Once-zealous advocates of "Laser Therapy" before that self-same laser spun about and became a hellish death ray. A shit Irish cover band (that never really existed) aping a Manhattanite original that was itself a fiction.²

No longer gazing toward a shiny future of swaggering consumption. But staring (vacantly) into space. Empty space. Lots and lots and lots of it.

1. Currently haunting down-town Limerick. [back]
2. Though one nowhere near as shallow and unifaceted as the cultural artefacts that appropriated its "4 fabulous gals on the town" motif. [back]

They don't try to hide or disguise this cuntitude either. They flaunt it (like belching, ball-scratching peaCOCKS). Communicating one's cuntness has never been easier. Pop into a local Topman/River Island. Pick up a "You Look Like I Need Another Drink" T-shirt. Boom. Job done. Instant cunt.

That's not your only option of course. For the odious prick about town the choices are (these days) many and varied. There is, for example, this chucklesome classic.

Or this slice of retro-gaming misogyny…

Ha! Ha! Women! They're all obsessed with nagging and marriage and ruining our lives and spoiling our fun and stopping us riding all round us and stuff. Wot a load of bitches!

It wasn't always this bad. Somehow and somewhere, in the last 10 years or so, Irish Ladism went from being a multifarious, loose-knit, fairly harmless and amorphous thing (built around rugby and late night group pissing sessions at pub urinals) to a codified and singular entity. Its themes and tropes were made concrete – and they were terrible to behold.

How did this happen? I blame a 2-pronged attack. Prong 1? The baleful rise of ladz magz (a trend that continues to find new nadirs – with Zoo [et al] making granddaddy Loaded look like À la recherche du temps perdu). Prong 2? The UK High St store invasion – on which a vigorous and fully-formed lad culture piggy-backed.

The hilarious part is that said culture is impossible to satirise. You could fill Topman with "WANKER!!!" t-shirts and there'd be queues around the block. They know they're wankers. They're thrilled about it.

However, we can but try. I'll be down the Milk Market in Limerick on Saturday morning trying to flog my "I Hate Women and Myself and I'm Wearing this to Try and Fill a Gnawing Emptiness Inside. Help me! Help me, Please!" t-shirt. If I can cause even one young fella to break down crying (hugging his knees and begging the universe to forgive him) it'll be a morning well spent.

#manclub

But advertising – that great omnipresent, satanic force – hardly helps. It knows we're down. It counts on and thrives on it. While we lie groaning in the gutter trying (desperately) to have a peak at distant stars, advertising's gaping, squatting, spangled arse obscures our vision.

It obscures it with images of shiny demigods, aglow with their own self-love. Livin' & lovin' life in sun-drenched IKEA apartments. Always up to kooky antics. Roller-blading indoors! Bouncing impishly on their beds! Pillow fights! DJs in the corner!! They're making the most of now. 24/7.

While the below couple are not quite as achingly hip, they're certainly no less odious (or shiny).

She? Default, middle-of-the-road dazzler. He? Wearing the open-necked blue shirt uniform of (conservative) youthful-ish affluence. Slacks and deck shoes unseen but implied.

A hard copy of the image was "liberated" (by me) from a coffee shop in the University of Limerick. Every table had (and continues to have) one – staring the assembled punters in the face and helpfully decoding the true meaning of the coffee-drinking experience for them. It's about friends,,,and life…and love…and coffee…or something.

Yet, on the face of it, nothing concrete or specific is being advertised here. It's not pushing a particular brand. It's not promoting a particular restaurant. It's selling some sort of abstract aspirational dream. A vision of a world chock full of smug, self-satisfied, "successful" cunts.

Has the global financial apocalypse softened their coughs or dampened their self-regard? Not a bit of it. They've simply popped on pairs of wellies, started growing their own organic veg, and lent their shiny faces to ads (disingenuously) pushing nouveau-frugal consumerism. If anything, they're more in love with themselves than before. And now they've seized the moral high ground, we – who sit scratching out holes, scarfing down Taytos, and wanking furiously in a bid to temporarily escape the dull awfulness of life – are made to feel shitter than ever.

An example? The head-scratching, terminally confused, clipart stickman. You know him. That perma-bewildered stick-personification of contemporary unsureness. That shit millenarian version of Munch's Scream whose angst sprung not from agonising (deeply human) existential dilemmas, but, rather, from an inability to figure out how the photocopier worked.

His natural homes were crap self-help/educational websites, crap fliers advertising crap managerial workshops, crap posters promoting crap religious get-togethers etc, etc. Wherever there was doubt and uncertainty, there he'd be – like a bewildered & silhouetted Fido Dido – promising the solutions to your confusions.

And now? Try Googling him. He's hard to find…possibly due to being laughed off the net, in the kind of hipster ridicule pogrom that put paid to Comic Sans. Or perhaps he lives on, hidden from Google searching in the printed/analogue world. Clinging to the edges and fringes of popular tech-culture – like VHS, or cassette tapes, or Aertel/Ceefax.

Christ, I dearly hope not. I loathe and despise him. I feel compromised and unclean even hosting his image (and giving him an audience). He makes me feel weary and depressed and angry. Why? Hard to put into words precisely. But if you cringed & flinched & vomited when you first clicked here and caught sight of him then you share my pain, and no explanation is necessary.

I taught students proper forms of address. I taught them formalised small talk. I taught them how to compose a professional looking fax. I taught them all this hideous shit and much more.

The nastiest, most cynical, most soul-sucking school I worked for was called – wait for it – "The Wall Street Institute". Classes were not "classes", but (through a master stroke of rebranding) "encounters". Classrooms were glass-walled cubicles – encouraging (so the corporate rhetoric would have it) transparency.

But they didn't encourage transparency. They encouraged self-consciousness and despair. The atmosphere was "futuristic" and dystopic. It was exploitative and evil. I quit after a month. The canteen served Soylent Green.

Company propaganda drew exclusively on stock images of square-jawed, blue-skyed optimism and can-do spirit. Images that I had to look at 300 times a day. Images that made me want to dive headfirst through the glass walls, while shooting myself in the face. Images like this…

And this…

Shot from below, with the viewer forced to gaze up at his/her betters. Message? You're a maggoty worm flopping about uselessly on your soft belly. But you could, one day (if you tried really hard), be just like these fuckers. People maggoty people look up to. Literally.

And don't forget…

…the business world is one where traditional divisions of race and gender don't apply. It's a brighter, braver place. Glass walls. Encounters. You get the picture.