Exploiting murder for higher sales is OK, as long as its a guy.

16 Aug, 2008 by Cassy Fiano

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Wrangler’s got a new ad campaign. The tagline is “We are animals”, and apparently, dead people is now considered “edgy”. Here are the ads, apparently running in France:

These ads are more than a little off-putting. Why is looking at people who have been murdered going to make me want to wear their jeans? It’s not sexy, it’s disrespectful and crude, and most definitely in very poor taste. But misogynistic? Apparently so!

According to Vanessa at Feministing, these ads are abhorrent. But only the one featuring a murdered woman is disgusting. The guy? Eh, not so offensive:

Apparently the cowboy jeans company decided to “spice up” their ads a bit: by featuring corpses along with the tagline, “We are animals.” Because, you know, murder is so hot right now. The one after the jump is so disturbing (trigger warning) that I honestly felt like I might throw up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sexualization of violence against women so disturbingly portrayed on an ad before.

See, only the one featuring a murdered woman makes her want to throw up. Only the murdered woman is disturbing. The murdered male is not nearly as important. Of course, the male ad seems to indicate more violence than the female ad does. The male’s jeans are ripped and torn, and besides just being wet, are stained with some kind of darker residue — blood? mud? — which isn’t exactly clear. It screams murder. The female ad, however, does not seem to depict death quite as much. It’s a little more ambiguous. Her body is stiff, her arm is flexed, and it’s a little hard to tell whether she’s dead or just… swimming topless through a dirty creek. She even appears to be semi-erect, with her head clearly raised at a higher angle than her back and legs. She’s clean, aside from the mud, and there are no rips on her jeans, nor blood or bruises to immediately indicate violence. Is she dead or alive? It’s a little bit tougher to tell than in the male ad, where he seems to quite obviously be a corpse.

But it’s the female ad which is offensive because of the indication of violence, not the male ad, even though the male ad seems to portray a more violent picture than the female ad. So what are the point here? That exploiting murder for profit is OK as long as it’s a guy? Classy, Feministing. Real classy.

There’s also some delicious irony in the complaining of feminists about violence perpetrated against humans, given that they’re all pro-choice. I guess that doesn’t count as violence in their eyes. But that’s another post for another day.