Digitally Disillusioned

I was watching TV and a commercial for Maltesers came on. If you don’t know, Maltesers are little cookie balls wrapped in chocolate. The commercial involves the hygiene-questionable practice of a young, hip, urban male delivering a Malteser to his young, hip, urban, lithlely sprawled out female partner via the suction of a drinking straw.

My objection to the commercial was in the giant size bag of candy this couple had sitting next to it on the coffee table. The couple was very thin and sexy, as per the norm for an advertising campaign. While I am suspicious that Maltesers are not the sort of candy any normal person buys, that size format of Malteser is absolutely something no thin person would ever be near. This can be taken as a universal truth, as if a thin person bought such a bag of candy on a regular basis they would be fat couch potatoes in about a week.

I get that moderation and commercial success are not paired concepts, but every time I go to Wal-Mart I see fat, matronly, middle aged women laboriously pushing around carts filled with giant bags of candy like this. As someone ferociously battling to lose weight, I wonder if these people ever connect the most obvious cause and effect of their shopping and eating habits.

Or, are they charmed by this stupid Malteser commercial and imagine they are in the proximity of young, hip, and urban because they stuff their fat faces with these chocolate cookie balls? No wonder accountability is such an elusive thing in every facet of the world.