Below the Belt: Has Advertising Bottomed Out?

So I’m sitting there, watching the TV, not paying a whole lot of attention, when this 30ish blonde comes on.

She’s got the Lauren Bacall look, she’s leaning out on what appears to be a New York City terrace overlooking Central Park--it’s a very sophisticated setting--and she says, “My mother always told me to look at a man’s eyes first.” There’s a pause. Then she knits her eyebrows in this hip, dismissive way, and purrs, “But what did she know?”

They go to a voice-over, and it turns out I’ve been watching an ad for Sansabelt slacks. Men’s pants. And I’m thinking, huh?

Several days later, I’m watching TV. This time, a late-20ish, studious woman comes on, expressing that same soft, come-hither mood. She’s got the Carole King “Tapestry” look, holding a book, an NYU law grad maybe, and she says, “I always lower my eyes when a man passes . . .” Pause. A sly grin. “. . . to see if he’s worth following.”

Sansabelt.

Sansabelt? The pants Ed McMahon advertised for years? Your basic fat-man golfer pants, right? What are those pants doing with these women?

I see another ad: Sitting on the porch of an Outer Banks-type beach house is a wind-swept, milk-fed, apple-cheeked blonde, as fresh and clean as a barrel of rainwater. It takes a look like that to get away with saying, “I have always considered a man’s lower half his better half.”

Sansabelt.

A man’s lower half.

I am not unaware that it is common practice for a man to peer at a woman’s lower half. A car I see daily in my neighborhood has a bumper sticker that pleads, “Watch my rear end--not hers.”

Size and contour are the subject of Spinal Tap’s enthusiastic “Big Bottom,” which proclaimed, “. . . talk about mud flaps, my girl’s got ‘em.”

A woman’s lower half; this, you’ll admit, has been going on.

But gorgeous young women going on TV, telling men that they’re looking at them and looking specifically at their behinds--this is new.

“What do you think this means?” I ask my friend Mike.

“It means you are in deep trouble,” he tells me.

I’m 40 years old. I’ve had a tush all my life. Never once has it occurred to me that anyone is interested in it.

My tush is for grading.

Who knew?

“This matters to women?” I ask my wife.

“To some,” she says.

“To you?” I ask.

She grins and turns away. When she reaches the stairs, she turns back and says, “The other day I was picking up Michael at school, and one of the mothers looked at him and said, ‘That kid’s going to have great buns.’ ”

“Buns?” I ask.

“Buns,” she says.

“Michael’s 3 1/2,” I say.

Great buns!

That night, I peeked at my own buns in the mirror.

I am in deep trouble.

Jerry McCann is vice president of marketing for Jaymar-Ruby, which produces Sansabelt slacks. He freely acknowledges that his pants were floating face down in the water with everyone other than Ed McMahon.

“Younger men had zero awareness of our product, zero,” McCann says. So to establish an image with younger men, younger women were brought in. “Young men are concerned with how they look to women. We are saying women look at men and the way they’re dressed.”

The lower half?

“There is a wink about that whole issue in our advertising,” McCann concedes coyly.

The buns?

“I get nervous when people take it to the anatomical extreme,” McCann says.

As you know, Sansabelt slacks (which now come--can you believe this?--with belt loops) are not the only product being marketed on sex. Calvin Klein sells perfume with incorrigibly naked, intertwined bodies. Sometimes, when he wants to sell designer underpants, he uses semi-naked intertwined bodies. Blue jeans and cars are routinely sold on sex; many TV beer commercials are so sweaty that you have to towel off after 30 seconds.

But this Sansabelt campaign is different. Not only is it a reverse seduction--what ad agency dared fuse women with lust before?--it’s the deliberate slathering of sex to reposition a product.

These were maximum-polyester, middle-age, convention-man pants. Sansabelt was your father’s Oldsmobile! It’s shivery enough to think of Sansabelt men as having behinds, let alone that any woman would be checking them out.

I peek again at my tush in the mirror.

It’s lumpy and as large as a lamp shade. I am way beyond buns--these are full loaves of bread. I vow to work diligently on the Stairmaster.

I am in deep trouble.