Funny Boners

I work hard a lot of the time (as many people do) and sometimes just want a bit of light relief, so I find myself Googling unusual sex/death topics which I’ve heard about as a kind of ‘still working but not really working’ activity. One of those unusual topics was the ad campaign for Argentinian condoms brand ‘Tulipan’ which featured several skeletons in coitus and gave new meaning to the word ‘boning’.

One criticism of the adverts was that consumers were unsure what they were trying to ‘say’ but I figured it was something like “These condoms are so good you can keep going for as long as it takes you to die and decompose”. Or maybe they were saying “Use condoms when you have sex so that you don’t get an STD which could kill you” (which is sort of what The Catholic League said when The Museum of Sex in New York put two skeletons going at it in their window.) So I think there’s a lot to take away from these ads and they were a pretty effective campaign.

They also put me in mind of this lovely picture of two skeletons which appear to be kissing that crops up quite frequently on the web.

Known as The Lovers of Valdaro, they were excavated during a dig at a Roman Villa site in 2007 , in San Giorgio di Mantova, Lombardy, and are thought to be 6000 years old. I’ve not seen this on a dig myself, but during an excavation on The Poulton Research Project, Chester, we uncovered two skeletons holding hands which was just as lovely. There is another from a dig at Hasanlu which is supposedly a genuine discovery but the skeletons aren’t 6000 years old as they are sometimes described. Perhaps it’s because this find frequently gets mixed up with the Lovers of Valdaro?

They’re both beautiful representations of love transcending death, hoax or not, and certainly a much more sophisticated image than the one I’m going to end with.

Well, it is the weekend… Have a good one!