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.
Thank you for this great commentary.
^^ This.
All of this. Just, all of it.
And this makes me mad on another topic too. HPV, another one of this scary STDs that everyone gets (the sexual chicken pox, if you will) is a male carried disease. Yet, I get blamed for it. Obviously I gave it to someone. No. The correct answer is that males carry it and have little if any symptoms. I want to see an awareness campaign about that. I want to see something that affects so many women get pinned on men’s irresponsibility to “keep it in their pants.” If males want to try and keep woman in their place, then I want them to see how dumb and horrendous it feels to be kept in place by me. I am so sick of this double standard. SO FUCKING SICK.
I agree that this ad is pretty atrocious, but on researching it (to write a blog post for the Leila Grace Foundation), I found that they have similar ads for males, heterosexual and homosexual. Additionally, the count on the male heterosexual ad was more than either the female or the homosexual male. I also found that this might not be an official ad, but rather a proposal for an ad campaign.
I don’t know if the original poster saw those things, but I am fairly tired of the way people on Tumblr take things out of context. This is in no way directed at anyone who reacted to the original post. The campaign, taken as a whole, is still tasteless - to assume a person is irresponsible with STD prevention because they have a high sex partner count is not logical.
The moral of the story here is don’t trust Tumblr. People don’t source things properly and Tumblr users will post things out of context because I don’t know why. Also, Tumblr users like to spoil new episodes and movies that you’re really excited about with their stupid animated GIFs.
(Source: rickrosswifey)
