Thursday, June 21, 2007

Trojan Pig

Pandagon ... You can see the ad she's talking about here here.

Okay, when I first read about this Trojan ad, I thought it would probably be at least mildly offensive. But I found it vaguely amusing.

It trades in the same gender stereotypes common to ads like this, but overall, I didn’t think it hit on them too hard. The ad doesn’t argue that men are de facto pigs, but it does suggest that men who push for condom-less sex are pigs, and that’s a pretty fair assessment of that behavior. But the stereotype issues aside, the issue with this ad is that Fox and CBS rejected the ad and not because it peddles in the same stereotypes that their programming uses. No, they took issue with advertising condoms as being used for what they are used for.

A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, “Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention — which may be allowed — and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons.”

Representatives for both Fox and CBS confirmed that they had refused the ads, but declined to comment further.

In a written response to Trojan, though, Fox said that it had rejected the spot because, “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.”

Translation: We can accept advertising of sexual devices if they are advertised as benefiting men. But if they insinuate something as crazy as the concept that men should respect women’s bodies, health, and choices, then they’re way out of line.

The good news is that the gloves are off. The networks are cowering because they’re scared to death of anti-choicers writing in and bitching about the idea that sluts should escape their due punishment for having sex. Make no mistake, this is not about the fetuses. Not even the most crazy anti-choicer can convince himself that condoms kill babies. The idea of preventing unwanted pregnancy—and therefore preventing abortion, actually—is the source of the angst. Once more with feeling: It’s not about the babies, it’s about punishing women for having sex.

In my opinion, this is a great ad. It's subtle at first and funny. That it was rejected by these networks for being about protection from something other than disease is pretty stupid. I don't know how much I agree with Amanda's translation, but it's probably pretty close. The male driven dogmas against painting men as pigs for wanting to be able to "get in there" without a condom on is prevalent in many areas of society. It goes along with NC-17 ratings for images of a guy actually trying to please a woman during sex, while a gang sex scene can show up in a PG-13 movie showing a girl going down on several gentlemen with little issue.

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