If you haven’t already seen this on Twitter, here’s something terrible for you: the image above comes from a catalog for Bloomingdale’s.
Because, apparently, a group of actual human beings sat around a table trying to come up with new ways to sell clothes this holiday season and decided that, really, there was no better way to do that than by conjuring up visions of holiday-themed date rape.
The ad copy is bad enough, but the picture really clinches the ad’s full terribleness: the happy woman, enjoying herself obliviously at some holiday party while her predatory “best friend” contemplates the best way to render her unconscious.
Happily, enough people were publicly disgusted by the ad and its creepy implications that Bloomingdale’s has now apologized for it, though somehow I doubt they will feel apologetic enough to rerelease their catalog with the offending image removed from it.
To me, one of the creepiest things about the ad was its implicit invocation of the notion of the “friend zone,” that mythic land where poor suffering men are exiled by cruel women who just can’t see that the best guy for them is already sitting by their side listening patiently as they cry about the latest bad boy to break their heart. You know this stale old story by heart.
The idea of the “friend zone” turns a woman’s lack of romantic interest in a guy into a sort of injustice that she has supposedly inflicted upon him. It encourages a seemingly contradictory sense of wounded, hopeless entitlement amongst guys who would do far better if they either accepted the friendship of their crush for what it is, or, if this is too painful for them, just moved on.
Guys who see themselves as being trapped in the friend zone feel they are being denied something — well, someone — that should rightfully be theirs. After all, they’re such nice fellows, the best friend a woman could ever have!
But really not.
Needless to say, a “best friend” staring at a woman and thinking about ways to spike her drink is not a friend at all. Neither, really, is any guy — well, anyone of any gender — who considers themselves stuck in the friend zone, which is not actually a zone of friends at all; it’s a zone full of thwarted, passive-aggressive clingers-on who think the fact that they’re your friend(and not something more) is a terrible crime against them. And that’s just as creepy as this Bloomingdale’s ad.
I’m fairly certain they knew full well that this would create controversy and ran it precisely for that reason – no such thing as bad publicity, right? Assholes.
As a teenage girl, I was “friendzoned” by guys many times, and so were a lot of other girls who were not gifted with precocious attractiveness. Violence was not an option.
Just disgusting. Time for boykotting Bloomingdale?
This “Friend Zone’ crap is truly ridiculous. When I was a teen and in my 20’s I was perpetually the “oh, you’re like a brother to me” zone. While disappointing, I never thought anything other than “bummer” and moved on. This FZ thing is just another example of the culture of outrage we have now. It’s everyone else’s fault I’m upset or I don’t get what I want.
This is one of those things where, even in the best case scenario—that it never, ever crossed the Bloomingdale’s ad people’s minds that spiked drinks implies date rape—it’s still a really bad thing. Like, okay, I’ll stretch my benefit of the doubt to the breaking point to allow that you didn’t MEAN anything by this, but that just shows that the rape epidemic isn’t the tiniest blip on your radar, which is a breathtakingly irresponsible lack of awareness.
I’m with you on that. People have moved beyond cleverness and into controversy in marketing these days. And no one believes in ‘harm’ anymore since freedom of speech has lost its original intended meaning.
Even if it wasn’t about date rape (it is) the idea of making someone drink without their knowledge or consent is scummy. What if they’re trying to quit or they have plans? Is asking really that hard?
This culture is as weird about alcohol as it is about sex.
why does that image suddenly make me think of “Blurred Lines?”
Unsurprisingly, there were a bunch of comments yesterday about how this isn’t a big deal and we shouldn’t be so outraged over it. Other people were claiming that because it says best friend then it’s totes okay! Because best friends never take advantage of one another. And there was this gem:
Every damn time rape culture comes up I lose just a little more faith in humanity.
I thought the same thing! The besuited wanker on the right looks uncannily like creepy Robin Thicke (and seems to have taken his dating advice seriously).
This advert is so amazingly awful that I can’t even believe it – I feel I must be missing some sort of context here, but I can’t imagine a context that would make it better. Maybe their best friend is a dog and they’re trying to get it to take its worming medication.
That add sit about as well to me as an ads for a house alarm who would be a crosshair on the head of a thief with the caption “our alarms let you have the first strike”.
Dude, spiking anyone’s drink is illegal as hell. How can an ads run an openly illegal advice like that ?
I don’t even understand what it’s meant to be advertising, even after seeing the full page – it seems like it’s just a casual suggestion that you might want to do something illegal nestled among the otherwise dull pages.
What the actual fuck?
Reblogged this on The Monster's Ink and commented:
I’ll bet the ad folks at Bloomingdale’s thought they could hide behind the gender-neutral pronouns in “when THEY’RE not looking” rather than “when SHE’S not looking.” As if encouraging date rape would be non-violent even if it could be made non-sexist.
Tricking someone into ingesting a psychoactive substance, isn’t something to make jokes about.
Additionally, some people take medications that are dangerous when mixed with alcohol.
Kootiepatra: Oh, with all this news of Bill Cosby spiking women’s drinks and raping them, trust me. they knew exactly what they were doing and they did it, specifically, to spark outrage. Apparently its the only way people can sell their shitty products now, I guess. Every member of the ad team needs a short, sharp pinch.
This is terrible. Bill Cosby spent the better part of a lifetime spiking women’s drinks and sexually assaulting them; and up until now he’s faced little to no consequences. Why the fuck is Bloomingdale’s using date-rape to market their holiday goods?
I’m looking at this and trying to imagine what the not-so-bad interpretation would be. Best I can think is that they meant “Put some booze in the drink so that your friend loosens up a bit and has a good time”.
Because, y’know, you can’t have a good time at a party surrounded by friends and colleagues unwinding and having a good time unless you’re as drunk as the drunkest person in the room. Which attitude, as a tee-totaller, I’ve encountered from time to time. There seems to be some feeling that I’m cheating or something if I’m not drinking, and some folk get downright resentful about it. Usually just to the extent that they try ever less persuasive arguments until they give up in disgust, but at least once to my knowledge going over the line to put alcohol in my soda when I’m not looking.
It doesn’t help that this is a favoured Hollywood trope: the naughty high-schooler’s spiking the prom fruit punch with vodka or whatever, but it’s okay because everybody has a great time because of it. Because getting a bit merry on alcohol is a good thing, right, so more alcohol must be a better thing, regardless of any issues like consent, or bad livers, or alcoholism, or just not liking the damn stuff.
I’ll bet the ad folks at Bloomingdale’s thought they could hide behind the gender-neutral pronouns in “when THEY’RE not looking” rather than “when SHE’S not looking.”
Yeah well, how do you know that the woman in the ad isn’t laughing because she’s just spiked the drink of the poor, unsuspecting beta orbiter with her copulins so she can spermjack and divorce rape him? CHECKMAET FEMINUTS
I really, really don’t think that’s a coincidence. It was a hit song, chances are Bloomingdale’s wanted to play on the imagery so people who liked Blurred Lines (and didn’t care about the Everest-sized problems with it) take interest. It’s deliberately sparking the subconscious to help sell shit.
Other than that – yeah, they were doing it for the controversy. Dick move, Bloomingdale’s.
I saw all the excuses yesterday that the ad was just like teenagers spiking the punch bowl at a party or dance. But if that’s the case, why is the ad of a male model leering at a female model?
Even if the intention wasn’t to imply date rape, it’s still terrible to spike someone’s drink without their consent. What if someone is pregnant and wasn’t telling people yet? Or on a medication that doesn’t mix with alcohol? It could potentially be dangerous.
They used a male model that looks exactly like Thicke and the coloring of the ad is similar to that of the “Blurred Lines” music video.
With the controversy surrounding Thicke’s song and with the news about Bill Cosby drugging and raping women who trusted him – no, this is no coincidence.
Disgusting.
That ad is creepy as fuck.
(@JoeKlemmer)
Same. The Friend Zone, when I was growing up, was that sense many people have that people are either friends or lovers, not both. It was portrayed as something you wanted to avoid – once assigned to one you weren’t likely to be the other. But it wasn’t some huge injustice and tragedy due to the evil perniciousness of women. It was just a quirk of how we view people socially. (And, over time, it was one I found not to even be true, as there are plenty of people who like the same things in their friends as their lovers.)
But I gave up trying to defend the term based on the old sense years ago – it has been lost to the new definition and frankly isn’t recoverable. I’m happy to let it die as a concept.
Some of the best moments I’ve had was when friends surreptitiously spiked my drinks…BUT let me explain. It was with my complete knowledge and consent and we enjoyed being naughty together on field trips and at funerals, dull meetings and dry weddings. Yay!
This however is sucky. And intentional. No doubt about it.
I would stop shopping there, but I didn’t do it in the first place.
The friend zone thing is bizarre. I was a girl who was often friend zoned. But I wasn’t angry at them, I was disappointed, sometimes bitter, sometimes broken hearted. I will admit to being a bit better that the world didn’t ‘get’ girls like me. But then I became a woman and I get the world a little bit better. I still get ‘friend zoned’ by men, but it’s awesome now. I have great male friends and sometimes go out with just guys and it’s wonderful. And I also don’t fixate on blokes who don’t like me anymore. I’ve learned that attraction is a funny thing and some people will be attracted to me and some won’t and I look for opportunities to find mutual attraction.
(I will admit to passively-aggressively spiking a casserole I served to my vegetarian in-laws with a chicken boullion cube when I ran out of the veggie ones. It wasn’t nice. But they came to no harm.)