Fury over ‘sexist’ ad takes the tea cake
SOUND the klaxon. Release the hounds. There’s something new to be offended about. Tunnock’s has had its wafers rapped for an advert for tea cakes featuring the top of a woman’s thigh.
Said thigh was in contact with an aforementioned tea cake along with the slogans ‘where do you keep yours?’ and ‘serve up a treat’.
This was all ‘likely to cause serious offence’ and ‘socially irresponsible’, according to the Advertising Standards Authority this week.
Oh, for goodness sake. Excuse me while I step over this puddle of melted snowflakes. What makes this tale even more extraordinary is that the advert was banned after only one person complained that it was ‘sexist and objectified women’. One! Just so long as we’re not overreacting.
The thing about this advert is not so much that it’s offensive, but that it’s not very good. While I see what they were going for (that Athena tennis poster from the 1970s), it’s a bit naff.
Who eats a tea cake during a tennis match? Who wanders about with a tea cake nestled snugly on their upper thigh? Where do you keep yours? In the biscuit tin, that’s where.
Yet I find myself wearily objecting to its banishment because ripping this advert off the walls quite literally sends the wrong message.
It says that looking at women is wrong, cheeky humour is no longer acceptable. That anything above the knee is all a bit much, really.
It’s puritan, marginalising and shaming and suggests we are edging ever closer to a strict and prim society, the rules of which are laid down on Twit- ter by the permanently offended few. Beyond all that, I also find it a frivolous distraction. Women in 2018 face real problems.
The gender pay gap is still an issue. Domestic violence has not been curbed. Sexual assault, for so long hidden in the shadows, is finally being confronted.
IMPORTANT conversations are taking place. This isn’t one of them. We need to know where to draw the line between a liberal, open, equal society and one that bans things because a single extreme viewpoint hits the right PC buttons.
Ultimately, the joke may be on those up in arms. Could it be that Tunnock’s judged the way the wind was blowing and – gasp – deliberately came up with a provocative advert? If so, they’ve played a blinder, given all the free publicity.
If that is the case, agencies will be actively producing ‘offensive’ adverts to prod social media into a rage. Now that really would be a distraction.