Living in western society in this age, means allowing yourself to be subjected to a cosmos of mass media infiltrating our daily lives – thinly veiled ads that mark a new era of false advertising, attempting to sell us ‘happiness’ in the form of an inanimate object. I’ve become pretty skilled at avoiding the main perpetrators. There are platforms that I eternally avoid, mainstream television and magazines, the billboards hovering over my head as I drive home from work. Every now and then though, something breaks through and with alarming ease I brush it away in order to maintain some semblance of faith in humanity. Not this time. I was off my guard as I walked into a bathroom of La Trobe University and looked up to see a cartoon drawing of two women and a man sitting at a bar. It took me a moment to take in the full scope of what I was seeing.
DON’T LET A SLOPPY REPUTATION PRECEDE YOU.
Those words stopped me in my tracks. I had to pause and take in what I was seeing, make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding it. I went back to class with the words etched into my mind, trying to justify what they could possibly mean. In class a fellow student turned and asked me “have you seen the ad in the girl’s bathroom?”. OK! So, I’m not overreacting. I passed an image of the ad around the class and was relieved, and disturbed, to find that my initial reaction to the ad was the same as my classmates, regardless of gender. Whilst this is not an ad created by La Trobe, I’m concerned that something of this nature could make it into a university that prides itself on “inclusiveness, diversity, equity and social justice.” I’m not entirely sure what message the creators of this ad thought, or hoped, that they were passing on, but they’ve certainly missed the mark.
The implications of this ad are deeply problematic and reinforce a culture of shaming and blaming individuals. The ad gives the impression that the woman pictured has two sides to her. One being a ‘decent’ and ‘respectable’ woman who is clearly meant to be represented as sober. The second woman is her drunk counterpart, a side of her that presumably comes out on the weekend after a few ‘too many’ drinks and is portrayed by the image as being indecent, ‘sloppy’ and ultimately unworthy of respect. Considering the importance and relevance of issues like personal safety, date rape and victim shaming within university culture this ad seems like a particularly reckless one. As a woman who has experienced first-hand the consequences of these complex issues my gut reaction to seeing this ad in the bathroom of an institution designed to educate and support me, was nausea, disgust and rage. I felt I was being told my worth as a person and the value of my voice, was intrinsically tied together with my ‘reputation’ which would be immediately tarnished lest I forget myself and get ‘sloppy’ drunk. I was reminded of the rhetoric that is so deeply entrenched in our societies vocabulary that people seem to have forgotten how fucked up it is, that ‘boys will be boys’, the implication being that it is the responsibility of the women to stay sober enough to prevent ourselves from being raped by men who just can’t help it!
It is past time to stop hiding behind victim blaming rhetoric and admit that we have a gendered problem with violence in our society, and no amount of ‘proper drinking’ (whatever that is?!) is going to fix it.
Bad Feminist 