If by chance you were feeling confident that violence against women is no longer a thing in advertising, be advised- it still is.
This is a truck decal: a magnetic photograph of a woman, bound and blacked out, that you can stick to your truck bed so it looks like you actually have a woman, bound and blacked out, in the back.
As you can probably imagine, when Brad Kolb, the owner of Hornet Signs in Waco, Texas slapped this onto the company truck as an experiment in advertising and posted the photo on Facebook, it went viral and an almighty hellstorm of, completely justified, feminist outrage ensued.
I love it when the Internet does that.
Even better is the news that, in response to the online outcry, Kolb burned the offending magnet and donated $2,500 to Waco’s Advocacy Center for Crime Victims and Children. Sometimes people get so caught up in the media’s all too frequent misrepresentations of women, they forget that they are not a joke or a decal or an advertising slogan. Hopefully this will be a lesson to advertisers and entrepreneurs everywhere that women are not a gimmick to toss in the back of your pickup like we don’t matter.
Images via KWTX, giphy.com
