Make Love, Sell Deodorant

John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent two weeks in bed in 1969—first the Amsterdam Hilton, then the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal—and called it a protest. The press arrived expecting a scandal and got something stranger: two famous people lying under white sheets, holding court, inviting the world to consider what deliberate inaction might accomplish. It was absurd and completely earnest in equal measure, which is probably why it still feels like something.

AXE, the deodorant brand, built a campaign decades later under the slogan "Make Love. Not War."—a phrase old enough to have grandchildren—asking people to stay in bed for a day in partnership with Peace One Day, a real advocacy organization doing actual work in conflict zones. The implied equation: skipping your morning routine is a political act. It isn’t. But the instinct underneath the campaign is real.

Staying in bed past when you’re supposed to get up is one of the few unilateral refusals most people have available. Not because it changes anything politically—it doesn’t—but because the machinery of the day demands your participation from the moment the alarm sounds, and sometimes you just don’t give it. That’s not laziness and it’s not peace activism. It’s something smaller and more honest: the extra hour you steal back from a schedule that wasn’t designed with your benefit in mind.

Lennon understood it as image rather than policy. The AXE version understood it as image too, but they were selling a different product. Peace One Day deserves better co-branding. The bed, on the other hand, needs no marketing at all.