An E-mail from the Love Zoo

If you're any sort of regular e-mail user, you've undoubtedly received a lot of porn spam over the few years since "porn spam" came to mean something other than erotic lunch meat. It's not, for the most part, memorable. The only thing that makes the typical "hot teen sluts" mail stand out is that it usually features women who are neither teenaged nor hot. And promises of "NAKED XXX BRITNEY PICS" are just demeaning, if sort of depressing, because you know there's some poor fool out there actually clicking through the links to get to them.

But every once in a while, you get something like this:

There are many, many things wrong with this ad, and a powerful, fire-and-brimstone sermon could be built around the snake-on-strumpet shot alone. The producers certainly could have come up with a wittier name than "love zoo." Try "heavy-petting zoo." Or "please feed the animals." The possibilities are endless. And even most porn-friendly readers aren't likely to get turned on by a woman getting pawed (hoofed?) by a horse. It's the shady side of Internet advertising: If it's free, then why not cast as wide a net as possible, no matter how specific the target?

(An aside: If you're appealing to farm fetishists, don't the sheep and goat overlap? Are there people who love to watch women suck off sheep but are disgusted by the same done to a goat? And monkeys? They're funny, sure. Everyone loves a monkey — just not in that way.)

But let's stick to the aesthetics. What's with the gerbil? It's not mentioned in the ad. It just sits there on top of the photos, larger than the women and their assorted love-creatures, peering over them like something out of a XXX version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Gerbils don't even belong in zoos. Let alone love zoos, though that may be a different matter entirely.

As pets, gerbils get the short shrift. Not as cute as hamsters, not as sturdy or intelligent as guinea pigs (which is saying a lot), not as eccentric as rats, gerbils are no one's favorite animals. Gerbils have their proponents, but they're usually the weird kids who sit at the back of class and talk to themselves. For a long time, gerbils were simply the also-rans of the pet store, the domesticated-rodent world's Bob Dole to the Bill Clinton hamsters.

Then, beginning in the early 1990s, an urban legend surfaced about Richard Gere, a debauched Hollywood fete, a lighter, a cardboard tube and a gerbil; suffice it to say that gerbil went in tube, and the rest has something to do with Gere's anus. It's probably not true. But then that's not the point of an urban legend. "Gerbilling" is now as much a part of pop culture's dirty-porn lingo as the hot karl, a test not so much of your depravity as your with-it-ness. And the gerbil is less an animal than a symbol, an asterisk that says "extreme perversion ahead."

So — are we to assume that there actually is a relevance to the gerbil, that it is more a participant than an onlooker in the love zoo? That we will see the loveable, furry little guy in the ad, if we hand over our credit-card number, be subjected to some decidedly un-loveable lighter-and-cardboard-tube action? It's not something most of us will want to find out. Though there's probably some poor fool clicking through to it right now.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)