Comment by Robert Coren on my “Meaty matters” posting:
“It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion” inescapably reminds me of a cigarette ad from my youth, whose slogan I chose to interpret in a way probably not intended by its creators: “It’s not how long you make it, it’s how you make it long”.
The 1951 song title was intended to convey (in the Wiktionary gloss)
When it comes to sexual satisfaction, penis size doesn’t matter, but technique does.
The cigarette ad from the 60s (which came in many variants, for television and for print media) was for Winston Super Kings, and the sexual innuendo was surely not inadvertent.
Background: the symbolically phallic potential of cigarettes has long been exploited in advertising: men display their cigarettes, women fondle them. Back in 1948 we got Lucky Strikes marching to the slogan
So round. So firm. So fully packed.
(cylindical, hard, full of stuff). You can watch the ad here.
Then came Winston Super Kings. Extra-long cigarettes that the makers claimed were designed to supply more taste, not just more millimeters. You can watch one of the tv ads here. Like “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion”, the message was that mere size isn’t the point, it’s all in the technique.
The Winston ads all featured erect penises jutting cigarettes. The print ads were more colorful than the tv ads, and sometimes reinforced the natural phallicity of a jutting cigarette with a fully packed man’s basket:
Hey, sex sells.
January 21, 2017 at 12:33 pm |
Although I have always heard, consistent with the above, that “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion” refers to penis size, I was surprised to find that the 1951 song actually seems instead to be a reference to the female form.
January 22, 2017 at 4:42 am |
Both that 1951 song and the “So round, so firm, so fully packed” slogan can in fact be taken either way. The recordings of the song go some in one direction, some in the other. The slogan in the ad campaign was probably intended to suggest both interpretations.