Virgin Mobile’s Creepy Stalker Girl Ads

I have a pastime that I bring into play whenever I see a gendered ad campaign, or forum comment, or joke, or whatever.  I swap the genders, and see if it still has the same tone.

This is not one of those cases where that holds true.  But I’m not sure which of our society’s outdated opinions on gender is most prominently displayed here.  That “sexual violence against men is funny, lol;” that “women are non-threatening even as predators.”  On second thought, I think the thing that bothers me most is that the first thing that is conjured to mind by the descriptor “violent stalker” (office poll bears this up) is “male,” and the creators of this ad thought that by simply swapping the genders and making the woman the agressor we would be comforted enough to think it was humorous.  After all, we’ve been characterzing women as fundamentally irrational for centuries now.

(via Best Week Ever.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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