magpie's nest of shiny objects

2004-12-02 17:30

Diamonds Are A Girl's Only Friend

There's a billboard that I walk by on my way to work that shows a pair of diamond stud earrings with the caption, "MAKE YOUR SINGLE FRIENDS LIVE VICARIOUSLY THROUGH YOU."

Now what kind of mixed message is that sending?

The people behind the ads, De Beers (which, probably to remove the stench of colonialism, have renamed their rough diamond business the Diamond Trading Company) is making it sound like married life is so boring that you need to throw more diamonds into the equation in order to keep up appearances to your single friends, whose lives you've been pining for ever since you got hitched.

Every time I see a diamond ad, I feel like I've been dropped down a rabbit hole into an alternative, media-driven, consumerist quasi-1950s universe where unmarried women are living a wacky, independent Sex and the City kind of existence (while at the same time desperately unfulfilled, waiting for an engagement ring to make them complete), and married women are extorting diamonds from their husbands on a routine basis to fill the emptiness in their lives. Either way, the problem is that you're inadequate, and the solution is to turn off your brain and get a man to buy you a diamond.

Take the plug here describing the "right hand ring" campaign:

Women of the world, raise your right hand -- the A Diamond Is Forever 'Right Hand Ring' campaign officially launched last fall, reminding women that they have two hands.

I do!? I hadn't noticed! Thanks, De Beers!

The right hand ring campaign is apparently aimed at single women who have put down their little Manolo Blahnik-shod feet and declared, "I'm not waiting for any man! I'm buying a diamond for my own self!" -- though the careful and/or cynical observer will note that the women making this fashion statement "on the red carpet" have husbands to buy their right hand rings for them, or at least they did when the campaign was launched.

In the warped alternate De Beers-iverse, men don't do much better, especially now at Christmastime. An ad campaign aimed squarely at married men makes it clear that wifey is barely putting up with her husband, but that he just might manage to redeem himself by coughing up the right jewels. They call this campaign "Seize the Day" (huh?), and it alternates the carrot of saying you married a fabulous, perfect babe with the stick of, well, these slogans:

"You Got Her. She Got You. You Might Want To Do Something Before That Sinks In." In other words, buy a little goodwill before you fuck up something major.
"Appease The Goddess and She Might Let You Live Another Year." Nothing I can add to that one, really.
"Carve The Turkey Any Way You Damn Well Please." Because that picky broad you married, who is at the same time A TOTAL GODDESS WHOM YOU DON'T DESERVE, MOUTHBREATHER, will be too dazzled by the diamond studs you bought her to criticize you about little things, thus buying you momentary peace.
"Hope You're Paying Attention Because There Will Be A Test on December 25th." Your goddess is a fickle goddess. Keep up.
"Ever Wonder Why So Many Babies Are Born In September?" Buy her diamond earrings and she will put out -- you can bet on it.
"This Anniversary Show Her You Do Pay Attention. Hey, We're Talking To You." If you can't fake attentiveness, distract her with a rock!
"Remember What You Got Her Last Anniversary? Our Point Exactly." She wasn't thrilled with that blender you bought her last year, so this year's the time to pay up.
"Three Billion Men In The World And She Picked You. Your Friends Can't Figure It Out Either." Of course, I thought a central part of the engagement ritual was that women, while they might lean on the future hubster a little, were ultimately powerless in deciding whether to get married, instead leaving their entire marital destiny in the hands of He Who Must Ask On Bended Knee, but nobody said the alternate diamond universe was consistent.

Which brings us back the single girls snubbed by the ad I pass every day on my way to work (and I do mean "girls," because the alternate diamond universe is the same place where you don't get to be fully adult until you're married). It looks like De Beers hasn't really thought through how they would react to the ad telling their married sisters how to be the focus of all the envy. After all, that very first diamond, the one that will cost your future fiance two months of his salary, is supposed to be the ultimate in emotional fulfillment, so how is it that married women have to work to be the envy of the single girls? (Because being "single" means you're all sad and pathetic and alone, rather than meaning that you haven't yet gone through an expensive, state-sanctioned ceremony featuring Diamonds: The Official Gemstone Sponsor of the Patriarchy, or that you did and it didn't take, or that you don't want to, or that you're not allowed to except in Masssachusetts.)

No, no, stop with the thinking already. Here, have another diamond. It's shiny!

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