Bière, frites, chocolat et...

High-tech PR doesn't get much better than this, courtesy of Belgian DVDPost.

I'm filling out an order right now - I've always wanted a green-eyed strawberry blond with an adventurous streak to keep the toilets sparkling and the cocotte bubbling.

What's that you say? Equating humans with DVD's is insulting and grotesque? Portraying women as rentable, mail-orderable commodities as a geek-lure is unconscionable?

Having watched the TV advert and visited the site, I'd ultimately have to agree. The black leather wrist and neck cuffs and a sociopath-in-the-making stuffing his used goods into its return box recalls a botched thriller. That said, the site still had me chortling on a cynical, distant cloud where politically correct doesn't exist to turn jokes into brow-furrowing sessions.

My laughter dwindled when, out of curiosity, I Googled the term "rent a wife" and found this, this and this. Get with it protestors - DVDPost is totally has been! Here I thought their com team had created some (finally) provocative tongue-in-cheek buzz marketing, when in reality, their false advertising goes nowhere near the kink or distaste of actual purveyors of "wifely" services.

Here's what keeps me chortling about DVDPost's ad: had this been an exposition at a lesser contemporary art gallery, it would probably inspire viewers to whisper really astute things like, "Brilliant treatment of a current polemic" or "Yes - when will homemakers be recognized as unpaid laborers?" or even "Didn't SNL do a sketch like this?" However, since the final, desired outcome of this PR campaign is sales, revenue, profits, any artistic merit (okay, it ain't exactly Delacroix, but it could be Pop Art-ish) or political and social commentary gets blindsided by the PC police. (Although when Tintin came under the microscope, I had to agree with the modern interpretation.)

As usual, and adding to the cynicism of the spectacle, the media skirmish has generated nothing but free PR for the Belgian company, and it's hard to imagine that the majority of mail-order DVD renters will be so offended as to not subscribe.