This might be old news to some: Burger King’s “Whopper Virgins” ad campaign has been running for a while. Here’s the promo:

I felt intuitively icky about the whole thing before but couldn’t quite define why. Luckily, blogger Evan Calder Williams has articulated that feeling very nicely already, so I’ll just let him take it from here:

The core of it seems rather to be: these are ads that hinge on the support structure of those subjects who do not grasp advertising, who are “pure.” Encoded in this, then, is the oddly self-aware stance of the corporation: look, we know that your consumption habits are so mediated by advertising — as we want them to be, we’re not suggesting that you change that, good God no — that you no longer can even taste things correctly. So we’re bringing in a pinch hitter, the global dispossessed, to function as the externalization of the sensual apparatus you all used to have.

[Thanks Steve!]