Well, it looks like Davidoff has passed on the ad designs. Despite the free advertising provided by widespread Internet speculation concerning the intersection of grodiness and gender-role innovation suggested by the cigar ads, Davidoff isn't too happy about being associated with old men getting off on their product. (For the record, I thought they were interesting).

"These ads are NOT approved by Davidoff," Davidoff of Geneva brand manager Danielle K. Hawthorne writes. "They have not and will never run as advertising for our brand. We have asked that all of these concept ads be removed from circulation. Evidently someone has taken unapproved liberties by using the Davidoff logo and posting these as if they were currently running."

Those special "someones" could very well be advertisement photographer and copywriter Ted Sabarese and art director Marta Ibarrondo. The mock-up advertisements are still featured prominently on Ibarrondo's Web site, as well as under the "Commissioned" section of Sabarese's own site. Looks like whether or not Davidoff "approved" of these ads, someone must have, well, commissioned them.

AdFreak has discovered these sexualized advertisements for Davidoff cigars. Each ad is accompanied by a photograph of a male model appearing to orgasm upon catching a whiff of some fine Davidoff cigar smoke. The ads read, "Every Man Has a D-Spot."

Finally, you may be thinking. Men reduced to sex objects in order to sell phallic shit, and not women this time around! [See female "O" faces in advertising: Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and a bonus nonconsensual orgasm ad in Exhibit C]. So is this gender equality? Is it regressive? Or is it just icky?

I say it's gender-equalizing regressive ickiness, but gender-equalizing regressive ickiness that reveals an interesting dynamic in mainstream sexist advertising. In traditional sex-sells ads, women's bodies are used to grab the attention of potential buyers whom admen assume either a) desire these women or b) want to be these women in order to be desired by men. The focus, then is always on male pleasure.

And these ads are no different, as this collection of orgasm faces attests:

Still, focusing the imagery directly on male sexual pleasure is helpful for a few reasons. First of all, the ads are specifically not focusing on women/objects as a means to that pleasure. Great!

Second, this conscious inversion of the male gaze is visually disturbing enough to serve as an implicit commentary on our collective comfort with exploiting female sexuality in advertising. We're comfortable looking at the boobs, but looking at the people looking at the boobs? Yuck!

And then, there's the whole cigar thing. If you buy into the idea that a cigar is not just a cigar, these men are getting off on the perceived sexual potency of their own dicks, and that's pretty funny. I really hope that's what you were going for, Davidoff!

Still, while I appreciate the attempt at sexist imagery switcheroo here, I'm not sure I ever want to be comfortable being persuaded to buy something by looking at a David Duchovny look-a-like experiencing a contact high orgasm:

This Week In Sexist History:

Good Old Day: June 23, 1909

Dateline: Washington, D.C.

Keywords: Joseph Gurney Cannon; pretty girls; rolling a cigar reminisciently in one's mouth; smiling indulgently; women's suffrage.

Joseph Gurney Cannon, who ruled over the House of Representatives from 1903 to 1911, is considered to be "the most dominant Speaker in United States history." After Canon's tenure ended, subsequent Speakers of the House were rendered increasingly helpless until an actual woman finally claimed the top Congressional spot, in 2007. See what happens?

Girls so pretty.

Pretty girls so pretty.

Girls pretty! Unfair how pretty girls are!

The women then waited ten more years before securing the right to vote.

Last week, I suggested that the Huffington Post was sexist for devoting much of its Entertainment page to obsessively posting accidental female nipple slips caught on camera. Arianna Huffington responded via a Howard Kurtz column by saying:

"As Freud said, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’—and a nipple slip is just a nipple slip."

Well, I've been mulling over Huffington's retort for about 24 hours now, and I've finally figured out what is so fucking strange about this response. Let's start with Freud.

Sigmund probably never actually said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," but theories abound as to the source of the attributed phrasing.

Here's the best guess of any: "Sigmund Freud was once asked about the psychoanalytic significance of his smoking a cigar, to which he replied that a good cigar was merely a smoke." So, Freud is sitting around having a cigar, and some student thinks it would be clever to ask Freud why he likes to put phallic objects in his mouth all the time. And Freud is like, ha, ha, you got me, but seriously, I am not gay. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

Nipples, meanwhile are not stand-ins for sexualized female body parts—they are actually sexualized female body parts. It's true, I'm not kidding. HuffPo confirms its peculiar interest in the female nipple by regularly posting intensely zoomed-in "nipple slips" on its Web site, while sparing male nipples—regularly exposed on beaches everywhere, even by smokin' hot American presidents—the same "NSFW zoom" treatment and "check out these nipples, we found more somehow" headlines.

What might be a more apt comparison here? How about this: So, Freud is sitting around with a man's penis in his mouth, and some student thinks it would be clever to ask Freud why he likes to put men's penises in his mouth all the time. And Freud is like, ha, ha, you got me, but seriously, I am not gay. Sometimes, a man's penis in my mouth is just a man's penis in my mouth.

In other words, an Internet "newspaper" can feature sexist entertainment all it wants without actually being sexist, as long as it insists that its actions are meaningless, and can source that meaninglessness back to an unsourceable quote from Sigmund Freud, of all people. You're good, Huffington Post. You're really good.

Photo by RyAwesome