CARNAL NATION

Sometimes, as an underemployed and commitment-phobic gay man, self-esteem issues occasionally spring up.  Luckily, when they do, there's a solution:  Watch the Super Bowl.  Not the part where the men in the gold spandex tights bend over a lot.  (Although that's a nice distraction, too.)  I'm talking about the ads, which serve as bleak, bleak reminders about how dreary heteronormative behavior can actually be.

I'm not talking about the nonsensically horny GoDaddy spots, or the eerie Focus On The Family ad which, maybe strategically, was placed right before one featuring Betty White. (I can hear the CBS meetings now: "The feminists and the gays might get mad at us, but how mad will the gays stay if we distract them with one of the Golden Girls?")

Most Super Bowl ads are targeted at guys that really, really want to be simultaneously very independent and also exactly the same as every other man.  Doritos and Budweiser and Coke know this.  But a couple of ads were so completely dreary in their emphasis on the crisis of mundane masculinity that they warrant special mention.

Here are the three worst offenders:

1. The Dodge Charger ad is maybe supposed to be funny, and I guess it sort of is if you're really into existentialism.  But the very idea that these men's joyless, spiteful, repetitive lives are valuable just because they get to drive around in a Dodge?  That's maybe the funniest part of all.  (On the upside, at least this ad's led to some interesting comments.)

2. Dove For Men.  Because a Real Men is disdainful of soap brand named after a peaceful bird, but a Real Man also loves anything that comes in charcoal-colored packaging labeled "For Men".  The first ad for Dove's men's line featured a badly-sung song (because Real Men don't have good voices) wherein a guy chronicles all the ways that women have nagged him over his lifetime before explaining that it's all okay because he's comfortable being a man.  There's even a pickle jar joke in there.

3. Google's ad was certainly effective, even if it wasn't actually new.  And it's not actually bad.  Over the course of a minute a guy goes to Paris to study abroad, meets a girl, learns how to spell Louvre, falls in love, learns about Truffaut, learns what truffles are, and decides to get married.  And then, with no break after the wedding, he learns how to assemble a crib.  His next query might as well be "How to pay for my kids' college tuition" and then "How to just die already."  Not to say that having babies is a bad thing, but who really wants to think about babies when talking about a romantic Parisian fling? (Also, why did this man never once use the I'm Feeling Lucky button?)

Remember the HDTV ad last night where Beyonce was asking whether it was a sweet dream or a beautiful nightmare and then that claw came and grabbed her?  The whole evening felt like that, or at least the ad parts did.  (It was cool when the Saints won, though.  I always cheer for whoever's wearing the goldest pants.)