Dear Deep Silver,

I have just seen the parody ad for the collector’s edition of Dead Island: Riptide. While violence against women and graphic dismemberment are fairly cheap, extremely tasteless and far too easy targets for “shock value”, I’m impressed by your provocative attempts to further the dialogue about the sinister and ingrained misogyny of videogame culture by taking it to a disgusting extreme.

Limited Edition! Specially designed and crafted! Completely and utterly terrible!

Oh… wait, hang on, I’ve just heard from Rock, Paper, Shotgun that you’re actually serious about this. This apparently isn’t just a misguided pastiche of publicity stunts. Oh. Oh dear.

You claim that this hunk of resin will:

… make a striking conversation piece on any discerning zombie gamer’s mantel.

Well, as someone who has notched up damn near 1,000 hours of zombie killing in recent years (thanks, Steam, for keeping track of that. I was starting to worry that I was wasting my life), let’s have a conversation about it. I’ll go and brew up a steaming cup of Sityourassdown while you perch on the naughty stool and think about what you’ve done.

I can hear it already, the rumbling of defensive PR managers approaching.

“But it’s a zombie game! The whole point of it is to commit heinous acts of violence against the undead in self defence! A zombie torso with its limbs severed is a trophy that represents your prowess!”

Before I address this, in the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I am not a qualified physician. However, from my forays into the study of human and zombie biology, I can confirm that the healthy, warm-tanned skintone, obvious freshness of the blood, the lack of any sort of necrosis or decomposition of the flesh indicates that this torso was certainly not a zombie at the time of her dismemberment.

Exposure of the lower ribs suggest traumatic chest injury; however, it’s not clear whether this occurred before or after the time of death. My working hypothesis is that her death had something to do with either decapitation or the loss of all her blood. Even without formal medical training, I am fairly confident in positing that there is no coming back from complete removal of the head.

There isn’t even any artistic merit in what you’ve created, which is almost as offensive as the glorification of horrific violence against women. You have the gumption to describe it as:

…Dead Island’s grotesque take on an iconic Roman marble torso sculpture.

No. Stop. Please. The skies are filled with the anguished cries of Classics and Art History students, joined by the despairing sobs of everybody with a functioning pair of eyes. There are several salient differences between your abomination and classical works of art, but I’ll set out a few of these for your convenience:

• Artistic merit. Marble sculptures are exquisite works by highly-skilled craftspeople demonstrating the depth of their abilities. Weeks of work go into a marble sculpture, creating something dynamic and evocative from a chunk of something cold and unyielding drawn from the earth. These are not pieces that can be “designed” in an afternoon by a gaggle of fratboy marketers over their weekly office keg.
• Anatomy. Sculptors who work with marble show an intimate and thorough knowledge and understanding of human anatomy. Every muscle, every curve, every millimetre of skin is honed to a perfect representation of the human form. What you have done is plonked two tennis balls on a solid block of resin, doodled in a crude cleavage with a Sharpie, then splashed raspberry sauce all over it and called it a day. Which brings me neatly onto my next point…
• Overt sexualisation and glamourisation of violence against women. Classical torso sculptures are not without limbs due to some horrible run-in with a horde of undead and a crazed survivor with a katana. If any Classics types would like to weigh in on this, I’d be interested to learn. However, I’m pretty sure that the motivations of those classical sculptors was not “Hurr, violence is EPIC. You know what else is epic? TITS! Yeah! But you know what’s not epic? Any part of a woman that isn’t tits or crotch. Let’s put, yeah, some tits and a crotch in a string bikini, and like, cut everything else off. Gamers will eat that up. Oh man, I’m jizzing my pants already. Tits and extreme violence. We’re geniuses.” (Again, classics students, if there’s any evidence of the great Graeco-Roman sculptors having had this discussion, I will withdraw this point. Let me know.)

In summary: what the hell? After the first Dead Island game failed to quite live up to its own teaser trailer, do you just feel like you need to continue along this trajectory of disappointment? Were you hoping to hit rock bottom with today’s sick display in the hope that thereafter, the only way would be up? If that’s the case, I’d be tempted to applaud your shamelessness, had it not been such a swing and a miss.

Now, I’m a feminist, but I also don’t believe that every catastrophic misunderstanding of how to exploit the “desirability” of anything that vaguely resembles a woman’s body (usually one that conforms to narrow standards of Western beauty) is born of true misogyny.

I believe it’s quite possible that you “just didn’t think” of the implications and repercussions of showing a violently dismembered female torso and selling it as an ornament. For those of us – women and some men – who actually live in bodies like the one messily represented in your collector’s edition, it isn’t possible to “just not think” about the possibilities and the realities of violence.

Women are disproportionately more likely to be the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, both by people they know and by strangers. We are taught from childhood that our bodies are weaker, that if we don’t want to be attacked we have to dress demurely, to know our limits, to keep our mouths shut and to do as we’re told.

We live in a victim-blaming world that constantly promotes the idea that the only way to not be a victim is to not provoke those strong and burly menfolks, who cannot be held to account if they attack you because you were obviously “asking for it” if and when it happens. Although this line of reasoning was born of institutionalised misogyny, it doesn’t exactly paint men in the most flattering of lights either.

The discussion is thankfully broadening, so this is not an issue I’ll go deeper into here. But Deep Silver, consider yourselves called out. There’s a wealth of resources, information, blogs, zines, articles, and opinion pieces out there. You have no excuse for not educating yourselves about why what you have done is damaging and irresponsible.

Everybody fucks up sometimes when it comes to the way they think about or treat people less privileged than they are. What really proves whether or not they’re capable of meeting the criteria for being a decent human being, or a company with any integrity, is how they handle and learn from their fuckups. My advice? Apologise. Be humble. Be grateful to people who have called you out on this. Make the choice to educate yourselves. And for the love of all things zombie, don’t do it again.

I do, however, have one thing to be grateful to you for about this. Should I find myself romancing a fellow gamer in future, and we go back to their house, this statuette will be an immediate and unmistakable red flag that this person has questionable taste in games, décor and attitudes towards women. This information will be a clear indicator that this isn’t somebody I should be spending time with.

Perhaps your statue could replace the endless whining about “the friendzone” as the hallmark of somebody utterly clueless about human relationships and endlessly disrespectful to women. Then I would laud you for your achievement, because that shit is getting very, very tiresome.

Yours sincerely,

Mia Vee

Without thinking, I responded in kind with a big, angry, I-will-slash-you hiss.

DESIST

He looked pretty taken aback.

I carried on my way and mused that I appear to speak feline like a mothertongue, but also I got to thinking: what the ever-loving crap?! Seriously, what on earth was he expecting from that encounter? What would a positive result have been? Surely that’s never worked for anyone, right?

Ah, street harassment. It’s been a few months. Usually my experience of you is relegated to when I’m wearing a summer dress (gender norms for the lose) but it sucks whenever it happens. It’s also antithetical to ever actually getting my interest because – no matter how many mad cat-lady vibes I’ve got going on – no one who thinks they can approach me like a pet is getting the time of day.

This particular encounter didn’t throw me much because I actually had a comeback – I walked away pleased with myself for thinking fast – but how you deflect it shouldn’t be the first point of call. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?

Far more often it’s crap shouted from cars – which I find rubbish twice over because they’ve gone before you can say or do anything in response. (Come back right now, dudebro. I have a LOT to say about what you just did.)

A friend of mine recently had some jerk shout “nice tits!” at her from a car. She was (understandably) angry and upset for the rest of the day, but the guy shouting it might have told himself it was a compliment – some interviews with street harassers have revealed what is either complete ignorance or willing ignorance of the effect it has on women. Many of the men, when asked why they do it, say it’s a compliment and it makes women feel nice.

Maybe it is a compliment for a very small percentage of people – I cannot claim to speak for everybody – but I am yet to meet or hear of one person who’s had a catcall, wolf-whistle or similar and felt good about it. The thing about street harassment is, it’s not flirting. Street harassment doesn’t make a person feel good because it isn’t about a person: it’s boiling them down to their physical attributes (‘nice tits’, ‘nice ass’) and funnily enough that doesn’t feel great.

“News of your interest in my ‘nice butt’ has not made my day in any way.”

The other thing is, it’s almost never a conversation: mostly ’cause the objects of the harassment aren’t interested and want to get on with their day, and also because often it’s at a remove – stuff shouted from cars, or (to use the cliché) from scaffolding. The people doing the shouting don’t actually expect a response. This isn’t a tool used to chat up women: it’s used to silence them. Under the guise of a compliment it’s a one-way street of objectification.

And Objectification Street is a crappy street. Seriously, I looked at a flat there once. There were rats all over the place and it smelled bad.

Of course, if people are physically closer to the harassers, it doesn’t exactly get better. The wonderful (and award-winning) Anti-Street Harassment UK campaign (ASH UK) was set up after its founder, Vicky, was harassed by a group of men who were initially shouting at her from a car, threatened to rape her, then got out of the car and followed her into a tube station where they assaulted her. The police (who did intervene) then blamed her for responding to them and said “boys will be boys.” SO. MUCH. FAIL.

Um… *cough* male readers – this is essentially Met officers saying your entire gender are all hopeless gropey asshats. Erm… *cough* I wouldn’t take that.

So, what can we do?

• Well, the first step is breaking down the idea that it’s either normal or OK. It’s neither, and we need to spread the word. Thou shalt not take shit, and (not that our readers should need telling) thou shalt not dish it out, either.
• Read up on it – from the likes of stopstreetharassment.org to this brilliant video on street harassment and women of colour:

• Check out Jezebel’s ongoing street harassment category, and call catcalling out for the asshattery it is.
• Those who want some background on why people are often hostile to approaches on the street would do very well to read this blog post ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’. (Heavy, but a thousand times worth it.)
• And in the meantime, don’t let that ‘compliment’ strawman argument derail you on your quest for gender justice.

On that note…

… since you’ve been such a good class of gender justice warriors today, I’m going to let you finish early with just one more video:

I absolutely love their line of questioning about “has that ever worked for you?” Also “sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchial dividend – it’s so over” should be on a t-shirt. I would buy that shirt.

And that’s a wrap. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to more important things – like buying cat food for my wonderful kitty – because some catcalls are nice. The ones that come from an actual cat.¹

• All images of unimpressed cats in high dudgeon from Morguefile, the free image bank!

1. Not Schrödinger’s cat. He is a meanie.

“Oh no, no, it’s OK, don’t get offended, it’s not your fault. You can’t help it, I understand that. Your genitals are disgusting and they stink, especially when they’re bleeding and there’s nothing you can do about it. You didn’t ask to be born with such a terrible curse, and nobody expects you to take responsibility for it. Help is at hand, though! If you give me lots of money every month for forty years of your life, we can help! Because believe us, you need it…”

I will admit up front that I am not a trained marketer, but it’s plain to see that the above isn’t the most convincing of sales pitches. Unfortunately, it’s a far more honest pitch than the current campaign for Always sanitary towels, which proudly declare the addition of “odour neutralising ActiPearls” as the next step in the evolution of “feminine hygiene” products. What the ads coyly decline to mention is that they’ve taken lessons in odour neutralisation from the Lynx school of “synthetic chemical stench and hygiene are THE SAME THING.”

This is straight-up vagina-shaming. It’s insulting and inexcusable. And giving me yet another reason to be pissed off when I’m already simmering with ire about the massacre going on between my legs is inadvisable. So congratulations, P&G: you’ve lost my custom for the next thirty years.

The packaging claims to “neutralise odours rather than just masking them”. This is at best a delicate glossing over of the truth. It’s impossible to tell whether “odours” (those vaginal FIENDS!) are neutralised or not because of the perfume.

Oh God, the perfume.

I appreciate that scent perception can be a highly subjective thing, so I’ll attempt to keep the description as general as possible. Cloying, synthetic, sweet florals with an undertone of disinfectant, false and stereotypically feminine. It hits you as soon as you open the packaging, before even unwrapping the first towel. A scent that lingers for hours even if you switch to an unscented brand immediately after using one of these. A scent that does not mask menstrual blood, but mingles with it into a nauseating aberration.

What I Expected

A thoughtful free gift from Always!

What I Got

OH.

The problems presented by this are manifold, but there are three main ones that leapt out at me. Bullet point list time? Bullet point list time!

• The obvious implication that people who have vaginas are utterly clueless about personal hygiene and how to take care of themselves, plus the completely ignoring the fact that vaginas are self cleansing and look after themselves without much intervention from their owners beyond showering/bathing regularly. The idea that menstruation makes a person malodorous or otherwise “dirty” is an outdated and misogynistic notion. If a vagina IS smelling bad, whether through illness or neglect, adding an unpleasant artificial scent to the crotch is only going to make the problem worse.
• Following on from this, people who are at least vaguely aware of their sexual health can tell from changes in vaginal scent if something untoward or unusual is going on. Trying to cover that up with perfumes isn’t going to help anybody stay in touch with their genitalia.
• The choice of such a blatantly “overt femininity-pink-and-flowers-BECAUSE-THIS-PRODUCT-IS-FOR-GIRLLLSSS” fragrance risks alienating trans* men and genderqueer customers who choose to use these products. As if the patronising “have a happy period, always” slogan weren’t bad enough. Not only are Always trying to insist that a reminder of nature not necessarily assigning the genitalia that most closely match an individual’s gender identity should be a matter for celebration, but also that everybody should smell like a field full of artificial blossoms when their loins are creating underpant carnage. Way to consider the needs of your whole customer base, there.

Now, at the risk of incurring violent flames, I’ll admit that I am not the biggest fan of my vagina. I appreciate the vast capacity for pleasure that it and its associated physiological paraphernalia provide, but for the most part our relationship is one of tacit acknowledgement and grudging acceptance. This does not mean, however, that I do not appreciate the inherent beauty and wonder of such genitalia.

A vagina should smell like a vagina. A vagina should not smell of roses or perfumes or any number of artificial masking agents. Every healthy vagina has a personality and life all of its own and scent to match.

At a time where in the USA, the wealthy, middle-aged, cis-male elitists running the country seem determined to drive women’s bodily autonomy and sexual rights back into the Victorian era, now seems a very prudent time to turn our eyes to our genitals and send a clear message to politicians and megabucks sanitary product manufacturers alike that our bodies belong to nobody but ourselves. Their efforts to undermine and deny our sexuality will be met with the resistance and fight it deserves, until they back the hell off what’s between our legs.

If we really must accept defeat and acknowledge that we are no longer capable of keeping our own vaginas spring-fresh, then our next step is clear: begin a campaign to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab to produce their own range of sanitary towels impregnated with their gorgeous scents. Because if my vagina isn’t allowed to smell like a vagina any more, it can do a hell of a lot better than Procter and Gamble’s sickly synthetic flower bleach.

Age old question, really, this one, and one where “want” and “need” are often made unhelpfully interchangable, just to make it EVEN SIMPLER.

Welcome back to Feminist TwitBomb, Deluxe Edition, in which we take a sexist Twitter hashtag and try and make it slightly less soul-harrowingly bleak by exploring its inherent absurdity, usually with caps lock, bad puns, and the sudden appearance of wildlife. Previously on this channel: how #TipsForLadies was skewered.

Abridged (But Still Frustrating) History Of The #WhatAWomanNeeds Question

• 14th century: The Wife of Bath tells us one particular knight (and rapist) had a complicated time working it out.
• 1920s: Freud facetiously prattled about it (often available as a patronising e-card or rubbish Tumblr graphic. Life=complete).
• 1993: Tammy Wynette warbled “a ring on my finger and champagne on ice” at Elton John in a song helpfully titled A Woman’s Needs; if you are lucky enough to have these items to hand, I advise you to down the entire bottle before you try to listen.
• 1999: Even Christina Aguilera is disappointingly lyrically coy about it – the song is originally titled What A Girl Needs and renamed to Wants by the record label execs. FOR FEMINISM, I assume. (Either way, apparently the answer is “whatever her dude wants her to want/need”).

PROBLEMATIC, as Tumblr might say.

It’s all fine, though, guys, because TWITTER TO THE RESCUE. Eat your heart out, Sigmund, Xtina and Geoff, for the question will now be answered.

#WhatAWomanNeeds

An initial peek at the feed for this trending topic was a little bit unedifying. I’ve anonymised the authors because they’re really only being quoted for background. The fun comes later when you lot get involved.

“Curves and long hair”

Does it matter where the hair is? Can it be in my nostrils?

“Endless closet space”

FOR THE SKULLS OF THE FALLEN.

“a guy who will protect her like she’s his daughter, love her like she’s his wife, and respect her like she’s his mother.”

Apart from the fact that many of us do not fancy these things at all (or men), this is a worryingly ambitious MAIDEN-MOTHER-CRONE SUPERCONFLATION, and I am not paying his therapy bill when shit gets too confusing.

“oven mittens”

… hoo, boy, watch out, sisterhood. This dude’s a serious wordsmith.

“to meet One Direction”

Ah, shit. *throws up hands* Busted.

You get the picture there, anyway: high time, we decided, for a cheering TwitBomb session.

What the hell is this world where neither the pay gap nor Kool and the Gang are given true credence.

Amazingly, all these things can benefit blokes, too.

Now we’re talking, ladies. Now we’re talking.

From a friend on a locked account:

(In a strictly non-imperialist way, mind: no colonial elephant-hunting or dodgy empiring here. The helmet will be ethically sourced in a fetching shade of electric blue fairtrade material and will mainly be worn by the aforementioned wisecracking mandrill. Whom I have named Artemisia.)

"Fuck Jimmy Choo."

I got pretty wrapped up in this whole sweetly awesome world we were creating, actually.

Seriously. I cannot believe LEGO are still spraying all their “girl budget” on pastel shades whilst failing entirely to address the lack of ladypirates in this product’s long and otherwise noble lineage. Yes, I know there was one or two. One or two is NOT ENOUGH.

It just fucks with my chi, that whole business, okay?

OK, I feel better now :).

Stellar advice from one of the brilliant Better Strangers Opera collective there. (The Apocalypse Girls would be proud.)

This next one actually broke into the Top Entries for this hashtag, which I frankly regard as one of my life’s crowning achievements so far. It’s sitting there, nestled loudly between Smug “Oven Mitts” Guy and Creepy Oedipal Posturings. It’s ruining the vibe of patronage-and-patronising quite nicely. Proud moment.

(I feel like a load of Level 50 Gyrados waving DEFEND THE NHS placards would only be a good thing, really.)

A hat trick of pragmatism for us all from our own Markgraf. By the way, this team is never going to conduct a TwitBomb without reference to the noble pheasant at some point. No reason. It’s just better than ovens, chivalry and sleaze. And when these sorts of ridiculous generalisations continue to be hashtagged, surely anything goes.

"hey girl"

Other Vital LadyNeeds(TM)

• Reasonable Armour
• “A BRA THAT FECKING FITS PROPERLY! Also no more sexism ever please”
• “additional bionic arms”
• Destruction of tedious genderessentialism
• Awesome orchestral movie soundtrack for daily life
• A violent end to the categorisation of “WOMEN” (and “men”!) as amorphous Borg-like blobs of sexist predictability, unvaried by differences of any kind
• FAITHFUL CAPSLOCK BUTTON

And More Seriously

…you’d be hard pressed to argue with this one, whoever you are.

I’m glad we had this talk, Twitter. Now this pressing question’s been answered, we can all get back to the revolution.

Hoverboards, DEPLOY.

Last week’s example was the trending topic “Tips for Ladies”. The online world took this tremendous opportunity to help guide women through life by posting thousands of tweets featuring the words ‘cooking’, ‘cleaning’, ‘clothes’ and advice on how to be more sexually available to men, all with exciting new adventures in spelling and grammar. (Don’t search for it. Just don’t. Your brain doesn’t need the trauma). Okay, look, here’s one at random and you can take my word for it that there are many pages of similar entries:

#TipsForLadies Cooking and Cleaning up does not make you a good woman.Your suppose to do that.

(I choose to read this as “Following society’s bullshit gender roles won’t make you a magnificent person – YOU are the one who must strive to transform yourself.” I choose to interpret it like this, because otherwise I would turn to drink most days.)

But then…

Then I noticed something new. It started small and grew as the rebellion began… BadRep’s very own Hannah Chutzpah brought the first one to my attention:

@MissEllieMae
#TipsForLadies Remember, when enacting nuclear fusion, the nickel isotope is more stable than the iron isotope.

I decided to write one of my own:

#TipsForLadies CERN’s results where neutrino speed appeared to break relativity were probably due to relativistic motion of the GPS clocks.

Markgraf weighed in:

#TipsForLadies Pheasants are easy both to capture and domesticate.

But it wasn’t just Team BadRep on the case.

@prattprattpratt
The way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach… unless your sword is kinda bendy upwards. #TipsForLadies

@GRILLEVERYTHING
#TipsForLadies When battling Gorgons, avoid turning into stone by only viewing your foe through a reflective surface.

@MsBathtub
#tipsforladies The ability to start a fire can mean the difference between life & death in survival situations.

(Ms Bathtub also quoted Rilke).

And another from Ellie Mae:

@MissEllieMae
#TipsForLadies Join a union. You’ll get paid more and have better working conditions.

Even Darth Vader’s PR team got in on the act:

@DeathStarPR
#TipsForLadies Don’t be a Bella Swan when you could be a Princess Leia. #StarWars

The line says "Remembered for 30 years, the same way Bella Swan won't be."

And I felt a little better. Found Feminism is often about finding voices fighting back in unexpected places, and that’s exactly what I hope people take away from this. In the online environment, we are surrounded by people too young, inexperienced or just plain bigoted to spread anything but the easiest, most poisonous dreck society has to peddle. The answer is to speak up. Use comedy, use popular trends, but even if it’s just you and just once, speak up for equality. And we’ll leave little beacons of hope in the places most easily reached by the most people.

Twitter is regularly a hopeless mess of misogyny – I could pick a new trending topic every week.

That just means we have to engage with it MORE.

I hate bra shopping. Generally I’m not a massive fan of shopping per se; it usually feels like a massive waste of time I could spend doing something actually relaxing, like having a cup of tea, or wandering around a museum. Or sleeping. Anything, really. But I digress.

Bras. I hate them. Where to begin my hatred? A little history, perhaps. I do like a little historical context to flavour a problem. Makes me feel like a proper academic. Except one who uses wikpedia entries a lot – like this one here.

To summarise: basically there was nothing for quite a while (when literally people didn’t wear much at all), then there were togas (or for the ladies, stolas) and people didn’t really care, then all of a sudden there were all kinds of things dedicated to “dealing with breasts”. There were bits of cloth in various arrangements with and without padding, corsets, bodices, and finally something that resembled the modern bra.

Which was never burned, incidently, except possibly in awful household fires. And we had the Madonna cone bra, of course.

Then came the Wonderbra with its rallying cry of Hello Boys, and to be honest I was never 100% clear on whether she was advertising her mammaries to boys, or addressing them as boys, and it all got all a bit confusing so I tried not to think about it. Plus it arrived when I was 14, which is a Bad Time for bosom-related upset.

Skip forward a bit further and we get Shakira declaring in 2002 that it’s:

Lucky that my breasts are small and humble
So you don’t confuse them with mountains

… which I’m still not really sure about, because, again, we’re getting all obsessed over size. Small or big? Which is better? (And why do we have to have better bodies anyway?)

My own ‘humble’ beginnings: for me, the bra was a graduation from the pre-teen crop top and the childish vest into the world of being a Real Woman. Periods were also involved in this uncomfortable phase (and they are also rubbish and make your breasts sore, but you do not have to go to the shop and pay money for them). This was not a good start for the bra and I, and it didn’t get any better.

The portion of my adult life that I’ve spent around bras has always involved the fickle inconsistency of measurements. As an experiment, on my shopping trip I got measured in three different shops and tried on more bloody bras than I have done in my entire life. I am, for the record a 34, 36 or 32 A, B or C. So that’s not really a good start. Furthermore, none of these bras, in any of those official sizes, actually fit my chest. Some do better than others, but there is no general indicator of agreed size.

Let’s talk about what they look like. They’re mostly quite ‘girly’, except where they’re meant to be ‘sexy’. Ah, that old problem again. I can have a virgin bra or a whore bra. Great. They contain a lot of extraneous stuff like lace and bows and other frou-frou items that my bosom really doesn’t need, so I spend a lot of time snipping things off bras whilst hoping that the sheer volume of stuff I’m lopping off isn’t in some way structurally vital.

And what about underwire, while we’re at it? No item of clothing aimed at men, designed to sit on sensitive, soft flesh, would include metal wire within a flimsy silk and lace contraption, frequently destined to poke out and puncture your poor, unsuspecting skin. Underwire, together with its evil cousin Padding, is the great illusionist of the bra world. This is not a world in which the bra is only there to clothe, support or protect you. No, it is not a knight in shining armour: the bra is a churl and a pimp. It exists to make your tits look nice. And by “nice” I mean bigger and with cleavage. As opposed to, say, the way they actually look.

Being realistic, since my breasts are not large: I don’t have a cleavage without serious amounts of bra-mirage work, without which any “revealing” top tends to reveal a lot of… sternum. It’s nice sternum, but it’s not the look I’m “supposed” to have.  And even when I’m wearing the damn thing, it doesn’t fit. The cups leave gaps where my breasts are not. The straps are too tight or too loose, leaving red marks in my ribs and creating weird bumps of flesh around the sides or under my arms that an anxious person might negatively label “fat”. In the panic room of the changing cubicle, it’s easy to get worried. Especially when one’s chest appears to be both “fat” and “small” at the same time.

Simply put, bras aren’t designed for my body shape. The fact that the bra is a quintessentially “feminine” object makes me feel unfeminine. Sometimes I’m okay with that. Sometimes I’m not. And all of this creates the sneaking suspicion that my own breasts are not socially adequate by themselves. It isn’t nice to feel like your body is inadequate. And for the most part nowadays, I don’t. But I used to. A lot. Especially as an unhappy teenager. Various problems with food ensued. It was not a good time, and it is a not good time that many women (and men) go through.

But bras are not solely the enemy of “small” women. Curvy ladies also loathe bras, and perhaps with even more reason. For them, the bra is often essential. The larger the bra required, the more expensive it is. Also – so I’m told – the more complicated the re-arranging of weight around the body, creating more lines of soreness across the shoulders and an additional aesthetic difficulty of ‘too much’ cleavage at inappropriate times.

Seriously, fuck bras.

But what to do about it all?

• Stop wearing them altogether? Easy for me to say, as long as the weather isn’t cold and it doesn’t rain, but this won’t do for the larger-breasted, for whom some element of mammary management is essential to personal comfort. Similarly, I can’t go bra-less all the time – even for someone my size a trip to the gym requires something to stop the painful bouncing.
• Buy other bras? I keep being told that if I was only measured “correctly” I would be fine. I’m disputing this, because I’ve been measured a lot, and measuring me doesn’t seem to alter the sizes of bras which persist in being made for a particular shape of wearer who is not my shape. A lot of women’s clothes are like this. I shop around for those. Perhaps there are magical bra shops where one can purchase perfect fitting, soft and comfortable bras for around a tenner. I doubt it, though.
• Wear a corset instead! … no.
• Strap them down? Um. Well, whilst I have been known to do this, I don’t want to flatten my breasts all the time any more than I want to inflate them.
• Buy a vest! I do like vests, and there are lots of places that do vests with a bit of extra fabric at the top in case of sudden cold, or rain.

So I’ve bought loads.

And they’re great.

]]> /2012/03/15/bra-mageddon-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-buy-a-vest/feed/ 4 9648 /2011/11/28/what-the-hell-advertising-beverage-edition/ /2011/11/28/what-the-hell-advertising-beverage-edition/#comments Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:00:50 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=8648 A while back we took a look at some recent adverts and discovered that, in a surprising turn of results, they were a bit crap when it came to portrayals of gender. And when I say a bit crap I mean it appeared that the advertising executives responsible had just recently stepped out of a portal from 1953 and brought their value system with them.

Today we revisit that topic because there are so very many adverts out there and we need a reminder that this is a field in need of a change. Advertising plays a large part in shaping our views of the world, so when it’s portraying something that’s almost casually wrongheaded, that’s a problem.

Now, confession: I watch a lot of American football. And this apparently makes me the target demographic for adverts pushing light beer, pickup trucks (September is truck month! Truck Month! TRUCK MONTH! Also so are all the other months) and soft drinks. Every ad break is packed full of these, and if there’s one thing American football does not lack for, it is ad breaks. What I’m saying here is that I’ve seen a lot of these adverts, and they are seventeen different shades of bad. The truck ads are surprisingly free of the sort of overblown machismo you might expect from the automotive industry, but the beer and soft drinks? Oh, my. So let us take a look at three terrible beverage adverts.

1: Dr Pepper Ten

The advertising industry is known for its orginality. No wait, the other thing. Lack of creativity and original thinking, that’s what I meant to say. So it is perhaps not surprising that Dr Pepper have lifted the entire idea for this ad campaign directly from the old “Not for girls” thing Yorkie did.

Dr Pepper Ten, like Coke Zero before it, is a diet drink for men. Men don’t go on diets, you see, so you can’t put the word “diet” in the name of the drink. Calories are manly; watching what you consume is not. That, Dr Pepper assures us, is for the ladies. This message is forced through our eyeballs and directly into our brains via the medium of explosions and toughness, because if there is anything that women hate, it’s explosions. That’s a science fact.

And okay, you can say “But Dr Pepper are clearly being ironic! It’s a sly and hip jab at sexist values! Get a sense of humour!” Except no, the problem with ironically supporting terrible gender values is that you’re still supporting terrible gender values, and those are still an active problem that negatively impact the lives of countless people. It would be nice to be in a place where we can look back and go “Ha ha, those outdated ideas, how quaint and comical they seem now from our position of enlightenment.” But we’re not in that place yet – we still live in a world where these values are things people actually believe. Read the YouTube comments if you want to see why this is still a problem. Except don’t, because much like reading the creepy eldritch book in a Lovecraft story, reading Youtube comments can lead only to infinite screaming madness as your brain confronts unknowable horrors.

Of course, the real reason no one drinks Diet Dr Pepper is not because diet drinks are somehow effeminate, it’s because Diet Dr Pepper tastes like licking the underside of a pub table.

2. Miller Lite

Drinking the wrong light beer makes you less of a man. This is another science fact. We’re learning a lot today. Thank you advertising! This is one of many recent Miller ads that makes a link between choice of beer and ability to conform to established gender roles. They also have an “unmanly choice” range in which men are judged by their peers for making unmanly choices such as riding on a scooter or drinking the wrong brand of light beer.

See, here’s the thing: all alcoholic drinks are basically a chemical to make your brain go temporarily wonky plus some other stuff to hide the taste of this brain-wonking substance. That is all drinks, forever. So why is one flavour man-tastic and another not? It is a mystery. Someone fetch me a fruity colourful cocktail so I can make this point properly about how thoroughly ridiculous it is to gender one’s choice of alcohol.

For an added bonus, Miller throw in some token sexy female lifeguards (because maybe if you drink Miller Lite, you too will receive attention from professional models. That is how things work, right?) and some bonus “comedy” fear of people who are insufficiently attractive to meet beer advert norms. Careful, if you drink the wrong beer someone you don’t find appealing may try to force CPR on you. This is a thing that happens. Honest.

3. Fosters

To round out the trio of beverage related horrors, we have Fosters serving up a healthy heap of happy homophobia. Guys, don’t touch other guys! That’s how you get the gay. This is our third and final science fact of the day. Do you want to become gay? Of course not! That would be a massive social failing on your part. So drink Fosters, to ensure you receive your suggested daily dose of heterosexuality.

These are not values it is okay to espouse. This is not some lighthearted humour at a topic too ridiculous to be taken seriously, it is a marketing tool that helps establish harmful cultural norms.

For an added treat, it’s not just issues of gender and homophobia on which the advertising industry fails us here. Look back over those three adverts and tell me what you don’t see. Here’s a helpful hint: the answer is anyone who isn’t white. People from non-white backgrounds make up over one quarter of America’s population, but apparently 0% of its beverage-purchasing demographic.

]]> /2011/11/28/what-the-hell-advertising-beverage-edition/feed/ 4 8648 /2011/10/24/at-the-movies-the-three-musketeers-or-markgraf-loses-it/ /2011/10/24/at-the-movies-the-three-musketeers-or-markgraf-loses-it/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:00:00 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=7912 I am the worst person in the world to take to a cinema. Cinemas turn me, through no fault of my own, into a Grade A Douchebag. I just find the whole experience too engrossing. My ticket crumples in my eager hand as I enter the theatre, and magic happens. The low light, the seats and the excited quiet cause a strange mutation in my brain and suddenly, the whole world is just me and that cinema, and nothing else matters.

I laugh. I cry. I shriek like an excited child. I hurl insults, groan and grip the hand of the person sitting next to me, and I just can’t help it. The film, in that darkened, magical room full of equally hypnotised people and their rustling sweets, is my entire life for the hours that it runs.

Now, if a film is uniformly delightful, I’ll get used to the level of delight it’s producing in me and be relatively quiet. If it’s uniformly miserable, I’ll just cry quietly to myself for the duration. If it’s completely terrible, I’ll start out shouting and then my fury will dull into silence, while I glare at the screen with the cold, dead eyes of a shark. But if a film varies, and has parts that I love and parts that I hate, I’ll react anew to the different levels of content as they emerge.

Paul WS Anderson’s The Three Musketeers was, therefore, a big problem for everyone else in the cinema.

**** WARNING: spoilers from here on out!****

It’s a film with its pros and cons, as most films are, but the problem with this film for me was that the pros and cons were both very forthright in how pro-y or con-y they were, and they constantly vied for supremacy. The result was a sort of see-saw effect, whereby the quality of the film yo-yoed wildly from start to finish, and my face was sort of like this:





So at the end, I looked a bit like this:



Oh my god you guys, what was this film. It was obvious that they knew what they wanted to do with it, but really weren’t sure how. As you can tell from the title, it’s ostensibly based on Alexandre Dumas’ lovely book, but much in the same way that every time I take a trip to Tesco, the journey is based on Virgil’s Aeneid. I read The Three Musketeers when I was young – so young, in fact, that the memory is a mere rose-coloured blip on the horizon of my literary consumption – so have possibly unrealistic recollections of how ludicrous it was. But I’m pretty sure the bloody thing didn’t have zeppelins designed by Leonardo da Vinci.

The whole thing’s meant to be set in the year 17-whatsit, and the costume department and set designers have had a fucking ball with it. The clothes are divine, and the interiors are spot-on. It’s really lush to look at, the attention to detail – even in the weaponry – is sublime, which makes it all the more bloody baffling that they saw fit to sledgehammer shit like rotary platform mini-cannons and clockpunk crossbows on top. The final straw for me was the sudden, rage-cage-inducing appearance of modern stringed instruments at the end.

The way I see it is this: if you love 18th century France so much, don’t spend oodles of obvious love and affection recreating that amazing period of European history in all its gaudy, beautiful, corrupt and hilarious glory and then promptly drizzle congealed green-screened steampunk on top! And if you want it to be a full-on, anachronistic love-in with airship-mounted flamethrowers, stop pretending it’s in any way historically accurate! Go the whole hog! Have a mechanical Tyrannosaur! Stick Cardinal Richelieu in leather!

…Ooh.

And the dialogue. Oh, god. The dialogue. It was clearly written by a team who thought they were far more witty than they really were (Alex Litvak and Andrew Davis, I’m looking at you) and while the cast, bless them, did their best, no one – not even Christoph Waltz, doing a staggeringly attractive turn as Richelieu – could redeem the continual stream of steaming cat vomit.

This brings me on, neatly, to the casting, one of the film’s only saving graces. As I say, Waltz is charismatic and delicious as usual, but it isn’t just him carrying the show. The Musketeers themselves (Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson) are fun to watch¹ with good interpersonal chemistry (OT3 FOREVER) and King Louis XIII, (played by Freddie Fox, characterised as basically me in a sparkly hat) is a gigantic hilarious fop. To balance out the prevalence of heroes, I was personally foaming with delight to see that we had not one, but three and a half whole villains to choose from! Milla Jovovitch, who is my future wife by the way, does a truly spectacular turn as demi-villain Milady de Winter (but more on that in a bit), an eyepatched Mads Mikkelsen (who you may remember as the blood-weeping, testicle-flogging villain in 2006’s Casino Royale) as the Cardinal’s captain of the guard, swanning about in red brocade being all leg and blades, and Orlando Bloom.

… Orlando Bloom. Now. I hate Orlando Bloom. I’ve found him phenomenally unremarkable in everything he’s been in to date, and in every case his universal expression is the perplexed discomfort of a dog that’s been instructed to sit on snowy ground. Here, he’s the villainous Buckingham – a tarted-up-to-the-nines fop with a pearl earring and a 24-carat smirk, and he’s fucking perfect.

I’m terrified that – after his Oscar-guzzling performance as Hans Landa in Quarantino’s most recent romp, Inglourious Basterds – Christoph Waltz will be forever cast by English-language cinema as villains, and Musketeers certainly doesn’t abate my fear. But please, please, gods of cinema, if there is any justice in the world, please let Orlando Bloom be typecast for life as a scenery-chewing villain off the back of this film alone. He’s having so much fun! He’s more camp than a goth Mardi Gras! The facial hair suits him and everything! I never want to see him doing the beleaguered hero act ever again.

So the casting’s great. Except, sadly, D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman), who’s irritating, boring, and frankly too young to carry the role off with any gravitas. But all of his shortcomings pale in comparison to the humanoid plankton² cast as his love-interest, Constance (Gabrielle Wilde). She has one facial expression:



This is her expression for all things. Delivering sarcastic put-downs, being dangled from the prow of an airship, stumbling along a boardwalk a million miles from the ground and being held at knifepoint. All that face, and a monotone to match. It’s awful. It’s not even as if she gets nothing to do. She gets herself captured on D’Artagnan’s behalf by dressing as him and acting as bait³ and that could be amazing! But she does it with the charisma and presence of a bowl of cold soup.

Readers will be surprised to learn that this film does actually get a technical Bechdel pass. There are actually quite a lot of women in the film, serving – on paper – very important roles. The Queen (Juno Temple) has an entire contingent of ladies-in-waiting, of which Constance is one, and the Bechdel pass comes when she asks for her jewels, only to find that they’ve been stolen. It’s only one line, though! She spends the entire film surrounded by women, having a fun time in the garden and calling Richelieu on his bullshit to his face, but she never gets more than a meagre handful of lines. Why? It feels as if the lines she does get – there are literally only about four – and the placement of them are lip service to having to write her a part. So, in an entire French fucking court of women that practically fills the screen, they only get six lines between them. WHY? Is there a LAW against women advancing the plot? The Queen has a vital fucking ROLE in the plot, as she’s one of the chief pawns that Richelieu fucks about with!

But yet, she’s completely out-parted by… Milla.

Oh, Milla. I love you so much. You’re the lizard-eyed, carved-bicepped, bullet-dodging action queen of my dreams. This role is a fucking gift for her. Milady is a double-agent, assassin and spy! She’s a fucking Swiss army knife of bad-assery. She’s got a lockpick haircomb, icy-cool emotional control to spare, and abseiling stays. She can dual-wield a pistol and a rapier, has no problems selling people out or killing them, and appears to be literally invincible. I can’t say enough brilliant things about her. It’s all going so well! And then her clothes fall off and she becomes a lingerie model on a clock, complete with lascivious camera pan. Because, obviously, men won’t understand or enjoy a woman being badass unless she’s got as few clothes on as possible (even in a culture where the collars were big and the dresses bigger). I cried. Sex assassin, ho!

Speaking of assassins, the opening action scene is in Venice. “VENICE, ITALY!!” we’re told (to differentiate, presumably, from Venice, Barnsley). A guard stands watch on a dark canal edge. Something bubbles in the water at his feet. Suddenly, a dart is fired straight from the water into his gullet. Athos emerges, wet and masked, armed with some kind of automatic crossbow.

Meanwhile, Aramis, hooded and billowy, synchs up a viewpoint before Leap-of-Faithing down onto a gondola.

Porthos manages to get a kill-streak of 15, fighting off soldiers in a basement, earning himself a new trophy!

They have basically made Assassin’s Creed II: THE MOVIE, and split Ezio into three people.

The rage-cage descended over my eyes. HOW DARE THEY, I announced, being restrained by the two people who foolishly accompanied me to the cinema. GET OFF MY ASSCREED, I declared. People had started to stare. PRESS X TO AVOID MY ACID VOMIT OF WRATH, I continued. I was out of control. It was of great relief to everyone when the scene changed and I could be pacified with Mads Mikkelsen’s gorgeous cheekbones and mile-long legs.

All in all, a mixed bag. Like reaching your hand into pick ‘n’ mix and being unsure as to whether you’ll get a fizzy cola bottle or an enraged musk rat.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It is so blisteringly camp and sparkly that I came out wearing glitter that I didn’t go in with
• The sets and costumes are lush beyond compare
• The casting’s brilliant, with few exceptions
• It’s one for the Eurofilm nerds, with excellent performances from Mikkelsen, Waltz and a motley crew of Brits – and an unexpected, hilarious cameo from Til Schweiger, who starred alongside Waltz in Inglourious Basterds
• VILLAIN PORN!!! VILLAIN!!! PORN!!! YES!!!

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It just doesn’t know what it’s doing, with anything, ever, especially the women
• “What? You mean… just having them on-screen isn’t good enough? :(“
• The dialogue’s an experience quite a lot like snorting crushed glass
• I’d rather deep-throat a live conga eel than watch the scenes with D’Artagnan in again
• Who the hell thought model battle-maps would make good scene transition material?
• Why is D’Artagnan glaringly American, when everyone else at least tries to be pseudo-British?
• MODERN FUCKING INSTRUMENTS HRRGHNH WHY GOD
1. Aramis is a priest. I will fight anyone going for Aramis. And I will win.
2. No offence to plankton.
3. with the laziest drag I have ever seen – SHE WEARS HIS HAT! That’s not drag, that’s what I do in the hat section of John Lewis for fun.
]]> /2011/10/24/at-the-movies-the-three-musketeers-or-markgraf-loses-it/feed/ 9 7912 /2011/05/31/yes-maybe-no-three-comics/ /2011/05/31/yes-maybe-no-three-comics/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 08:00:49 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5769 So, here are three recent-ish comics, one good, one with potential but some issues, and one of them so eye-meltingly bad that quite possibly I am a worse person for having read it.

So, let’s start with the bad, because that’s where the fun is, right? Right.

Neonomicon – Alan Moore



A four part mini-series that wrapped up just recently, Neonomicon was… well, it was, as much as we might wish it hadn’t been. A modern spin on Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos, Neonomicon actually looked like it had potential to start with. A good Mythos tale lures you in with mundane normality and then – bam! – unspeakable eldritch abomination and the creeping madness behind your eyes. In a similar way, Neonomicon lures you in with a clever enough idea and characters and then – bam! – racism and gang rape. We’ll get to that in a moment.

So, that acceptable start we mentioned. We’re given a pair of FBI agents investigating some strange goings on that very quickly become Mythos related. And hey, we think, the two lead characters are not square jawed white guys. We’ve got a female lead and a black male lead, nice to see some variety in character design for a change. Sure, some of the Lovecraft references are a bit heavy handed, but that’s okay.

And then the second issue happens. Our two agents have followed the lead to a Mythos sex shop in a quiet New England town. It’s not sure whether it wants to be creepy or played for laughs with some of the novelty items visible in the background. One thing leads to another, and they’re infiltrating a sex cult and… oh, now the guy has been shot, and the racial slurs are flowing freely. And now it’s gang rape time for the female agent. Thanks for that, Alan Moore.

Now, Moore did say (there’s a quote in this interview here) that when he was writing this he thought (paraphrased): “…let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in.” And that could have been interesting, handled differently. It could have been a chance to tackle some of the issues with Lovecraft, to look at the fact that Lovecraft was a bit of a terrible racist and misogynist. But that isn’t what happens here. This isn’t a story that uses sex and racism to raise questions and make a point. It’s just a story full of non-consensual sex and racism. Or, as a friend put it: “If God were to look down upon this benighted planet in judgement, he’d probably think the place worthy of a second chance. Until he read Neonomicon. Then he’d remember why he commissioned the Book of Revelation in the first place.”

Carbon Grey – Hoan Nguyen



Carbon Grey is our “has potential, but also issues”. Let’s look at the potential first.

Set in a slightly steampunky spin on First World War-era Europe, the story follows the Sisters Grey. Each generation, we’re told, see three sisters born to the Grey family, hereditary defenders of the Kaiser. Three sisters, one for strength, one for grace, one for wisdom. Except in this generation, where the youngest sister has a twin, a fourth Grey, a sister for revolution.

What does this get us? It gets us explosions, and action, and the four very deadly Sisters Grey kicking ass and changing the face of politics in Mitteleuropa. It gets us spies and assassins and clever dialogue. And did I mention the ass-kicking? In the opening sequence of the first issue the youngest Grey pulls off more awesome action stuff than can be found in an entire Die Hard marathon.

The issues, then? Well, mostly it revolves around one thing: the art (which for the most part is very, very pretty, as long as you don’t mind the manga influences). With one notable exception in the form of a background character with no lines, all the female characters have essentially the same body type. It’s that improbable superhero-woman build, all gravity defying breasts and waist lines that surely don’t leave enough room for internal organs. The Queen of Germany lounges around in a scrap of white fabric that’d make Emma Frost blush.

The intro arc has just wrapped up, so now’s a good time to get in on the main story of Carbon Grey, if you can look past the art problems.

And now, on to the good.

Scarlet – Brian Michael Bendis



Bendis is a lot better on his creator-owned work than he is when he’s writing superheroes for Marvel, and Scarlet is among the best of his creator-owned stuff. The first plot arc just finished, so now’s as good a time as any to get started here.

Scarlet was a regular hipster kid in Portland, just generally existing. Then things went wrong and she learnt a harsh lesson in how messed up the world is. Now she’s running a grass-roots revolution. That’s the basic gist of the series. Oh, and she wants your help and is telling the whole story via fourth-wall breaking narration. Between some excellent lines and a fantastic snapshot life sketch in the first issue, we get Scarlet as a nicely well-developed character, someone we can accept as real.

It’s an interesting look at what it takes to shake someone out of their comfortable middle-class white comfort zone, and what they do next. And with everything being told to us via Scarlet, who very definitely has an agenda, we get to see how bias colours perception. The police and politicians aren’t all corrupt and evil, but seen through Scarlet’s eyes they become significantly darker. These aren’t events as they are, they’re events as one person believes they are. And I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator.

The art serves as a distinct counterpoint to Carbon Grey’s over-the-top women and frequently absurd costumes. Scarlet, and the people she interacts with, look like real people. They dress, move and talk like real people. This is perhaps not surprising, given that (long-time Bendis collaborator and fantastic artist) Alex Maleev does a hell of a lot of photo referencing, to the point where it’s almost a comic equivalent of a rotoscoped film like A Scanner Darkly. It’s definitely nice to see, though.

So there you go. Go read Scarlet, consider Carbon Grey, and bin any spare copies of Neonomicon you find, before Judgement Day rolls around.

]]> /2011/05/31/yes-maybe-no-three-comics/feed/ 7 5769 /2011/05/17/what-the-hell-advertising/ /2011/05/17/what-the-hell-advertising/#comments Tue, 17 May 2011 08:00:34 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5451 So, here’s a cigarette advert from several decades ago. Y’know, back before they knew cigarettes killed you and stuff. Also back when gender representations in advertising were even more terrible.



But hey, that was decades ago, right? That was from a time when people held far more dubious views, hell people had only recently stopped using tape worms as a miracle diet (no, seriously). It was a less enlightened time, but we’ve moved on since then, yes?

Well, no, not so much. The world of advertising is still filled with dubious messages, awkward depictions of race and gender, and terrible division of products along gender lines (“This is a girl product! Make the packaging pink so they’ll buy it! This is a boy product! Fill the advert with explosions!”) So what we have here is a collection of half a dozen or so recent magazine adverts that have taken their attitudes straight from the 1950s.

Mr. Clean



It was Mothers’ Day in the US recently, and Mr Clean decided to run this advert for the occasion. Maybe I’m misinterpreting the advert. Maybe Mothers’ Day in the US is a bit different to the UK. Either way, the apparent message of “Get back to the cleaning! And get your daughter to help, she needs to learn!” seems a little… well, off.

Goldstar Beer



Goldstar Beer have an interesting view of how drinking works, one that manages to simultaneously insult both men and women. Women are complex and have to worry about matching their drinks (girly, fruity drinks, naturally) to their outfits, because they’re shallow like that. Men, meanwhile, are simple-minded creatures who are only capable of desiring one thing: beer. And not even good beer. Crappy mass-market beer.

Goldstar have another advert in this campaign that manages to be even worse on some levels – take a look for yourself here.

Nike



It’s not just gender that advertising fails on either. Here we get a delightful intersection of gender and homophobia from the fine folks at Nike. Because ballet isn’t manly, you see, and you don’t want your son to do something that isn’t manly. Best buy him some Nike trainers as soon as you can and get him doing something macho like soccer, before the homosexuals lure him into their sordid world of energetic dance routines and toned calf muscles. Because that is totally how reality works. Yes.

DeBeers



Women, you see, are basically like magpies, only larger and incapable of flight. So not very good magpies. But like magpies, women are innately drawn to shiny shiny things; the shinier the better. And as DeBeers know, if you feed her craving for shiny objects then she’ll pretend to like you and sate your desperate need for validation. Which, of course, is all women are good for. (That and cooking you dinner, which is a talent the common magpie rarely excels at.)

Wait no, all of that was wrong. What the hell, DeBeers? Really?

Prudential Financial



Social values, 1950s style. Cooking, cleaning, caring for your child. These all start with C. More importantly, they’re all things that the wife does, because hey, it’s not like she has a job, right? Women in the workplace? Madness! And all of those things are time consuming; why, hiring someone to do them all would be fairly expensive. When your wife dies, you won’t be grieving over the loss of your life’s love, you’ll be wondering who’s going to make dinner if you can’t afford to hire a cook. So you’d better get life insurance out on her. Or, I guess, buy some diamonds and lure a magpie, either way.

Qsol Servers



I was going to say something bitingly snarky and witty, but… I just… wow. I’ve been defeated by this advert. Just imagine I said something hilarious and cutting and you’re all very entertained.

So, defeated by that last advert, I’m going to stop here. I implore all of you to go out and get jobs in advertising and make better adverts than these, so that we can someday feature them in Found Feminism.

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