Telecom New Zealand has cancelled an ad campaign asking fans of New Zealand’s national rugby team, the All Blacks, to abstain from sex for six weeks in order to help the team win the rugby World Cup in Auckland next month.
Promised black rubber rings in return so they can proudly display their proof of chastity, rugby fans throughout the nation uttered a howl of fuck-mad sex fury and told Telecom where to stick their rings. Particularly amused by this were online fans of the All Blacks’ main rivals, the South Africa Springboks. An article on Fox Sports Australia cites posts wherein South Africa fans said they were “just happy for the sheep.” News sources in New Zealand quoted fans who said they didn’t look forward to the jeers of visiting foreign fans when they proudly displayed black rubber rings. (No, they’re not cock rings…they’re meant to go on your finger, so everyone can puzzle over your sex life).
In the video (embedding is disabled), All Blacks team captain Sean Fitzpatrick drives out “in a pink fistmobile,” as one outraged Kiwi blogger put it in post headlined “Telecom Comes to Their Senses; Still Over-Priced Bastards.” In fact, a significant amount of the public outrage on NZ blogs seems to be fixated on Telecom NZ sucking in general, more than this campaign particularly being extra-stupid of them.
I’ll agree with the rugby fans here: Telecom’s logic in asking for sexual abstinence from its customers is as murky as the statement they put on www.facebook/backingblack:
Full credit to the opposition, we were pinned deep in our own half with plenty of pressure on the flanks so we’ve kicked our ‘abstain for the game’ campaign into touch. We appreciate the idea wasn’t for everyone and we apologise if we’ve offended some fans.
“Into touch?” “Pinned deep in our own half?” Maybe that’s rugby talk; I have no idea what they’re on about. Or maybe “our own half” is a New Zealand thing. I think I need Flight of the Conchords to translate for me. But then, they’d need to also translate the fact that during the development of this campaign, Telecom and its ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, reportedly considered — briefly — encouraging fans to “think of your mum in a bikini” in order to help them abstain. Apparently they ditched that offensive idea before the campaign got very far into the planning stages, thankfully.
What I find truly disturbing about the above clip is not that it’s unfunny and stupid as hell — that hardly seems like a hanging offense. It’s that Fitzpatrick never actually articulates the point of the joke. In short, he never tells you what the fuck he is talking about.
Telecom tried to make a raunchy sexual joke — “We’re supposed to abstain from sex before the big game, so you should too!” without having the balls to actually say it. It reeks of a provincial attempt to relate a sex joke without understanding sex…or sexual culture.
And when I say “provincial,” I know that the use of that term would probably get me slugged this week in an Auckland rugby bar — the New Zealanders are understandably a bit sensitive about being called country cousins, since they’ve spent a week being the butt of jokes about screwing sheep. In response to the Telecom flap, Matt Brooks of the Washington Post suggested New Zealand is “…A small island nation nearly falling off the bottom of the globe that rarely gets mentioned outside of a sentence that also includes England or Australia.”
Ouch! Such low blows are not really fair…since it’s the private company Telecom, not the nation of New Zealand — and certainly not its topography, the law of gravity, or the North-South orientation of most globes — that staged this campaign in the first place.
The truth is, the campaign is humiliatingly vague. It’s not sex-negative because it jokes about enforced celibacy; it’s sex-negative because it’s a dirty joke that doesn’t just use euphemisms…it doesn’t even get around to saying them. It hardly seems worth a bout of raving-and-drooling punch-em-out fury, but it’s a pretty stupid campaign.
Interestingly, however, the “controversy” has started a weird discussion about an essentially unrelated matter of scientific fact and/or speculation, and one of great fascination not only to athletes and sports fans, but to lovers of erotic orgasm denial…or, that is to say, at least, uh, one of them.
Is there any truth to the idea that abstinence from sex augments athletic performance?
An article in the New Zealand Herald says no, it does not. That was also the conclusion drawn by ABC News during the ’06 Olympics. What’s more, other sources describe athletes who go out of their way to engage in sexual activity just before a game, match or competition.
There seems to be no scientific evidence either for or against abstaining before “the big game,” but athletes fall into both camps, depending on their personal experience. Some think there’s no connection, or don’t even consider it. But others religiously subscribe to the view that abstaining augments their performance.
And Bodybuilding.com, believe it or not, says if you’re a man, you should actually watch porn before you work out:
Research demonstrates that testosterone levels rise as a response to sexual stimuli. Therefore, an athlete could benefit pre-workout by being exposed pre-workout to sexual stimuli. The athlete could then exercise with increased testosterone levels and aggression.
–or, more accurately, not just “watch porn” but receive some kind of sexual stimuli (fantasize, receive a lap dance, get a steamy kiss from your paramour, or undress in a room full of muscle boys) but don’t masturbate. The idea is that you work out in a state of heightened sexual stimulation.
Can that help your team win at rugby?
Er…um…well…that is…maybe, if you’re one of the rugby players. But if you’re a fan? I sort of doubt it, although you certainly may cheer a little louder.
Incidentally, what about female athletes? Or, for that matter, a woman who is not an athlete? Should you be “exposed pre-workout to sexual stimuli” before hitting the gym?
I have no idea. As far as I can tell, nobody’s talking about whether female athletes should be out there spiking volleyballs and punching each other in the face after getting pumped up on a leisurely visit to Divine Bitches. But just speaking for myself, I certainly like that idea.
Meanwhile, companies that want to sell their services using a dirty joke should they need to actually tell that joke, rather than just alluding to it with a blush and a giggle. Not everybody’s as afraid to say “Don’t fuck or cum for six weeks before the big game, will you?” And, apparently, New Zealand rugby fans aren’t afraid to say “Screw you!”
Image: Clermont-Auvergne Scrum-Half and occasional Fly-Half Morgan Parra, from the blog State of the Nation UK — more sexy rugby players at their post on that topic.
From a marketing perspective, this has been a successful and brilliant campaign. Look at all of the free publicity and internet backlinks it has received! I wouldn’t be writing this comment now if they went with a banal, uncontroversial ad.
I thought they’d shown that sex before a game actually Helped (an Afterglow effect), but only if the game was less than 8 hours after the sex. So sex the night before doesn’t really help on a statistical level. Might help you sleep better though…
” Full credit to the opposition, we were pinned deep in our own half with plenty of pressure on the flanks so we’ve kicked our ‘abstain for the game’ campaign into touch. We appreciate the idea wasn’t for everyone and we apologise if we’ve offended some fans.
“Into touch?” “Pinned deep in our own half?” Maybe that’s rugby talk; I have no idea what they’re on about.”
=> Yes, that’s rugby talk. When a team has the ball but is close to their own try line, it’s common to just kick the ball (often into touch) as far away as possible, thus giving the ball back to the other team but gaining some ground. I think that an American equivalent would be when an American football team punts the ball on a 4th down?
Anyway, what he means is that their ad campaign is a failure and they have no idea how to get it back on tracks, so they are just going to abandon their idea rather than keep trying to defend it.
BTW: another funny thing about pre-workout sex and testosterone level, is that a few athletes who were caught by doping tests with abnormal testosterone levels tried to blame it on sex and alcohol… Though usually without much success.
Just another example of that tired old trope that women drain the ‘potency’ of men out through the tip of their penis.
Science disproved the idea of ‘sexual’ energy in the early 20th C. and are still having to slap down this idea of the woman as energy draining Succubus even now.
It’s definately anti-women in that awfully mudane ‘never mention women but imply that contact with them will make you weak/diseased’ idea. Pretty sickening in this day and age, and worse, as you’ve pointed out, it’s phallo-centric anyway. No-one whose made this claim of ‘sexual’ energy has ever wondered if a woman’s vital essence could be sucked out through her vagina.
great post, though would just like to point out that Sean Fitzpatrick is a former captain of the All Blacks :)
I will say, when my boyfriend plays sports sex seems to help him focus on winning, rather then the little part of his brain demanding to get off. One could even argue sex HELPS them focus on the game, as one ‘need’ has been sated.