A perfectly sculpted man stands topless on a New York rooftop in the pouring rain, face tilted up, mouth open. He looks up. “Are you alive?” he mutters.

Another perfectly sculpted man dashes into a dark alley, clearly being pursued. Maybe he’s pulled off some daring heist like seducing a beautiful Italian heiress in order to steal her diamonds. We don’t know, but our musings are cut off when he looks up at us and grins. “Are you alive?”

No, these aren’t excerpts from my forthcoming erotic novella Men Only. They’re scenes from a particularly obnoxious series of adverts by perfume makers Diesel. They feature beautiful models doing beautiful things clearly designed to make us shovel-faced normies painfully depressed about how un-beautiful our lives are.

I think these adverts are what the phrase “fuck off” was designed for. Some 18th century genius envisioned a nightmare future in which pretty men and women could invade our homes and tell us how pathetic we were, and decided to invent a suitable retort.

Of course, convincing us our lives are dreary and mediocre is a staple tactic when you’re avertising a product that costs fifty quid and makes you smell like liquid mercury. Ewan McGregor tried to convince us that wearing Davidoff would lead us on an “exhilirating journey” that would lead us “further and further into the realms of the extraordinary”, where “the scent  of adventure is in the air”.

Fuck. Off.

A recent skin cream advert, the name of which escapes me, ends with something like, “Until you’re ready for a more permanent lift, there’s [product name - probably Pro-Spewminol A-minus or something].” The assumption being that the natural process of aging is so repulsive to you that plastic surgery is an inevitability, and moisturiser is merely to tide you over until you pluck up the courage to do the right thing and go under the knife.

Is it me, or are these adverts getting more and more brazen? It’s a trend that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, and I imagine within the next decade or so we’ll have perfume adverts that feature a gorgeous model saying, “buy this nice-smelling stuff, you stinky pathetic heap of commoner scum.”

And we’ll probably buy it. But until that day comes, there’s a glorious phrase invented just for the occasion.