Sell-Abrating International Women’s Day

As any long term reader of the Feminist Peace Network blog knows, I have no patience with cause-branding for profit at the expense of women’s lives and rights.  Here a few of this year’s not so delightful IWD offenders:

This ad for a new LG Ice Cream phone gets our nod for misogynist bad taste this year:

It is international Women’s day (sic) coming up soon on March 8th, for those of you that didn’t know already.

LG have their LG KF350 otherwise known as the Ice Cream which is just in time for those of you that want to treat that special lady in your life. Whether that be your mum or your girlfriend, or whoever that special lady is.

This is a delightful phone which is available in lovely candy floss colours of either vanilla or pink. It is all girly and is a great lady phone for sure. Although this was launched in Korea back in 2008 the device is only just making its way over here.

However this year we bestow our lowest honor, the what part of sex trafficking do you not understand is wrong award, to 1888pressrelease.com for a press release for Hot Russian Brides that reads,

In an effort to help members develop their relationships further, leading International Dating service (aka “russian bride”) HotRussianBrides.com® is offering an additional 50% off the already discounted Video Streaming rate to Premium Members with active Intimacy Requests to celebrate International Women’s Day. The promotion takes places on March 8, from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Eastern Time. 

International Women’s Day, observed on March 8, is a global celebration of women. Since HotRussianBrides.com empowers Russian and Ukrainian women to find love anywhere in the World, the day is widely used as an occasion for men to express their love for the special women in their lives.

The release goes on to explain that this is a dating service not a mail order bride service.  Uh huh. Oh and as for 1888pressrelease.com, you’ll be pleased to know that,

Because we aim to carry only quality releases, editors and journalists have come to rely on 1888PressRelease.com as a credible source of information. In fact, our troupe of editors manually reviews and approves each press release to ensure it has significant content, meets formatting and grammatical standards, and is newsworthy.

No, really, drippy pink phones and exploitive dating services aren’t newsworthy or significant, even if they meet grammatical standards (although our sensitive lady-eyes appreciate that gesture towards English grammar while hawking Russian brides), and do not celebrate the lives of women. In fact, they just look like crass, misogynist anything to make a buck business as usual to us.  In other words, go shove your crappy merchandising and keep your grubby little advertising campaigns off our holiday.

Finally, the Feminist Peace Network continues to call for a boycott (or more to the point woman-cott) of InternationalWomen’sDay.com which, while offering information on IWD is primarily devoted to pointing traffic towards Reuters news stories (Thomson Reuters, parent company of Reuters is one of the primary sponsors for the site).  Here are some of the IWD-irrelevant headlines they were hawking on March 2:

–Getting naked for art at the Sydney Opera House
–Pharma desire for “female Viagra” excites passion
–Children over-exposed to sexual imagery
–Women and men travellers tend to get different illnesses
–Britain sorry for shipping children to colonies
–Your old mascara may be spoiling your looks
–Exhibit lifts the skirts on feminine footwear

International Women’s Day is a human rights celebration not an advertising opportunity.  While the website does in part provide a service, more than half of it is devoted to driving traffic to Reuters and that is not acceptable.  You can read more about the boycott call here.