TORONTO ADSCAPES

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From The Torontoist by Todd Aalgaard
You may have seen the posters around town hocking low-cost cellphones and Blackberrys in the most appealing way possible: with hot, ass-grabbing, face-sucking angels.

But now, two Canadian cities—Calgary, not surprisingly, and Mississauga, somewhat more so—have decided that Virgin Mobile’s steamy “Hook up fearlessly” ad campaign is a little too hot for their apparently chaste commuters. After being inundated by at least six whole complaints, Calgary Transit pulled the offending ads this week. Ron Collins, a spokesperson for Calgary Transit, cited the models’ lasciviously wandering hands as being over the line, telling the CBC that “It’s basically the positioning of the hands of the male on the female….In one, the hand’s on her buttocks. Another, it’s on her thigh area and that sort of thing and so we didn’t think that was appropriate.”

Virgin Mobile, however, has yet to be discouraged by all the torches and pitchforks and cries of won’t someone please think of the children??? “We’re very proud of our ads,” Chris Baines, spokesperson for Virgin Mobile, told CBC. “We don’t think there’s anything wrong with them. They are just young couples passionately embracing or kissing. It’s no more than that and they’re a lot of fun.”

Collins disagrees. “If you look at that through the eyes of a child using the transit system,” he told the Globe, “we didn’t think it was appropriate they should be subjected to that.” Kissing is fine, Virgin, but leave room for the Holy Spirit.

Just the right amount of hotness for Calgary, thank you very much.
Which seems to be the whole issue, since another of Virgin’s risque angel make-out posters, with more lip-locked shirt-lifting and less back-alley thigh-groping (a close-up of which is at right) has remained a fixture of Calgary’s network of bus shelters.

The thing is, while we don’t want to come down too hard on Cow Town’s morally upright sons and daughters, how surprising is such a puritanical move for a city that, as recently as October, got all uppity about transit ads for Ron Mueck’s gigantic wrinkly baby sculpture, an installation Collins described as “inappropriate”? Children riding the C-Train, after all, might be irreversibly scarred for life by—well, by themselves.

Mississauga, meanwhile, had two of the sexy promos yoinked in December, replaced with posters depicting two men doing a lot of “embracing,” as the Globe put it. (That ad is pictured at the very top of this post.) No less sexy, the man-on-man fun depicted in the ad was never shared with the streets or bus stops of Calgary, after the other, more controversial materials were removed. But the gay ad has cropped up in numerous high-traffic, high-profile locations all around Toronto—we just saw one at a transit shelter near the East York Town Centre on Overlea Boulevard. Just don’t tell Calgary. We still want to be their friend.