This Pickle Up The Ass Of America Has A Peloton Logo On It.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pShKu2icEYw

The older I get the more tolerant I am, sadly, becoming of all the bullshit I see out there. But every once in a while you run across something that pisses you off just enough.

This time it’s the gargantuan amount of nonsense surrounding the recent Peloton commercial, where a guy buys his wife/girlfriend (whatever), a Peloton stationery bike for Christmas. The commercial is basically a chronicle of the girl’s first year with the bike and the self-proclaimed difference it has made in her life.

To me as an advertising creative lifer, this looked like a pretty decent idea. But that probably has something to do with the fact that I am a bike rider and have been all my life. I have a road bike and a stationery bike so that I can ride or bike all year round and keep my cardio-vascular system healthy.

But in the age of “Pickle Up The Ass” social media and a hypersensitivity to sexism, this poor little commercial suddenly became a symbol for male domination, and the idea of giving your partner a stationary bike ended up right up there with insisting that she get herself a pair of fake boobs.

As a bike rider and an advertising guy I saw exactly what Peloton was trying to do. And when the girl exclaims at the end of her year that she had no idea what a difference it would make in her life, all the Pickle People jumped on it with both guns blazing, stating wow, all she did was lose four pounds off her already skinny frame. What male manipulation!

Blah, blah, blah.

https://www-today-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.today.com/today/amp/tdna169080

What these Pickle People, and there are a lot of media people among them, are too fucking ignorant to realize is that the real benefit of a Peloton has little to do with weight, which has always been a superficial thing anyway, but stamina and cardio vascular health.

So if you give someone a gift like that, you are not telling them they are too fat for you, you’re telling them that you want them to be healthy and happy. How people don’t get that is way beyond me. But I have given up on most of them a long time ago. They are just too fucking stupid for words.

I guess the world has become much less of a three dimensional place and more of a full time court of public opinion where everybody gets to be judge, jury and executioner about everything.

Could Peloton have made the real intent of their commercial a little more obvious? That’s not for me to decide. I’m not in the target audience. But sure, I suppose they could have.

Did they get crucified by a bunch of assholes? Yes they did. But what else is new these days?

Over the course of the 21st century the world has drifted from moderately non-intellectual to massively anti-intellectual, especially in America with the bad examples that are being set just about everywhere, and the proliferation of stupid shit on social and mainstream media.

A lot of people I know either use the stupidity for the basis for their ranting (guilty), or just walk away from it altogether.

Being a writer, this has been a virtually limitless source of social material to go after.

Not that it will make any difference to the politically correct and the many other forms of asshole we have in our society now, but it will certainly enable me to download a lot of the crap that that builds up inside and can cause all kinds of bad things to happen.

So in a way this is really all about me and my mental health, and I can live with that. The assholes, unfortunately for them, and I guess fortunately for me, will never change.