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.
Actually, they’re probably just using design to make the advertisement more mysterious. A cropped head catches your attention more than a full body shot. It also allows you in a way to picture “anyone” as the woman, making it more personal.
The Facebook maps icon is just to include an image we already associate as being a place where people have been (it’s the logo for facebook check-ins) so as soon as you see it, you understand that it means people have been there, then you see that 20 people “were here” which is supposed to make you understand that when you have sex with someone, you are catching whatever those other 20 people had.
Sometimes people read way too far into things >_<
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. Although I understand what you’re saying from a design standpoint, I have a moral obligation to critique the misogynistic visual language being used in this ad. By using the ubiquitous “hot”, “faceless” woman in a vulnerable, sexualized position (which is now somehow accepted because of its deep roots in porn), this ad is already demeaning. And then to reduce her vagina to a “check-in” point where “Bill Johnson and 19 others” were is not only slut shaming but demeaning. This ad tells me that my body is still fair game for patriarchal expliotiation.
Think about it. Would this ad exist if the subject were male?
feminists are the worst thing to happen to tumblr
