There’s quite a lot of chat around the femiblogosphere about this ad for organ donation, spotted at Sociological Images. (See also The Curvature, Feministe, the F-Word.)
The advertisement depicts a very young, thin white woman with long blonde hair, wearing underwear and silver stilettos. She is plucked, waxed, heavily made up, and has a navel piercing. She is posed lounging awkwardly with her arms behind her head, eyelids drooping and lips slightly parted and pouting.
The text reads: “Becoming a donor is probably your only chance to get inside her.”
The ad credit says it comes from the Belgian “Reborn To Be Alive” organ donor foundation. My first thought was – was this a live print ad, or a viral “oopsie” like that Pepsi ad? Trendhunter says it was printed in lad-mag “P-Magazine.” The blurb at Coloribus supports that, and says that the ad agency involved was Duval Guillame. Indeed, the ad is right there on the Duval Guillaume blog, dated November 7.
Now, apart from being about the most gruesome postmortem viscus-rape fantasy that’s ever passed before my eyes*, and the imagery being stock-standard “barely-legal” exploitation douchebaggery, there’s another issue here.
The comments I’m reading around the forums seem to assume that she’s a typical, healthy youngster. I’m not picking any individual out, but they’re along the lines of “Oh, so they’re saying she’s going to be in a horrible car accident or something?”
Well, no. That’s not typically what people have organ transplants for. A more likely scenario, if she was real, is that she has terminal kidney failure, or terminal heart disease, or cystic fibrosis, or perhaps severe mental illness and has poisoned herself mostly to death with paracetamol.
So I’m not seeing the same healthy young women who might suddenly meet a tragic fate (and getcher “organs” inside her, wokka wokka snerf.) I’m seeing a very ill young woman who is thin and fragile and can barely stand up. I’m seeing a woman struggling with her own mortality, having no idea whether she will be alive next year, or next month, or next week; a woman dependent on the random generosity of doomed strangers to stay alive. And I’m seeing an audience of young pornbuyers being encouraged to jerk off over her while fantasising about their own organs (wokka) being harvested from their brain-dead body and inserted (snerf) into hers to save her life.
This is my “stop the world; I want to get off” point.
~~~
* or, perhaps, the only one that’s ever passed before my eyes.
Categories: gender & feminism, health, violence
DUFC #69 
Hoyden About Town 
Yeah, the fact that if she’s a candidate for receiving organ donation she must be seriously ill was one of the things I found most disturbing about the ad too. So very wrong.
But it’s no fun to think about that stuff, Laur. Come on.
Now, apart from being about the most gruesome postmortem viscus-rape fantasy that’s ever passed before my eyes*
I’m glad I’m not the only one whose mind went to the place of “oh, so you’re saying I can get inside when she’s injured and dying” (I did think injury rather than illness, but it’s grotesque either way).
This is my “stop the world; I want to get off” point.
Yeah, mine too. So many different levels of wrong that I just…give up.
I knew it made me want to vomit, I just wasn’t sure why.
I did in fact, FLINCH, then think ‘wow the look on her face and the way she’s falling over make her look like she’s dying’ which makes it even worse. Eeeew.
God the more I think about it, the more I hate it! It’s so: “Quick! Give her your organ, she needs it”. Had my own meltdown over it back at my blog. Reduced now to angry incoherent noises.
fuckpoliteness’s last blog post..Fuck the fucking universe!
Apart from anything else it’s just crap psychology in terms of its target audience. I imagine the overlap between the two demographics — the group *voluntary organ donors* and the group *I’m too stupid to see through this trashy ad, drool* — would be pretty small.
I like this ad. Its a funny, sexy taunt with great cut through to the most desirable organ donor demographic – healthy young risk takers. Can you think of a better way to reach nineteen year old motor cyclists in an organ donation campaign?
adherent: Who’s being taunted, who’s doing the taunting, and what’s the substance of the taunt?
Who’s being taunted? The prospective organ donor.
The taunter? The girl in in the picture.
The substance of the taunt? “You’re not getting any of this.”
Don’t be an organ donor because you can save other human beings should you meet with a tragic end: be an organ donor because terminally ill women are SEXY, and we must preserve THEIR SEXINESS.
I guess terminally ill yet tragically unsexy people don’t deserve organs. Perhaps those cruelly taunted risk-takers can get a special pink DONOR sticker that includes the desired measurements of any potential recipient. On what planet would a man’s sexiness be used to promote his access to lifesaving medical treatment?
On the other hand, maybe the ad really does just know its target audience: braindead men. /snark.
Because of course a woman can’t survive without a man’s ‘Organ’… it just gets worse, doesn’t it?
YES. This. This neatly distills the problem with this ad. It’s also a bit of a mandate on the ill and disabled. Even when you are sick, you are required to look like this.
Shorter adherent: Women (“sex” as in “sex sells” — equating “sex” with women’s bodies) have all the power in this world.
No to defend this ad, but for those who think someone who might need an organ donation could not possibly look like the model, see page 3 of “This is Who I Am,” by Rosanne Olson.
And is it just my imagination, or do most people seem to miss the poorly disguised double entendre in this ad?
Ahh right…cos women are expected to try their best to look that hot. But when they do they are *taunting men*. So when they get raped it’s their fault because they were asking for it. Delightful.
@ anon:
Not bothering to address an asinine “joke” is not the same as missing it.
Hmmm…the woman in the ad also appears not to have much agency in the advert – she’s just lounging (or tied up?) in a dark and dusty room. But the ad is talking *about* her, she’s not talking. So I don’t think we can say that *she* is taunting anyone.
Hmmm…the woman in the ad also appears not to have much agency in the advert – she’s just lounging (or tied up?) in a dark and dusty room. But the ad is talking *about* her, she’s not talking. So I don’t think we can say that *she* is taunting anyone.
fuckpoliteness’s last blog post..Rants from a cafe
eek – apologies ed. Please remove one?
Shira:
” On the other hand, maybe the ad really does just know its target audience: braindead men.”
If I’m ever in the market for a used cornea, I’ll happily take one from a (perhaps literally) braindead man, so I don’t mind an ad for organ donations that targets them effectively.
fuckpoliteness (seriously?):
“…the woman in the ad also appears not to have much agency in the advert ”
I don’t think she appears one way or another. How could you tell? Its an image without context. A person with wit and patience could put her in a different story every day of the year in which she dominates and controls the unseen events in the image. Or if so minded, one in which she’s tied and powerless, as you have. Its up to you. For my part, I thought she showed some edge, so I guess agency is in the eye of the beholder.
As is wit I guess
Only to someone ignorant of the dominant visual languages at play in advertising, and who is (wilfully?) ignoring the actual context: Western society’s portrayal of women in advertising. You could browse around the archives of this blog and of Shakesville’s “Assvertising” posts for a starter course.
Reclining, almost-naked, heel-nobbled and seriously ill sure doesn’t read “dominant” to me. You might also be a bit careful – again, paying mind to the context in which you are speaking, here, in this place – about using “edgy” as a positive when talking about the visual objectification of women.
Perhaps it would have been more precise for me to say the image gives no context to the situation of the woman. Regardless, its a distraction from my point, which was, an important organ donor demographic is effectively reached by this ad. If this were an ad for a car, I’d agree with the contributors here. But if this results in more young males ticking the organ donor box, I’m a pragmatist and I’d say its a good thing.
Incidentally, I appreciate your patient reply.
Perhaps an important donor demographic *is* reached by the ad, we don’t know yet. The point is they could have done that any number of other ways. This way plays into dangerous ideas about women and sexuality. It is no less pragmatic for women to be concerned about that given the statistical frequency of rape of women.
“But if this results in more young males ticking the organ donor box, I’m a pragmatist and I’d say its a good thing.”
What if it also results in more young males seeing women as a means to their ends, rather than as persons in themselves — leading to more domestic violence, sexual assault and intimate murders?
Your visibility seems to be limited to arm’s reach, here. You can’t see much outside your own ends. Which is the human condition, of course, but people are trying to prod you here to look beyond that.
Wow…I’m a woman, and I’m really not THAT offended, I think that the responses to this ad listed above and in the article show a common problematic perception about feminism, that we’re all too f*ing sensitive, and read into things sometimes even a bit too far because inside there are pain and feelings of insecurity.
I’m a strong woman, and I consider myself a feminist (why wouldn’t I) BUT there is being real and pointing out irony and poor taste, and there is going overboard and being overly whiny and PC. I think this article jumps to a conclusion and so have many of you that have jumped on the bandwagon. Lighten up, it would do us all some good!
Mary, accusations of “whining” and “fucking sensitivity” (even with the coy asterisk) and “political correctness” reveal a lot more about you than about your targets. Go read this ”The Greatest Cliché: The Unexamined Propaganda of “Political Correctness””, please, and this, and this, and read our comments guidelines in full before re-commenting.
It’s funny how it’s “whining” when feminists do it, but whining about feminist whining and how oppressive, unneccessary and fun-spoiling it is apparently magically not whining. Actually. It’s not funny at all. It’s boring.
(Slightly O/T but not totally) That Zuky post is in my top three of best ever.
Mary, if you don’t find “get inside her” offensive, that’s up to you, but I think it’s highly offensive and I’m a devotee of bad-taste comedy like League of Gentlemen etc.
This ad is disturbing because it appears no subject matter -no matter how delicate, no matter how ‘life and death’ – is off-limits for pornification.
Also, it would appear that they don’t want straight women or gay men to be organ donors.
Of course, they obviously don’t want the help of straight men or lesbian women who respect women, but the deliberate and complete exclusion of women and gay men from the apparent pool of people they want to donate organs is pretty confusing, given the good record both groups generally have when it comes to involvement in charities and human rights organizing. (Not to mention the sheer number of straight women and gay men in the world….I mean honestly, wouldn’t their money have been better spent on an ad targeting ALL potential organ donors, rather than a few selfish straight dudes who really don’t give a fuck about anybody else?)
Also, it’s not like you have a say in where your organs go after you’re dead. For all the ad’s targeted Selfish Straight Dude knows, his organs could end up in some “nasty” fat guy — and oh noes, what if he’s a nasty fat gay guy, then it’s totally like you’re having sex with a gay dude after you’re dead! Oh, the huuuuuumanity!!!! (Which is another problem raised by this ad — so ugly women don’t deserve organ transplants, and apparently no men do, either. But of course the misogynist trolls fail to see that bit of OMG MISANDRY IT’S EVERYWHERE!!!! Because being an MRA troll is really not about helping men, it’s about hurting women, otherwise they’d be all over this like germs in an elementary school.)
Well, they won’t take blood donations from gay men under any circumstances … ew ew unclean!
I couldn’t agree more with fuckpolitenes’s last comment- v. true- when feminists ( and I love it how people ALWAYS lumpenize and homogenize feminists) say anything it is ALWAYS radical, ‘PC’, and contaminated by their misandry and ‘indoctrinated’ way of viewing the world. And the person complaining about feminism is always politically neutral and super-human in their ability to remove themselves from their contexts, and become ‘objective’ ( do people not realise that this is a mythical state that does not exist?), thus exempting them from criticism.
I find the necrophilic aspect of the ad quite interesting, seeing as it has so much investment in creating a heteronormative scene- passive female, phallic penetration, theme of rape fantasy, sexy lingerie. It seems like you have a perfect heterosexual scene in place, but then they bring in this concept of death, of the MALE dying ( a dominant reading) , of the male body being PENETRATED in order for his organ to be removed, and the scene becomes profoundly queered. The blurb ” Becoming a donor is the only way you will probably get inside her” can be read as mocking the male ego, and mocking the idea that the ego has so much investment in the capacity to score heterosexually?
I think the ad, while differing from more mainstream donation campaigns due to the sex aspect, has many similarities. You have the eugenicist bent ( I live in Australia, and not once have I seen a black person/”ugly” person in the advertisements for blood donation). You have the homophobic bent ( a dominant reading of the ad would suggest heterosexual sex). And you have the nationalist bent- the white woman with blonde hair waiting for the heroic male to sacrifice himself for the perpetuation of the body politic.
Overall though I agree with what has already been said, with regards to how disgusting it is to dress a potentially very ill woman up in underwear and high heels, and use her sexiness ( and not her humanity or suffering) as the reason she deserves a transplant.