ghost-modernism

nonicethings:

ghostmodernism:

alright, Advertising, let me be straight with you for a second here: where on earth are you getting your numbers? if slut-shaming is the name of the game, at least break 30, for christ’s sake, this girl is at least 18!

just in case that was too subtle: I am joking and irritated. if this ad thinks this woman is a nasty ho, lord knows what it would make of me, as someone who has slept with almost twice as many people over the course of the past several years. (although if the idea is that she boned 20 dudes at once or in a single day, not over all time, that is super duper intense but still HER PREROGATIVE, broheim.)

also, this is very much one of those situations in which I wonder what the response would be if this ad featured a male model—or perhaps even more interestingly, a gay male model. I feel like this idea would be less upsetting if displayed only as part of a multi-gendered triptych? thoughts, internet?

bananafin:

coketalk:

This may be a campaign about HIV/AIDS awareness, but that’s no excuse. This is blatant misogyny, really sinister stuff that conveys a much more profound message about the female body.

Take another look at it. She’s got a killer smile, but still, you can’t see her eyes. The model is cropped so that she’s essentially headless. What makes her human is gone. What makes her a woman is on display. That’s a very deliberate creative choice.

She is an object to be fucked without a brain or an identity. Worse still, her vagina is a fully indexed destination on a Google map. The visual metaphor is so potent (and porn is so ubiquitous) that this image is more jarring than one in which she shows us her actual pussy.

It’s not about the fact that she’s had sex with Bill Johnson and 19 others. Who gives a fuck? What’s toxic is the idea that they checked into her vagina on Foursquare. It’s saying is that a her private parts aren’t private at all. They’re public. That’s the implicit message in this image, and it’s degrading as hell.

It’s not slut-shaming so much as it’s female-shaming, and it reinforces the age-old cultural narrative that women’s bodies aren’t their own.

I’ve seen this floating around, and it makes me so profoundly uncomfortable. It’s up there with the Sex Without A Condom Means You’re Fucking Hitler commercial.

I think the gay male model point is interesting: that’s a population where extreme attitudes about prophylactic use are kind of taken for granted (practiced? Maybe not), in part because gay sex is easily labeled as deviant, where deviant=dirty=unsafe. Which is fine! We should just feel that way about ALL the kinds of sex! I am all for fear-mongering if it promotes condom use, because I am super-all-about condoms, and you should be too!

The two big issues that have been raised about the ad seem kind of…reachy. I suspect that the model’s face was cut off to protect her identity—yes, I get that she probably isn’t HIV+, but making someone the literal poster-child for casual sex and its potentially fatal consequences is just rude.

I’m not sure that it’s necessary to address the vagina-as-public-place issue, since it’s obviously a peripherally clever attention-grabbing gimmick, but hey, I can get reachy too: We’re moving away from perceiving a woman’s sexuality/genitals as belonging to her father and then husband, so representing a vagina as a location, rather than a possession, is actually moving toward a less a) euphemistic and b) patriarchal perception of female sexual agency. The state of sexual health in this country is so abominable in part because we’re tangled up in the myth of it all, so I understand why the ad, with it’s surprisingly unvarnished version of what casual sex signifies, feels uncomfortable.

Reblog this again for added astute comments from a pal.

(Source: rickrosswifey)