ABOUT MEN

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Gentlemen, it's time to pitch all this X-treme Guy nonsense into flaming-roller-para-bungee-trail-mogul oblivion once and for all.

Seriously, the whole screaming bad-ass thing might have been fun for the first, oh, 10 years. But, jeez, enough already.

Does anyone ever need to see another soaring snowboarder selling toothpaste or office supplies or matzo-ball soup?

It all might have started innocently enough — maybe with a couple of stoner skate rats somewhere with a cliff, a video camera and not enough credit hours in physics, or a bunch of bored BMXers who still had mom and dad to cover their HMO co-payments. Maybe there was some pure Eden moment years back when one bright-eyed dreamer said to another: "Dude, betcha can't hit that double-black diamond naked on one ski!"

Whatever. The point is, the moment extreme sports became extreme marketing for the extremely un-extreme masses, whatever misguided but genuine spark of fun and irreverence was snuffed out. And, dude, that was a long, long time ago.

Some might argue that the cult of the extreme, with its roots in bored, white, middle-class America, was a generational stand against consumer excess — extreme physical experience as a refutation of extreme material consumption.

Sounds good, except that it took corporate America exactly 1.3 seconds to seize the extreme angle and insinuate itself in the concussed consciousness of the prized 18- to 35-year-old male consumer demographic.

What we've been left with has been an endless, cynical parade of office-tanned advertising dorks trying to sell us on the notion that drinking Mountain Dew, driving a Nissan or even eating Doritos is in any way congruous with jumping out of an airplane or going ropeless up a sheer granite face.

And they have. Powered by the narcotic spectacle of it all, co-opted extremity has entranced a whole generation of male consumers. Everyone, it seems, has found something about which to be extreme. The extreme has become sundry.

Take ESPN, which hedged on its future prosperity by giving the generation incapable of sitting through an entire baseball game something faster and sexier: the X-Games. Or consider Nissan, which borrowed the name of a grueling off-road triathlon (X-Terra) for its SUV so couples with 100K incomes could off-road it in the gravel lot next to their kid's AYSO match.

Marvel at it! Middle-aged men drink Gatorade at their desk to avoid extreme air-conditioning dehydration. Guys on the University of Hawai'i-Manoa campus walk around with $300 backpacks, dangling their t-squares where their ice axes should be.

The whole thing has gotten so absurd that the advertising itself has collapsed on itself like a dying star, parodying its own ubiquitous splattered mud-guy spots for cheap laughs. Come on, when Joe Isuzu joins the revolt, it's all pau hana.

And for that, menfolk, we should be glad. For the real embarrassment in all this is that for too long we've let all this idiotic image pimping define us in the most revealing terms. The disconnect between our pedestrian lives and the death-defying hooey we fill our heads and homes — and garages — with is no different than that of the loopy 12-year-old who walks around with a puffed chest and a Twisted Metal black T-shirt, or the guys at the coffee shop talking up the Eco-Challenge while living "Eek-a-Challenge!" lives.

Want to do something extreme?

Get real.