People in jail will rape you if you drink and drive
The ad started off funnily enough with some dudes talking about the type of person they want to meet. But then it got scary — the ouens looked too much like 28s.
A couple of thoughts: the white guys look like nice, decent and thoughtful potential partners. They look like someone I can meet on Dating SA. The black guys, however, are your stereotypical gangsters and thugs.
But that’s not my biggest problem with this Brandhouse ad; my biggest problem is that it seems to be condoning jail rape, which we all know is a big problem in South African prisons.
Here’s what Chris Roper says about the ad. And yes, I absolutely agree with him:
There’s no appeal to our civic sense, to our desire to do the right thing, to our awareness of how driving drunk can hurt others. No, what we’re selling is how driving drunk can hurt YOU.
The other thing that is problematic is that prison is already a punishment. Do we really want people to be afraid of being raped inside the place that is supposed to punish them for their behaviour? I realise that it is a reality; I realise that rape inside prisons happen. But what I do not condone is the attempt by Brandhouse to make light of it. “It’s ridiculous and reinforces the stereotypical image that people in prison are inherently bad and can’t be rehabilitated. That is deeply concerning,” – Lorenzo Wakefield at the Community Law Centre.
The one good thing about this campaign is the breathalyser machines inside drinking holes such as Mr Pickwicks in Long Street. I actually saw one there recently. Pop in a R5 coin and you can analyse your breath to find out whether you’re still within your 0,05 g per 100ml of blood.
The only thing that’s going to stop drunken driving is by making it socially unacceptable. Similar to how we’ve made it socially unacceptable to go without applying deodorant or how we’ve made women feel uncomfortable about their armpit hair. But the big difference is that this will actually save lives.
Question: Would we condone this ad if they used the threat of rape against women? If not, why is it OK to use it against men?
As regular readers would know, it’s not often that I agree with with Joy. But exceptional times call for exceptional responses.
This ad is outrageous, and there’s a rich irony to it’s having coincided with the Sixteen Days of Activism campaign against violence against women and children. In a recent newspaper piece, Mosibudi Mangena the (former?) head of Azapo, and a recent minister of Science & Technology noted the inappropriateness of the campaign theme: We don’t campaing against violence in general, because when it happens to men we feel that they had it coming. This ad’s celebration of male rape dovetails neatly with that attitude.
I’m surprised that Joy hasn’t laboured this, but (as she mentioned) the ad is also starkly racist. I imagine that were you to put this to the agency they’d deny it, but that’s precisely because the racism is so entrenched that they (the makers) wouldn’t notice it. It’s not generally nice to do this, but I wanna bet that the director was a White person, who lacks Coloured friends (as opposed to colleagues and acquaintances).
This is evident in the stark contrast (that Joy mentioned) between the round characters of the White dudes (who spoke with characteristic awkwardness about their emotional needs), and the Black dudes (who delivered flat phyiscal one-liners.) The quirky delivery of the of the Whites, and the crap acting of the Darkies was not due to genetic differences, but the fact that the director didn’t bother to – uh – direct the Blacks. In the director’s view, their stilted thuggery was exactly what you’d expect from a Black person in reality.
Also notice how the Black speakers wore prison garb, and the White ones civvies? This probably wasn’t a deliberate decision, but for the director a White person in jailhouse orange looks unrealistic, whereas on a Black person its just looks right. And the order is revealing too. As Joy said, it get’s scarier towards the end – when the Blacks appear. You can laugh at a White moffie – but a Black one (the perspective goes) is downright scary. Again, this isn’t explicitly-held orthodoxy on the part of the director, its just genuine racism – she really feels that way.
Last year the American National Public Radio fired a commentator for admitting on air that the sight of Muslims filled him with fear. We’re a great deal more tolerant of bigots emZantsi.