Rejected by Fox and CBS due — I assumed — to its hints at bestiality. The Spuds Mckenzie ads took heat for that too at the time, but Spuds was never seen getting anything from his groupies beyond an admiring smile. Here you’ve got pigs ready to roll one on. But it turns out that’s not the objection at all:

In a written response to Trojan, though, Fox said that it had rejected the spot because, “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.”

I’m not sure how to parse that logic. It was okay for the characters on “Melrose Place” (which aired on Fox) to use condoms while bed-hopping since they might be crawling with VD — but it wouldn’t have been okay if they were married and had a clean bill of health? Dumber still, the ad makes pretty clear that they are using the condoms for, ahem, “health-related” reasons. Hence the pig metaphor, which has little to say about fertility but a lot to say about being “unclean.”

Ah well. Enjoy it as theater. It’s the epilogue to “Animal Farm” that Orwell never got around to writing: after colluding with the humans to enslave their fellow animals, the pigs settle into a life of easy sex and dissipation, the pursuit of women on the social “meat market” symbolizing their endless greed and self-cannibalization. God, how I would have liked to write that English paper.

Needless to say, had the gender roles been reversed here, the outcry would have shaken the firmament. Click the image to watch.