Stop looking at advertisements

Moustaches, horns, the occasional crudely drawn genitalia: graffiti on subway ads are usually an expression of little more than an under-active parental authority or an over-active brain stem. But in Paris, the giant 12-square-meter advertisements in the metro are being graffitied over with the slogans of a revolution.

"Enough with advertising!" is the motto of these revolutionaries, who have been defacing Parisian metro ads since October. For several months, dozens of stations have become ideological battlegrounds, where Sharpie pens leave in their wake defaced ads, disfigured models, and a trail of furious sloganeering.

One anti-ad offensive last fall regrouped hundreds of loosely connected volunteers and vandalized ads in 130 metro stations. The next morning, passengers waded through shreds of torn-down ads.

The activists, sometimes prone to exaggeration, strove to warn the public of the grave damage being done by the "three by fours," a term referring to the offending ads by their dimensions in meters. "Advertising is harmful to your health," one slogan gravely warned metro riders. "Advertising kills!" shrieked another.

But the graffiti wasn't all written to such a hysterical pitch -- some pointed out the cringe-inducing stupidity of certain ads. One recent set of ads featured a generic blond man winking idiotically at passers-by, his giant foolish face at least twice as tall as the average man. It was an ad for French cheese, and at station Havre-Caumartin, someone wrote "LOGOTOMIE" (vomit) on his forehead.

I'm sure that I'm not the only metro rider who appreciated such breaks from the soulless monotony of the commute, and who even commiserated with the sentiment.

But such protests have landed 62 anti-ad activists in the courtroom, where they face the possibility of having to pay 922,000 euros in damages to the ad agency of the state-owned Parisian transportation company.

Just how this motley group of students, professors, and unemployed persons will be able to scrounge together a million euros has yet to be determined.

The activists' ideologies are as varied as their backgrounds -- some are anti-capitalist (which is less heretical here than in the U.S.), some are altermondialiste (seeking an alternative to globalization as it is occurring today), and some, it seems, are just looking for something to get riled up about -- or an excuse to doodle on metro ads.

Other anti-ad organizations such as Casseurs de pubs (French for "Adbusters") are under attack by the ad agency Defi, a subsidiary of the insidiously evil empire that is Clear Channel Communications.

But even if these graffiti radicals don't have a sense of humor about being prosecuted -- and they don't -- they may have a point.

We see ads 2,500 times a day, according to estimation in the French daily L'Humanit?©, the newspaper of the Communist Party. And we've all had the experience of finding our lives being invaded by advertising in some new, unexpected way -- ads on the ATM screen, ads embedded in supermarket flooring, ads on the wall above a urinal (though I have not personally experienced this last one).

Only Kaczynski-style hermits can avoid the daily bombardment that has become an inseparable part of our reality and a creepily subversive challenge to our free will. Ask yourself: why do you use Crest instead of Colgate?

Another legitimate grievance of the Parisian commandos is that advertising makes too-abundant use of female sexuality to sell everything from cell phones to vegetables. (I once saw an extremely suggestive ad for green beans.)

Ads for sunny vacation getaways are often the worst offenders. Given France's more liberal (the French would say "less puritan") attitude toward nudity, it's not unusual to see a little T&A on the way to class in the morning.

And so, I think the feminist inside every woman felt vindicated at metro station Bastille, where a leggy underdressed model in an ad for knee-high stockings was labeled "Femme-Objet" - an objectified woman.

Models in ads all across Paris have shared this title recently, as well as other slogans denouncing advertising's degrading, sexist treatment of women.

But though the anti-ad campaign is rich in ideological indignation, it's hard to see any tangible effects it has had. The Parisian transportation company, after pointing out that ads are necessary to finance Paris' excellent metro system, put up a few blank "free expression" boards, but they have already been taken down.

And the demand of one of the most oft-seen slogans certainly rests unfulfilled -- very, very few riders have actually obeyed the order to "Arr??tez de regarder la pub" - "Stop looking at ads."