Ad Featuring a Butchered Woman
July 29, 2010
by Hardy Girls Healthy Women
|21 Comments
Hat tip to our friends at Hardy Girl Healthy Women for sharing this disturbing ad for Beymen Blender, a pop-up store in Istanbul, Turkey.
The tag line with this disturbing photo reads: “The concept store with a butcher shop.”
Blogger Susannah Breslin at The Frisky writes:
…one could say it’s misogynist, offensive, or a series of other criticisms, yet what if you take it to the bottom line: Does seeing this chopped-up, butchered woman hanging from meat hooks make you want to go buy clothes? I can’t parse it if I try. She’s naked so … I should cover myself up? Or someone will chop me up?
Precisely.
Just who is this ad meant to appeal to?
PUKE. Just when I think things can’t get worse, They do. I remember as a girl going to a small Mom and Pop grocery and standing in line to pay. They had gone into the pornography biz and their rack of porn mags was right front and center behind the counter. One of them had a cover picture of a sexualized woman being run through a leaf chipper and guts flying out the back. I dropped my Popsicle and never went back to the store but the image is still in my mind. At least now all those places have been driven out of business by Walmarts and it is easy to pressure the mega chains into not subjecting shopper to pornography.
Men hate you. It’s high time women stopped denying that fact.
Not all men hate us but the ones who do are really loud and have a monopoly on media.
If this were just another naked woman in an ad, I would take some time this morning to rant about the ever present sexual double standard, lol. This ad, however, appears to be created by a person(s)/agency that border on pathological. There are really no words. As if violence against women isn’t already a pandemic.
I think the writer says it all in the last sentence: “Just who is this ad meant to appeal to?” I’d love for someone to answer that question. I’m also curious as to whether Beymen Blender will see an increase in sales over this.
@ Bes: “PUKE” is my response, too, not just towards this ad, but as you allude to, towards the sexualization of women in the marketing industry. This trend does nothing to advance a vision of equality and egalitarianism. NOTHING.
Bes, the problem with saying that “not all men hate you” is that it’s not a choice between men that hate us and men that love us. It’s a choice between men that hate us and men that really couldn’t see why they have to give a damn one way or another. So it’s not between Evil and Good. It’s between Evil and Apathetic. I can simply never stop remembering that. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.
Janis: This time I don’t agree. There are men who love women and they are a much bigger segment of the population than the female haters. But the men who have monopolized media and advertising are overwhelmingly misogynist and they are very loud and they are apparently dumber than dirt in that they repeat their business killing misogynist imagery over and over without ever learning they are offending women and hurting business. I have said before these men do not process language and it is a waste of time to talk at them, they only speak money and the only way to deal with them is threaten profits which women could easily do.
I also blame orgs like NOW for their prominent but ineffective representation of women and our interests. There were women who marched into the major grocery chains 10 years ago and demanded that women shoppers be respected and not have to run a gauntlet of pornography to make their purchases, but these women who negotiated the changes in corporate policy were not “feminists” from NOW. They were conservative Christian church based women. The broads from NOW probably couldn’t return sour milk if someone else negotiated the right of them to do so.
EWWW!!
In other news: I created a Facebook page to oppose the fact that in Saudi Arabia all adult women are required to have permission from a male guardian to do many things; for example to travel, study, work or even go to court to make a complaint about domestic violence. I know a Facebook page isn’t much but us nobodies must do what we can. It would be great if you all would click the “like” button and write on the wall:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pag.....038;ref=ts
The page is called “women don’t need guardians.”
There are men who love women and they are a much bigger segment of the population than the female haters.
I disagree. Individual men may love individual women, generally like they love their pets or prized possessions, but the vast majority of men hate women in general. We wouldn’t be seeing these kinds of ads otherwise. Misogynistic porn would not be so popular. The laws, traditions and ideology in male-dominated societies would not be so anti-woman.
Kali, again I’d say that the vast majority of men just don’t care. It’s not good versus evil, but apathy versus evil — which is no better.
Either way, we’re setting the bar for “love” way too low. We’re defining it such that all a man has to do is not actively adore this sort of advertising or actively create it. The facts are that a man is either evil and actively hateful, or a man sees this sort of thing, feels a bit queasy, but doesn’t raise his voice and thinks that women who do are making too much out of it, and then his thoughts move to more important things like last night’s game or tonight’s dinner.
We simply define the latter combination of two seconds of mild distaste followed by apathy as “love.” We set that bar so low that a man gets over it just by not whipping himself out and jerking off to that ad the split second he sees it. I’d rather see that bar set at a more sane level myself — if a man loves women, he’d see that ad as worth a storm of controversy and loss of temper … even where his buddies might overhear it. He’d stampede over here to voice his horror and support of women.
Yet how many men do we see here ever, in reply to any post, who aren’t whining that they are oppressed by being forced to see us as actual people, who don’t try to mansplain to us why they only ever vote for men because they’re such feminists, or who snap out some stupid comment that shows that they never even read the back archives because it’s beneath them to have done so?
If we set the bar for “love” high enough that it actually means something, we may end up having to admit that we might never see it. Truth is that if that ad featured a butchered Labrador Retriever, men would scream their heads off. a butchered chick? Crickets. That is NOT love. It’s not active hate. It’s apathy, which ultimately amounts to the same things since whether they hate it or couldn’t give a crap, we still get the message like the monster in the horror movie says: Scream all you want honey, no one’s coming to your aid.
I think it was Simon Wiesenthal who said about the Holocaust that the cruelty of the oppressor hurts less than the apathy of the bystander. Jews don’t mistake apathy for love in that case … but Jews don’t hunger for the love of gentiles nor do they create them from their own bodies and invest themselves nursing them to adulthood for 18 years. No one wants to say that, after that sort of personal and emotional investment, that the best they can expect from the bystanders is apathy.
How would the ad be treated if it were a butchered Jewish man or Black man, or Gay man? Hell, NOW might even get pissed off over that! So what do we do to change the tide of society? I say we threaten financial ruin of anyone who publishes or sells this garbage. That is a form of communication men can process. Talking at them regarding lofty values is worthless because they apparently can’t process language since they don’t respond to it.
After reading and rereading the article I can’t figure out is the store in the USA? Is it only an online store (in which case I would start a club of hacker girls to take them out). And was this ad published in a print magazine or some corporate run web ad placer?
Who thought this ad up?
What business was the ad promoting?
Where was the ad published and by whom?
How do we disrupt their business?
There’s an interesting piece at NRO that speaks to this topic: “Are Commercials Responsible for Encouraging Crimes Against Women?” (7.28.10)http://social-activism.suite10.....inst-women
Here’s one paragraph:
“Objectifying women in commercials and advertisements for products has desensitized people towards violence perpetrated against women. Portraying women as seductive and helpless reaffirms the notion that men are superior to women in an already male dominated world. This does not help the cause of women fighting for equal rights, opportunities, wages and representation in the real world.”
That’s all so true. I commend the writer for having the courage to write this.
I just figured out an Idea that could work to combat this sort of imagery. OK we form a group and monthly we vote on the most offensive ad. Say this ad won (although I think it could be necessary to focus on major corporations and major media outlets that run the ads) Then we take up a collection, we make a copycat ad that features a Jewish man (picked because they own almost all media and their orgs will actually get coverage by the corporate media who set the sexist agenda and then blame it on merely reflecting the culture)in the same ad and we pay to place the ad in a major publication. When the outrage hits the media, they call our group and ask WTF? then we interject our own spin on the discussion….”this ad is an offensive ad that did not ring any alarms when it was featured with a woman, this is our way of objecting since we don’t have an authentic voice in corporate media..stay tuned for our next installment”. Of course you could use gay men or black men in your copycat ads but Jewish men have the most media power and forcing media to talk about the problem is the goal.
Alright, this picture is loathesome. We are talking about body parts here. You see this kind of thing, mutilated sexualized women, in popular music videos such as Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance and Beyonce’s Diva, the music video itself is likely written and edited by males. Less insidious examples include seemingly innocuous phrases like “Put a ring on it.” Males hide their hatred, and I don’t see the need to spend too much time figuring out why they hate women, it’s jealousy, their own incompetence compared to women, and deep hatred for sex in my opinion, but they hide this hatred with you know, professions. They need women to provide for them and they can only function when everything is provided to them. Now that everything is provided to them…this is the progress of civilization. Women had social standing because of their ability to do things, when men get comfortable they want women to feed and dress them, and they are seemingly incapable of doing this on their own. Now they have enough technology so now it’s time to bring out the Blender.
As if, really. As if they really honestly think they can use physical violence , the result of a defective genome, to murder women. I agree with Janis that the majority of men hate women. If you are a married woman, or a daughter, you might get the sense otherwise.
Bes your idea is brilliant.
It’s sickly fitting at the moment that Time magazine is showing us all what the brutal mutilation of women and girls actually looks like. The girl on their cover doesn’t look like she feels all sexxxay, does she? *seethe* And these assholes are making what amounts to PORN about this.
exactly Janis. They laugh about it like they are being sneaky like there’s a big sky mommy that’s going to swat their butts and it’s all funny. They’re not human.
Wow – Bes, great Idea!
We at Hardy Girls Healthy are launching a revolutionary site for teenage girls to react to disturbing and demeaning ads like this one! The site itself is launching in less than two weeks, but we already have a great Facebook site where girls can view satire thats been added outrageous media images. Please check out and invite any teenage girls you know to Powered By Girl: http://www.facebook.com/poweredbygirl
The most offensive ad idea is great… and not only should we show the impact if the ad were aimed at men or minorities . I think a list of brief and relevant reasons the ad is offensive, and possible repercussions , to add to the importance of the “award” .
Wow, even Hannibal Lecter would find this distasteful.
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