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Trojan condoms are back in the news again, this time as a champion of sexual health and reproductive rights. (In 2005, they launched Elexa - traditional condoms that are gender marketed so that women will feel more comfortable buying them – and backed them up with a wonderful blog, SexySmart, full of practical and insightful advice and thoughts on sexuality by a team of women bloggers.) With "Evolve," their latest ad campaign, Trojan is using crude humor (men are pigs until they buy condoms and evolve into responsible and desirable humans) to promote safe sex. The New York Times reports that the ad has been rejected by CBS and FOX. Fox's reason? “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.†(Because as we all know, preventing unwanted pregnancies is obviously not a "health-related use" of condoms. Nope.) CBS noted, "…we do not find it appropriate for our network even with late-night-only restrictions.†(Of course, women being tortured during prime time on early episodes of "Criminal Minds" and "Close to Home" is perfectly appropriate for their network. No moral issues there.)
The blog world is full of commentary on the networks' actions and reproductive health. Liza at The Feminist Bloggers Network wrote:
The ad doesn’t argue that men are de facto pigs, but it does suggest that men who push for condom-less sex are pigs, and that’s a pretty fair assessment of that behavior. But the stereotype issues aside, the issue with this ad is that Fox and CBS rejected the ad and not because it peddles in the same stereotypes that their programming uses. No, they took issue with advertising condoms as being used for what they are used for… Translation: We can accept advertising of sexual devices if they are advertised as benefiting men. But if they insinuate something as crazy as the concept that men should respect women’s bodies, health, and choices, then they’re way out of line.
Also as part of a longer piece on how this latest action kowtows to zealots' efforts to stymie reproductive rights, Jill Filipovic reminded us at The Huffington Post that:
The vast majority of American women will use contraception at some point in their lives. People of both sexes want to plan their families. Self-determination is a desire that crosses all party lines and ideologies. All of this makes it even more fascinating when a fairly quotidian advertisement makes waves because it attempts to sell condoms, while few of us so much as bat an eyelash at the constant stream of highly sexualized images we see on television every day.
Carol Carrozza, vice president of marketing for Ansell Healthcare, which makes LifeStyles condoms, summed the hypocritical situation up very nicely when she told the Times, “We always find it funny that you can use sex to sell jewelry and cars, but you can’t use sex to sell condoms." Ha ha. The joke is on us.
Suzanne also blogs at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants and was very disappointed on a recent road trip when the condom machines in a gas station bathroom did not work, thus denying her one of six surprise products from "Pandora's Box"
