Voting Is Your Friend, With Benefits

A new Spanish commercial shows what happens when you vote: hot flashes! The tingles, down there! Ecstasy! It’s just like having sex—except with exit polling instead of pillow talk.

Check it out:

Produced by the Young Socialists of Catalonia (the part of Spain where lovely Barcelona is), the ad—titled “Voting Is a Pleasure“—has caused a stir, with at least one conservative lady pol calling it “an attack on the dignity of women.” Other women from more liberal parties have taken the ad less seriously: Catalan Green Party leader Joan Herrera said it would “very difficult to reach orgasm voting for any of the candidates, myself included.”

Both responses seem appropriate in their own ways. The ad does take the low and obvious road of applying the old “women plus sex equals ‘edgy'” formula, which is soooo tired already. Add in a bunch of cliched elements—shocked older people, in-and-out ballot teasing, the excited voter’s loosening of her hair—and the reaction might be, “this is the best you can do?” But ultimately, the ad is so dumb that it’s hard not to laugh at it, and the conservative pol’s response comes off as overblown. (It is refreshing to see a woman experiencing pleasure plain and simple—we don’t see that sort of message expressed in American mainstream culture so much.

What do you think, film critics?

Spain’s R-Rated Election Campaign [NY Times]