Image of jeans looks increasingly threadbare

I almost always read Kevin Myers's column. To be as prolific as he is and still manage to amuse, entertain, disturb or raise the blood pressure 20 points on a regular basis is quite an achievement.

Although we both write for this newspaper, I have met him only once, when we were panellists on Questions and Answers. During the interval, Kevin was telling anybody who would listen that Nora Wall was innocent. This was days before her name was cleared. Given that the rest of the world, including most journalists, were busy at the time gathering wood to burn her at the stake, seeing someone willing to stand by with a few churns of water was impressive.

Of course, he can be an annoying so-and-so. Once I wrote about a suggestion made by Finola Bruton that the words "deeply offensive" be banned from public discourse. I half-wasted it by adverting to it only at the end of my column. Kevin took the suggestion and made it the centrepiece of a brilliantly polemical piece. The swine.

All of this is just a long prelude to saying that I thought one of his columns this week missed the point wonderfully. He was talking about the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland upholding 27 complaints about Levi's and Diet Coke advertisements. With his usual restraint, he launched a savage attack on whingeing feminists, sexually repressed prudes and, for good measure, Muslims.

Kevin is wrong about the advertisements. They should have been banned not because they are so offensive, but because they are so boring, so predictable and so utterly without any shred of originality.

Picture it; twentysomethings sitting around in an advertising agency are asked for a cutting-edge campaign to promote Levi's, and what do they come up with?

Semi-clad, semi-anorexic young things pawing themselves and each other. They should have been fired for churning out a string of cliches. Jeans equals sexiness equals skinniness equals street cred. Yawn, yawn. The Diet Coke ad comes into the same category. Drink Diet Coke and be gorgeous. As my kids would say, yeah, right.

All these advertisements show is that they have all the originality and creativity of Young Fine Gael. Remember those advertisements a few years back featuring an amorous couple in bed? For ages I thought they were for Haagen-Dazs until I realised it was actually Young Fine Gael exhorting new voters to "make the first time the best" by voting in a European referendum. Sorry, lads, but not even sex can make the European Union sexy.

How about this for a really original campaign? One of our rookie assemblyline workers produced a pair of jeans one day with skewed seams, tilted pockets and no belt loops. The line manager wanted to fire him, but we promoted him to chief creative director, gave him $100,000 a year, named the new look "engineered jeans" and have been flogging them to you ever since.

Or what about this? Levi Jeans. A few pence worth of rivets. A few pounds worth of denim. Fifteen quid tops for manufacture, distribution and marketing. The other forty-something quid you pay is for that little red tab at the back.

Kevin describes a brave new world where "Most young people today become sexually active in their teens and, moreover, inhabit a culture of overt, explicit sexuality, in which virtually no personal conduct is not discussed, even if not always experienced". This he contrasts with the "prudes, cranks and sexually dysfunctional" few who would object to these advertisements.

Some teenagers are sexually active, though by no means all are. But is it such a wonderful advance? Once, sexual activity was stigmatised. Now it is vulgarised to such an extent that it is virtually meaningless. This is not a nirvana of sexual freedom and health for young people.

They remain as vulnerable and insecure as ever. I was told of a case in a 14-year-old's class where a boy, offered sex by a classmate, was unable to perform. He had become severely depressed because in her mirth at his dilemma the girl had told everyone, and he could not cope with his new nickname, Droopy.

Similarly, this wonderfully open and advanced culture has seen spectacular rises in sexually-transmitted disease. This includes chlamydia, which wreaks havoc on the female reproductive system. It is the main preventable cause of ectopic pregnancy. Bet that's not a teen topic for discussion.

Kevin quite rightly makes the point that "a society which is all-inclusive, which says we value all your opinions equally, is not a society at all, but a school playground full of feuding cliques".

But this does not mean that certain groups such as Muslims do not have the right to object to the prevailing mores of the society. No one has the right to impose a religion-based morality on a society, but they have every right to argue vigorously in the public square, and to have their arguments judged on their merits, not on the group making them.

As for Ireland being "a secular Christian society which, after all, compels no one to stay"; given that some, at least, of our new-found Islamic population are asylum-seekers, they do not have a whole lot of choices as to where they go.

Kevin objected strenuously a few months back when he felt Nuala O'Faolain had taken a cheap shot at his anti-feminist views when she said that "90 per cent of women-haters in this world don't hate women at all. They just want more and better sex for themselves". He inquired as to which group he belonged to: the 90 per cent whose hatred of women was motivated by sexual need, or the 10 per cent with unspecified and possibly more sinister motivation?

Yet where does that leave consigning all those who objected to the advertisements to the category of "prudes, cranks and the sexually dysfunctional"? I suspect those millions who, according to Kevin, did not object to the advertisements may not be so much illustrating their sexual advancement as their numbed boredom at such pseudo-daring advertising.

bobrien@irish-times.ie