This week's questionable advertising is for Roc sun screen and comes from the advertisement agency DDB in Milan, Italy.It's not the usual questionable depiction one is used to in advertisements where ad agencies seem to have forgotten it is not still 1953. No, this one is...
apparently implying that the sun is some kind of child molester.There is really no other way to look at it. This isn't a depiction where the sun is physically harming children or acting like some kind of bully. No, these ads depict a rather predatory looking sun offering two children toys as some kind of incentive to get closer.
But the toys alone aren't really enough to ruin this ad for me. Rather, it's the way the sun looks at the audience with a sort of knowing grin. It's just unsettling.
I suppose the ad is successful in that it depicts how a sunny day can tempt children outside regardless of the possible harm of UV rays, but I'd rather not imagine the sun then trying to play a game of "hide the pickle" afterwards.
The ad's slogan is “protect them from sun,” but god if I don't read it as "never let them outside again."
A few years ago I was a manager at a production company with a pretty even male/female split. When I started I loved working there because we had a great team of people and everyone respected one another. However, about two years in I started to get reports about sexual harassment. I figured it would be a quick fix since our department manager was very serious about harassment cases. We carefully screened our new hires and we make them fully aware that physical or verbal harassment of any kind was not allowed. Those who got it stayed and those that didn't were let go.However, this case was different. Because in this case the victims were men and the perpetrators were women. It seemed that some women felt that "playful" touching and "teasing" was okay and despite being asked to stop would continue without abate. I received repeated complaints, and it always made me sad because the men seemed so ashamed that they had to complain in the first place. Talking with the women didn’t help as none of them believed what they were doing was sexual or harassment. Even pointing out that when someone says stop they need to stop didn’t work. They honestly believed that nothing they could do, short of grabbing the guys junk, counted as sexual harassment. This is not what feminism is about. We are not supposed to create a role reversal, but rather have respect for one another and listen when someone says no.When it became clear to me that talking and shifting schedules wasn’t working I took the issue to the department manager. He didn't believe it and refused to listen, claiming that a woman couldn't possible sexually harass a man. I was floored. We eventually lost a good deal of employees because the work environment had grown so toxic. I also eventually left because I couldn't continue to work in a place that didn't treat every employee with respect.The biggest issue with this whole incident was simply that men aren't raised to see women as threats and women are raised to believe they cannot be a threat to a man. Men are not taught to view unwanted attention as creepy or indicative of possible violence the way women are. If a man acts like these women he is perceived as being a possible threat, but when a woman does it she is perceived as either being pathetic or flirty. Neither of these behaviours are healthy for anyone involved. Men don’t speak up enough when they feel uncomfortable, for fear of being labelled a sissy or weak. Women engage in sexual misconduct because they don’t believe that what they are doing is wrong or at all similar to what men do. This belief is only reaffirmed when managers and employers treat cases of male sexual-harassment with less seriousness than female sexual-harassment.
