Sheer Commodification

Some interesting things happening here involving bio-energetics, sex and commodity aesthetics.  In the erogenous zone of the airline, the "Sheer Energy by L' Eggs" product gives a little something extra, facilitating  that 110% service-industry spunk.  A hidden implication of this commercial is a libidinal investment in the everyday via the commodity, which is part of an entire milieu of commodifications present in the sexuality of service-industrial relations. The excruciating boredom of airline travel culminates in a performance of pure service--featuring Sheer Energy-- that evokes the type-cast sexualized aesthetic of the female flight attendant.  Being served becomes a service in itself; service is the service provided.  Prior to the diversification--but not elimination--  of  airline hiring practices in regards to appearance and gender, inflight experience resembled a kind of perverse sexual utopia that centered on masculine consumer desire coupled with company attempts to maintain a nostalgic image of travel luxury, all subsumed under a scripted role-play.      

Sheer Energy corresponds to needs directly posited by the service industry-- which is part anatomical and part mystical.  The latter element is seen in the energized super-humanity of the flight attendant, an occupation often associated with a paradoxically sleep-deprived, maniacal gusto.  Flight attendants figure in many ways to be the transcendent super-(hu)man of late capitalism,with a bubbling energetic reserve to invest not only in the service provided to flyers but also in a spectacular love for providing that service.  Super-humanity exhibits itself in this--albeit put-on-- ebullient personality that situates itself in the context of  inflight despair (the claustrophobia, the air, the technologically-provoked anxiety); service is valued on the basis of its ability to obscure the horrifying, banal and inhuman tendencies of micro-managed consumer experiences.  In this light, the flight attendant is the apogee of service industry valorization.    

The commodity becomes a source of abstract, post-caloric energy that fuels postindustrial labor.  The wear-and-tear of the workday is placed under erasure by this magical product.  The product itself makes her feel like dancing, even after standing for six hours.    

Sheer Energy also informs a feminine commodity aesthetic that can be procured through consumption.  70's and 80's advertisements exhibit similar tropes to the ones displayed by Sheer Energy--mainly that of securing a place as an object of desire by relating it to male preference.  "Men prefer Hane's pantyhose"; "Tab [cola] can help you stay in his mind"; the concept of Virginia Slims; etc.  Consuming becomes not only a way to reproduce the worker but also to more fluidly reproduce, capitalize and hyperbolize existing tendencies in the field of desire.  Products who, at least in their ads, evoke the body are instrumentalized in commodity-hermeneutics in which the maintenance and care of the consumer is the objective; the result is the commodification of the consumer body itself (as well as, more residually and less violently, a commodification of hetero-male desire).