relationship between those ads at the front and those ads at back is. Do the customers of the front-end advertisers become the back-end advertisers?
In other words, could ads for cosmetic surgery and sexual services proliferate without the complete commodification of our bodies? As combodities, we are far more easily packaged. We are more easily stacked on shelves: purchasing decisions simplified for today's hurried comparison shopper. We are more easily sold, losing only our identities, ourselves, in the process.
This example of combodification, of the female body as object, reaches a deeply degrading new low. When women are seen as nothing but horseshoe spikes, they are no longer seen at all. The anal ring toss ploy is a marketing gimmick, a new twist on a service (lapdancing and strap-on sex) that had already become generic, absent of brand recognition and added value. The question is, how will others competing for a share of the Orange County bachelor party market try to trump this?