EDITORIAL: We must resist the sexual objectification of men too
Ad that plays on age-old racist trope that black men are brutish, rampant sexual beings is nonsensical and irrelevant
For a body regulating the advertising industry, it is extraordinary that the Advertising Regulatory Board has given its seal of approval to the practice of racially and sexually objectifying black men. A Netflorist radio advert referred to a woman whose male partner was half-English and half-Zulu, that the Zulu half was "below the belt" and that he might have a thing for Top Deck — a chocolate bar that is white at the top and dark at the bottom. The ad played on the age-old racist trope that black men are brutish, rampant sexual beings, which in different manifestations suggests they are at best overly (animal rather than human) well-endowed dynamos between the sheets and at worst are unable to control their sexual urges, are sexually violent and are rapists. In response to a listener’s complaint that the ad "fetishised" black male genitalia, a majority of the regulatory board ruled that the use of a humorous SA stereotype did not amount to an unacceptable "fetishising" and that as ...
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