Last night after a day driving down and around Victoria BC, we settled with our hosts to watch a movie. Nothing too challenging but with enough entertainment value to stop us drifting off to sleep. John Grisham’s The Rainmaker suited us all, despite the intermittent adverts on the viewing channel.

And what interesting adverts they were.

Now I’m not a prude, and we live in ‘tolerant about all things’ Holland, but I have to say I was a tad surprised by two adverts in particular; both of which seemed to run several times in each advertisement slot, so a dozen or so times during the movie.

One was for a blue male performance pill, the other a male enhancement pill. I do not wish to name either for fear of being seen to advertise them, and more importantly have no desire to be buried by unsolicited email should my name be connected to them by the mere mention on a blog.

I have to say the blue pill adverts were quite entertaining and obviously paid for by a large budget; the other less so. It took a while to figure out what the second was about – the starring male spent a lot of time with a huge smile on his face, so our initial reaction was it must relate to dental work.

Oh, the naivety.

Thing is, while I understand Monday evenings are quite dull TV-wise in BC, one has to wonder who on earth is watching a good courtroom drama and thinking about male related matters so early in the evening. I understand men are alleged think of sex every twelve seconds, and oft feel the need check their vital parts are in place many times a day, but hey, come on, enhancement pills at dinner time? Enough to put most of us off our food. Mainly females admittedly.

Of course as the evening progressed all the adverts became a little more, shall we say, risqué, but this was after 9pm and we’re all adults and it’s the same in the Netherlands. We have a choice whether to watch or not. We were just a tad sad the movie seemed to end halfway through the final scene and we were bombarded yet again by blue pills and male enhancers. By this time of the evening ( it was a long film given the amount of adverts) the guys the ads were aimed at would have been fast asleep and couldn’t care less.

I don’t know why, but it came as a real surprise to see adverts like these on mainstream TV . . . in Canada. My own preconceptions obviously, but they don’t seem to fit with the outdoorsy, clean-living way of life out here. Lumberjacks, Mounties – you follow my thinking . . . sorry, I drifted for a moment there.

I don’t want to get into a moral debate over this but I guess in my head I have a line and these ads crossed it – there’s a time and a place for stuff like this and early evening TV anywhere doesn’t seem appropriate, to me anyway. I have a visual that in homes all over the country young kids are asking, ‘mom, what’s male enhancement?’

Worse still I have to go away and decide whether I’m really out of whack with the world, getting old and turning into a prude, and if so what I’m going to do about it.

At the moment though I can’t get the visual of that man and his smile out of my head, think The Shining and you’ll be on the same page.