When even Time Magazine sets aside space for ad reviews you have to figure they’re finally running out of things to talk about. Not to knock my own little column here but they ought to have more important stuff to focus on like, say North Korea’s nuclear ambitions or whether Obama likes cable-knit sweaters better than fleece ones. Instead, the big brains over there ran an article chatting up an internet viral by Budweiser that mixes porn with comedy. Time’s crack reporter concludes that the very existence of the ad proves just how porn-friendly our society has become. This should come as good news for porn dealers nation-wide currently tasked with blacking out their store windows and disguising their products with plain brown wrappers. Rejoice! Porn is finally out in the open. Ding, dong the taboo’s dead!

Now the folks over at Bud Light are pretty much Jedi Masters when it comes to using humor to sell booze and this spot is no different. And while it’s pretty hilarious I’m pretty sure that the bright lights at Time and I are not exactly on the same page about society’s overall acceptance of porn.

In the spot, a nerdy guy goes into a grimy little corner store to buy a six-pack of Bud Light. He approaches the counter with his beverage of choice as the aged, and heavily accented, counter woman asks if that’s all he wants? He replies no, and proceeds to add in some lip balm, batteries and then request a copy of “Tongue in Cheeks” – clearly a hardcore porn mag. The woman responds by leafing through the adult mags she has beside the counter and calling out each of their names – each more horrifying than the last - and then yelling out to her husband asking where they keep the “Tongue in Cheeks.” He answers that the “weird” (bleeped out s-word) is kept under the counter. As the counter woman tries to find it, a cute girl enters the store and recognizes our hapless porn buyer – she went to prom with him way back when. As you can guess, the horrible counter woman keeps on harping about the porn mag, naming it again and again, humiliating the guy further even as he lamely tries to explain that it’s for a “friend.” A tall, creepy guy then joins the line and proceeds to really raunch up the proceedings by vouching for the periodical’s freaky bona fides by describing his own personal use of it.

It gets worse as the counter woman produces a selection of free gifts (you can guess, I’m certain) that come with the porn magazine’s purchase. Finally, nerdy dude tries to leave but can’t as he gets stopped at the door by a hold-up guy who takes the entire store hostage. To cap off the humiliation he is seen, porn and all, on the nightly news. Most. Embarrassing. Moment. Ever.

How the spot sells beer I don’t know. Maybe it’s supposed to make me think Bud Light is cool ‘cause they can joke about skin mags or something. Who really knows? The weird thing to me is that the message they appear to be pushing is so seemingly out of step with a world where Hugh Hefner publicly hires whores to pose as his girlfriends and Donald Trump seems willing to pimp out his Miss California for nude photos. In this case we have a porn-soaked, sex-toy waving beer commercial that plays almost, dare I say it, conservative? It’s hard to see, amongst all the dirty talk, sex goodies and raw humiliation but doesn’t the message Bud Light is pushing seem almost puritan in nature? They appear to suggest that having weird sex fetishes is bad enough but getting caught with them out in the open is so potentially life-ending that nerdy dude should have stuck with the beer alone (is beer a fetish?). Kind of an odd conclusion in a world where shame of any kind is supposed to be the enemy.

Time magazine ought to spend a bit more time looking into the real story here. Perhaps Bud Light is actually part of some “vast right wing conspiracy” to demonize the purchase of porn. They could interview Hilary or even Newt. I bet they each keep files on this kind of stuff. Time could even commission an intensive, hard-hitting expose on porn – with tons of pictures. I bet that’d sell some copies. They better put a brown wrapper on it first though.

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