The Opera of Orgasms

Okay, so where am I?

I'm preparing for an other trip...and another surgery...yeah, getting old sucks. I'm also prepping for the Emmys on Sunday. I got a new lens to break in. You know I'll post pictures. Stephen Colbert is hosting...more political humor. Ugh! I'm thinking Louis Vuitton for the red carpet. Yeah, that's the ticket...yet I digress.

I bring up the traveling because it's a little known fact that I see a classical music performance or an opera in every country I visit that offers such a thing. In Europe, it seems every major city has a beautiful opera house. Ah, the Opera...a kid I remember it being something you were taught to avoid. It was a old school meant to be enjoyed by the stuffy, nose-up crowd in tuxedo tails and shiny shoes.  The opera was strictly for the high cultured. As I aged I learned to truly appreciate it because I get to use my slim knowledge of classical music and study up on the stories and the history of each type of performance.

Regardless of how well I've aged and how cultured I've become, the fact remains that it is still a difficult sell for younger audiences.

Swedish opera house Folkoperan knows this fact and decided to pick the easy path to try and reach Swedish millennials is to use the old advertising adage that "sex sells."

To promote the premiere of Puccini’s Turandot, Folkoperan and its agency crafted a commercial called “The Opera of Orgasms” that is devoid of words, just moans and groans and, well, orgasms.

So much for high culture...

If you are new to opera, the connection to sexual situations isn't a stretch by any means. Opera is peppered with fables spun from of unbridled yearning, retribution and heartrending losses. Elevating its more applicable qualities was invented yesterday either. Last year, the Paris Opera recruited Bret Easton Ellis to craft a modern version of “Figaro,” a story as contemporary and depraved as you can get without dolling our red-light district ticket prices.

Turandot is especially suitable for this kind of interpretation. First released in 1926, it narrates the tale of Prince Calaf who falls in love with the unemotional Princess Turandot. To gain permission to marry her, potential suitors have to solve three riddles; any wrong answer results in death. Yikes!

“We live in a society where we’re constantly encouraged to indulge life, but it’s often in very superficial ways,” says Mellika Melouani Melani, director and artistic director at Folkoperan. “In our interpretation of the opera, we want to pay tribute to the urge of desire and the total devotion that comes with it. In our film, the orgasm symbolizes this.”

In the commercial (the Folkoperan marketers call it a film), people in diverse—not necessarily glitzy—sexual circumstances express their apex to the tune of the Nessun Dorma aria. It’s a festival of unlimited longing, those moments when you’re so close to metaphorically falling off the cliff that things like environment, expectancy and social norms no longer carry any weight. And it exquisitely echoes the state Turandot’s admirers find themselves in, one in which the proximity of pleasure is so painful that nothing matters more than finding release, not even oblivion.

Now trust me, having an orgasm might actually be the closest you and I get to singing opera. Both are big physical experiences that release endorphins and oxytocin, but this piece just rings wrong with the current state of advertising. It’s over the top and getting ample amount of press but it’s done so well, it’s much too hard to be incredulous.

So what do I know?

I do know this—it's becoming all too easy for brands to use sexism as low-hanging fruit to go viral. Time after time, we rise to the bait, giving the brands exactly what they set out to achieve: Internet Fame.

On an almost daily basis, sexism in headlines, adverts and newspaper front pages is getting taken to task on Twitter. But, by tweeting about those brands and making them go viral, are we giving them exactly what they want?

As Oscar Wilde said "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about". Brand managers are well aware of this," says Anthony Patterson, professor of marketing at Liverpool University. A "response — whether outrage or support — demonstrates that consumers are engaging with their brand."

Take the London's Daily Mail. On eve of Britain triggering Article 50 and officially entering Brexit negotiations, it was #LegsIt (not #Brexit) that topped the UK's Twitter trends. The newspaper's headline declaring "Forget about Brexit, who won Legs-it!" alongside a photograph of Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and British Prime Minister Theresa May and a pain staking analysis of their legs, prompted the ire of thousands on social media.


A statement from a Daily Mail spokesperson (which began with "for goodness sake, get a life") only added fuel to the fire. "Sarah Vine's piece, which was flagged as light-hearted, was a side-bar alongside a serious political story." The Daily Mail wasn't sorry. And, why would they be? We, by venting our outrage on Twitter at their "light-hearted" sexism, made #LegsIt the most talked-about story of the day.

Long story short: Women shouldn't be roadkill in a brand's race to get viral fame. Brands, it's time to get your act together and find another way to get internet fame.