You Don’t Have to Be Sexist…but you do have to have a lack of imagination.

Everything is not hunky dory.

Sitting on the bus having just passed a community centre where young people are getting together in mutual respect, the writer’s retinas were blasted by a woman’s body, her breasts and a packet of crisps. Crisps are lovely, as are women’s bodies, but by combining them, putting them on billboards all over the city and all for the sake of sales is nothing short of pathetic. This set of advertising is added to the ones for pasta sauce: one with the compulsory Italian hag while the other with a young, fabulous woman.

I’m tired of people trying to sell things, make us buy pasta, crisps, alcohol, fruit, shoes, underwear, shampoo, shorts, tea, coffee, pens, necklaces, runners, books, phones, mp3s, holidays, lipstick, makeup, flowers, suits, condoms, toilet paper, juice, soup, house cleaning products, papers, bags and all by showing me parts of the human body. Anyway, does it work?

I’m not stupid but my senses are appalled by these methods. Bodies are not products, people are worth more than any strategic advertising budget but it seems that the agencies have run out of ideas and so we have women being objectified, their bodies put on show, as much as ‘product placement’ as anything else and no doubt it is all, as Kenny Everett might say ‘In the best possible taste’.

What might be in the best possible taste would be for these companies to stop running these ads, to spend their time and money on a campaign to highlight how women still don’t have parity with men in terms of pay, we’re still expected to do all the care work without equal respect and recognition, women and girls are beaten, abused, raped by those they are told they should trust, dismissed as shrill and our needs neglected because we have vaginas and breasts.

These ads will continue to run but they definitely should come with a warning:

‘Sexist and objectifying due to lack of imagination and prolonged exposure to pornography’

Make a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority

A great blog for some more comments on the campaign: http://soisaystoher.wordpress.com