This week, the sportswear brand Stüssy launched a Facebook campaign to get an extra bit of edge. The campaign, centered on Facebook, enables users to strip the model by liking the Stüssy page. “The more likes, the more clothes come off!” Stüssy promises fans.
Clicking the Like button enabled us to watch the model — who is apparently decked out in their entire Spring/Summer 2012 collection — do a little dance, removing a piece of clothing in each frame until she was down to her skivvies. And giving us the middle finger. Because nothing says sex appeal like “fuck you, lol.” … Continue Reading
It wasn’t long before advertising firms around the nation learned a thing or two from the internet. Posting “controversial” things can mean incredible pageviews, so why shouldn’t they get into it? We really thought we’d seen it all — until last Friday, when Belvedere Vodka released a new ad on its social streams. The ad featured a laughing man with his arms around a woman who was clearly trying to elude him, her brows knitted in a frown and her mouth open into a plea for help as she tried to pull away. The text on the ad read, “Unlike some people, Belvedere always goes down smoothly.” … Continue Reading
The day before yesterday, I wrote a scathing piece about the California Milk Processor Board’s new milk ad campaign, which features cartoonish men in varying stages of distress, with headlines such as “I’m sorry I listened to what you said and not what you meant,” and “I apologize for letting you misinterpret what I was saying,” and “I apologize for not reading between the right lines,” as well as a website that illustrates women’s premenstrual syndrome-related moodiness in the same way we once color-coded terror threats.
The firm who put this campaign together, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (hailed for the brilliant “Got Milk” campaign of the 90s), sees their “Everything I Do Is Wrong” campaign as a way to raise the awareness of milk’s helpful effect on the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome. It’s not a war on the sexes, they tell the New York Times. It’s a way the sexes can deal with it together.
I don’t buy it, and I wrote about it. Today, I got the following e-mail from an individual claiming to be an employee of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners … Continue Reading
Despite the well-known adage that sex sells, anyone with something really sexy to sell knows how difficult marketing can get. Durex, however, seems to have found a medium for creating buzz with its house parties — events held at people’s homes for which the company supplies items for people to check out and take home to try. Think Tupperware parties… but a million times better. … Continue Reading
We find it humorous that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have no regard for the human animal — so what if we all develop massive body image issues, at least the animals are safe!
Their latest campaign, which pokes fun at the Transportation Security Administration’s new full-body scan measure depicts a security scan of a woman (all boobs, ribs and razor-sharp hipbones) in her bra and underwear, which reads: “Be Proud of Your Body Scan: Go Vegan.”
We’re here to tell you that in moderation, you too can eat bacon and have a sexy security scan. Just kidding. We’re here to tell you that you’re beautiful just as you are. … Continue Reading
Oh, Woman’s Day, you’ve really gone and done it this time. Their October 1, 2010 issue features an advertorial (usually put together by the rag and a company’s brand strategy team) for Summer’s Eve, a company that makes personal care products for women, which suggests that the best way to get a raise is to make sure one’s vagina is squeaky clean.
Earlier this month, the site CougarLife.com, which connects older women with younger men, got a bit of a nasty shock from Google. The search engine giant, which was receiving $100,000 a month from CougarLife to manage its advertising and place it on content pages, told CougarLife that its ads, which had been appearing since October, would no longer be accepted. The reason? Cougar sites are not “family safe.”
CougarLife suggested placing a different ad: instead of one picturing older women and younger men together, they proposed an image of the company’s president, Claudia Opdenkelder, 39, without a man in the picture. … Continue Reading
Not to fall behind Kotex in embracing open discussion of menstruation, Tampax has apparently launched MenstrualTweets, an aggregator collecting the Twittersphere’s 140-character missives about — you guessed it: cramps, PMS, tampons, cycles, and periods.
As with most aggregators, we’re seeing a variety of … interesting things.
No word from Tampax of yet as to this campaign. We’ll keep you posted. And, of course, you can go gawk at @MenstrualTweets on Twitter.
Kotex has decided to tackle ridiculous advertising for tampons with a brilliant campaign called U by Kotex.
This campaign is the first step for Kotex in addressing how we talk about menstruation and vaginal health as a society.
“Society has created shame and embarrassment around periods and vaginal health, which restricts honest dialogue and information sharing and compromises a women’s ability to take ownership of her personal care,” Aida Flick, Kotex brand director, tells Marketing Daily. “With the launch of U by Kotex, our goal is to change the conversation and to help women understand and be comfortable with their femininity and bodies.”
Not so fast, Kotex. Major television networks are banning the ad due to the use of the word “vagina.”
Even when the company substituted “down there” for vagina, two [of the three objecting major] networks [which have not been named] still wouldn’t run the ad, so the company was forced to drop the idea altogether. That provoked Amanda Hess, author of The Sexist blog, to observe: “Now, the commercial contains no direct references to female genitalia – you know, the place where the fucking tampon goes.”
An executive for Kimberly-Clark, the owner of Kotex, notes that US TV networks have no such compunction about references to “erectile dysfunction” in prime-time ads for Viagra and Ciallis.
The New York Timesreported that the campaign — produced by the advertising agency JWT for tampon brand Kotex — was “a bit too frank” for U.S. TV. Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT said: “It’s very funny because the whole spot is about censorship. The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we’re saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tampon is not a dirty word, and neither is vagina.”
The video on this post is the amended version, which debuted on TV last week.
Advertising commentators are all about this Durex ad campaign by the German designer Andrej Krahne, but we here at Sex and the 405 have a question: why is the woman made up of shiny happy words while the man is made of neutral or negative ones?
We hate to get all Jezebel on this, but just what message is Durex sending? That women feel no exertion during sex and that they exert no judgment or wisdom? And what’s with the fruits? Fruits? Really?
Let us tell you something, Durex — no matter how much we love sucking dick, we’re not thinking “happy, happy, happy, happy, happy” while administering a blowjob. Sorry to break it to you.
The Houston Press unceremoniously outted Sarah Tressler as a writer, adjunct professor and stripper, suggesting that she’s only doing what she’s doing because she wants a book deal and a movie made about her life. “It’s all pretty much what you’d expect,” he says. “Writing in the style that really, really wants to be described as ‘fearless’ and ‘intelligent’ and ‘funny’ and ‘sexy.’”
In a world where employers can easily find out everything about you, where insurance companies can decide to give or deny coverage because they see some status update as representing a liability, where a judge at family court can take away your children because — God forbid — you had a photo taken at Playboy West some Halloween… It’s not a matter of the web exposing you. It’s a matter of no longer having the ability to segregate different aspects of your life as we were once easily able to do and the concern is entirely valid.
But there is one question we just haven’t been able to answer to our satisfaction — at least not without exposing the absolutely disgusting hypocrisy of people who claim to be interested in preserving the beautiful tradition of freedom and autonomy that this country represents. The question was posed simply enough: “The conservative party’s devotion to preserving the life of the unborn is admirable, but their concern seems to only extend to the unborn. Why are people so devoted to life in the name of God treat the very children they have saved as unnecessary burdens on the state, to be excised like so many malignant tumors?”
Every woman knows the word slut has power. Whether you love it or hate it, the word “slut” is an evocation of a gender double standard used to control women and no woman alive hasn’t thought about what it means to be labeled in this way. In some cultures, where honor killings take place, it is a matter of life or death. If you’re a “good” woman, don’t kid yourself. It means you’ve spent your life and will continue to spend your life calibrating your appearance, speech and behavior so that you are not a slut.
Initially, it is unclear whether Limbaugh repeatedly cites this fraudulent article as a means to justify his dishonest tirade or if he truly failed to do the appropriate research regarding Fluke’s remarks, but as his show continues and Limbaugh plays more clips from Sandra Fluke’s congressional hearing, it becomes evident that he is picking and choosing what he wants his listeners to hear, in order to corroborate the allegation he made in a previous show that Fluke is nothing but a slut who wants everyone else to pay for her birth control.
Hoping to provide pro-choice supporters a space to counter anti-abortion rhetoric and activity surrounding the “40 Days for Life” Lent campaign, a Tumblr has been erected to cheer on those who believe that a woman’s body doesn’t belong to society.
Sex and the 405 is what your newspaper would look like if it had a sex section.
Here you’ll find news about the latest research being conducted to figure out what drives desire, passion, and other sex habits; reviews of sex toys, porn and other sexy things; coverage of the latest sex-related news that have our mainstream media's panties up in a bunch; human interest pieces about sex and desire; interviews with people who love sex, or hate sex, or work in sex, or work to enable you to have better sex; opinion pieces that relate to sex and society; and the sex-related side of celebrity gossip. More...
