You might not have noticed, but there are currently two separate campaigns airing for products that stop your loo smelling of poo featuring camp speaking toilets. (I can’t for the life of me remember the brands in question - they’re bad adverts in every sense.)

In both, women are shamed by their talking toilets into taking more care over the odors eminating from the bowl, lest their houseguests think ill of them. In one ad., the loo is voiced by Julian Clary (or an impersonator) in the other, it’s a generic Kenneth Williams-esque voice that chides the housewife.

The reason for this queering of the toilet bowl is simple: you can’t have a woman sitting on the face of a humanoid toilet that is explicitly hetero - the wonks scripting the ad. are in weird enough territory as it is without introducing a cunnilingual subtext to the relationship between the Everywoman heroine and her newly clean and sweet-smelling shitter.

In his complaint about the Muller campaign, Tom chooses to miss out a layer of the Muller spot, one shared by the adverts featuring our poofy toilet friends - the gay Air Steward (what a lazy, lazy stereotype) who looks at a man’s willy to make people buy yoghurt (do they really want to associate yoghurt with cocks?) doesn’t do so with a lascivious glance, nor does he make an aggressive pass. Instead, it’s a purse-lipped end-of-the-peir mug to camera. So, instead of have the protagonist fuck his girlfriend in some yoghurty way, we are shown her getting distracted by a delicious tub of Muller Light, while her boyfriend is forced by circumstances beyond his control to have a non-sexual encounter with a gay man.

WTF?

On the one hand, this could all be seen as an extension of media representation of gay men as inherently asexual, non-threatening figures of fun - just as damaging a stereotype as the one Tom identifies when he says:

When I was growing up gay I was under the misapprehension that gay people were dirty and sickening and pathetic because of adverts like this.

But I think it’s more complicated than that. In all these adverts, sex is being used to sell products - whether it’s the winking harpies (Harpics?!) who trade double-entendres with their living toilets, or the woman who prefers a tub of live culture to the attentions of her man - but the implication of shagging is diffused through a neutered-but-sexual homosexual. That’s at least as dangerous a message (or chunk of social control, if you’re feeling paranoid) as the, erm, straight portrayal of gay men as threatening pervs - these adverts say, effectively, that gay men are naughtily suggestive of sexual activity, but also that they themselves are barred from that activity.

It’s a bit like dressing your Barbie doll up like a slut, only to point out to everyone that she has no cunt.

There’s a point buried up there somewhere, I think (in this post, I mean, not your Barbie doll). It’s probably that until the television advertising industry starts presenting gay men (and lesbians, who are similarly much-used in their most unthreatening, lipsticky form) in the way that, say, advertising has, on the whole, learned to present mixed race couples, or ethnic minorities in general, without making it an issue, letters of complaint like Tom’s are much needed.

• Paige Turner
• Tanya Hide
• Gail Force
• Annette Curtain
• Ida Slapter