Mountain Dew sells racism and violence against women
PepsiCo has pulled a Mountain Dew commercial that social commentator Dr. Boyce Watkins calls “arguably the most racist commercial in history.” [Content warning for racism, battery, and basically everything that's wrong with the world]
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Billboard Fail: Why this billboard celebrating “remarkable women” doesn’t work
The Riva Spatz Women’s Wall of Honour is a wall at Mount Saint Vincent University that pays tribute to remarkable women, and the intended message of the billboard is, “You should donate to the Women’s Wall of Honour, much like we did.”
...read moreWhen is an ill-fitting bra like domestic violence? When you ask Amante. (Or Jezebel.)
[Warning for references to domestic violence.]
The ad says, “Suffocation is the worst kind of abuse.” Is it really the worst kind of abuse? I don’t know, frankly; considering the range of horrible things done to women by partners and family, it’s kind of hard to rank them all. But I feel comfortable saying that suffocating one’s breasts with an overly tight bra ranks so far down the list as to not warrant even joking comparison.
...read moreA Simple Saturday Post: Leave Me Out of Your “Everyone,” Mr. Apatow.
I just wanted to quickly mention the trailer for the new Judd Apatow movie, “This is 40.” Of course, we all know that Hollywood is guilty of all sorts of offenses all of the time, but it seems rare even today to find one that is quite so up front with its surface-level exclusion. The [...]
...read moreTarot! Get your tarot!
Hi guys. As some of you, but not most of you, know – I read tarot. Not because I’m a creepy “let me tell you your future, child… oh yes, a tall, handsome man approaches…” – type (Jesus, at least I hope so), but because I have found that tarot is good for predicting the [...]
...read moreIt’s National Cleavage Day!
Get out the ladies, ladies! It’s National Cleavage Day! And I, your resident humorless feminist fuddy-duddy, am here to poop all over it.
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Belvedere apologizes, but what do we want?
Belvedere has officially apologized for their rapey ad, and made a donation to RAINN. Which is… fine. But kind of always how these things go, right? Someone fucks up big time, and the fuck-up appears to be an institutional problem and not just one idiot running their mouth off, and then Outrage, and then a Statement that the fuck-up is Not What We Stand For, and then a donation to X organization. Here’s Belvedere’s statement:
...read moreChildren’s Healthcare of Atlanta shames fat kids to save them
It was surveys of two towns in Georgia that convinced Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta that the nation’s relentless campaign against childhood obesity wasn’t hitting hard enough: Georgia has the second highest rate of childhood obesity in the U.S., and parents in the towns surveyed seemed unaware of their kids’ obesity. So to promote their Strong4Life campaign, Children’s decided that a painfully blunt approach was necessary, and damn the consequences–even if those consequences involved putting sad, overweight children on billboards and TV ads to shame their parents into action.
...read morePete Hoekstra is super racist, doesn’t understand the word “satire”
If you’ve gotten someone’s attention by giving them policies to challenge and facts to debate, you’re doing something right. You’re putting yourself out there as a contender. You’re making yourself part of the conversation. Good for you! If you’ve gotten someone’s attention by putting a young Asian woman on a bicycle to pedal through rice fields in a sedge hat to the tune of a gong and a pentatonic scale, so she can smilingly criticize your opponent in broken English, it’s not because you’re a contender–it’s because you’re a racist asshole.
...read moreThe Annual Post About Sexist Super Bowl Commercials 2012
Last year, safe estimates were that 46 percent of Super Bowl viewers were women. With market research indicating that 1 in 5 watch just for the commercials, that’s more than 10 million women who have your undivided attention (not to mention of millions of men who actually, you know, like and respect women) as, once again, you devote millions of advertising dollars to naked chicks in front of wind machines.
Welcome to 2012′s Insulting, Demeaning, and Frankly Not- Terribly-Creative Super Bowl Ads (Tittys! Edition)
...read moreNow with pro-pixel fauxtanical hydro-jargon microbead extract
Do you ever feel like your skin has that unpleasant skin texture? Are you worried that your waist isn’t narrower than your head? Do you look at photos of yourself and think, “Oh, no, I look like myself!”? Have no fear–you stop looking like a human being and start looking like the walking incarnation of an unrealistic, unattainable beauty standard with Fotoshop by Adobe.
“This commercial isn’t real,” says faux-ad creator Jesse Rosten, “and neither are society’s standards of beauty.” (For the record, the whole “eat healthy and exercise” thing ain’t a slam-dunk either, Rosten. But your overall point is sound.)
[Transcript after the jump.]
...read moreObjectification, Your Honor
This is a guest post by Jessica Mack
Last week, there was a new and interesting twist to the Leveson Inquiry – the ongoing public trial of the British Press following last year’s phone hacking scandal. A handful of women’s rights and rape prevention groups in the UK are insisting that the media’s portrayal of women – namely its accomplice in sexism, objectification, rape culture, and misogyny – be investigated as part of its general scumminess.
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