A little something for the weekend Sir?

OK, I've been at it again - snapping ads on the Underground. It's a testimony to my commitment to this strangely evolving blog that I'm willing to go to such lengths - you have no idea how many weird looks I get, specially since the ads I'm interested in usually have no small whiff of sex about them (no big surprise in a blog about advertising - what else is there to sell?).

Underground commuters will now be well acquainted with this campaign - three in the series I've counted so far - in which three glamorous twenty year olds (a blonde, a brunette and a redhead) breathily court our attention with bedroom eyes, telling us how much they l-u-u-u-u-urve to 'go like rabbits' and how much Skyn (we presume a nanometer-thin condom) revolutionises 'everything'.

What struck me when I saw the first of them was hang on, what's she doing selling me a condom - and since when was it her job to sort out the rubbers? Well that's obvious, I hear you say. Since she was the one who ran the risk of getting herself 'up the duff'.

But it hasn't always been this way. Times were when it was the man's job to tend to this little chore, when a trip to the barber's for a 'short back and sides' on a Friday after work would be accompanied by the barber's discreet and euphemistic query "A little something for the weekend Sir?"

That was back in the days when women weren't 'begging for it' or, in some cases, more sinisterly, 'asking for it'. Back in those halcyon days when women were not responsible for a man's urges, when women didn't 'cause men' to want sex, when sex was a more private matter between a man and a woman. In fact, the 'little something for the weekend' may well have been used in the context of a marriage, when Dad, responsible as he was for his clan, also took responsibility for the potential issue of his own loins.

This campaign, with its bevy of red-lipped, gagless beauties reinforces the tragic illusion of the patriarchal world in which we live - that women, owing to their relatively newly unleashed voracious appetite for sex (thank you 'feminists' of the 1960s) are responsible for sex. This has significant ramifications for wider social issues - I'm thinking here of rape.

So next time we see an ad for a condom, why not let's have a man pouting to camera with 'come hither' eyes, telling us how much he loves sex and hates condoms and why this changes everything. With the status quo as it is, sadly, it could take a while to come (no pun intended).