Against Sexist Advertising
You see Chio Chips in German supermarkets and there’s this moment where you realize someone in a marketing meeting actually signed off on flavors split by gender, explicitly designed so men and women would buy different ones. It’s stupid enough to be funny, except it’s not the exception—it’s the rule. Axe ads, H&M lingerie billboards, surprise eggs for boys and girls like their DNA requires different plastic toys. The whole advertising landscape is built on the idea that women should be decorative and available, and men should want what they can’t have while also being soldiers or whatever.
Stevie Schmiedel from Pinkstinks has been calling this out for a while. She organized a demonstration in Berlin against sexist advertising, and her point is simple: we see about five thousand ads a day, and the sexist ones stick because they’re the loudest. A woman in lingerie looks at you like she’s asking you something. A man in lingerie looks at you like he’s doing you a favor. The difference matters, especially because kids absorb this without any irony shield—they don’t get that it’s meant to be clever or post-ironic. A kid just sees a headless woman on a billboard and internalizes that the head part is optional.
The petition they organized mentioned something that’s hard to unsee once you think about it: one in five kids in Germany shows signs of an eating disorder. You can draw a direct line from that to advertising that reduces people to whether they’re fuckable, to whether their body matches some photoshopped fantasy. And the advertising industry keeps pushing irony as a defense. Kids don’t know irony. Neither does anyone’s unconscious.
Sookee, the rapper who was involved, talks about something else that connects here—how capitalism and patriarchy teach you to compete instead of cooperate. If there’s a sexually liberated woman, you can point at her and call her a slut, which makes you seem virtuous by comparison. If there’s a feminist woman, you can call her a shrew, which makes you seem reasonable. It’s comfortable, staying in the lane you’re handed. Hip-hop’s been through the same cycle—a decade of shock value and misogyny normalized as art, and slowly, incrementally, people getting tired of it. From the US you get out gay rappers in the playlists now. From the UK you get women MCs actually making it into rotation. It’s visibility that shifts things.
The weird part is knowing all this and still moving through a world built on these assumptions. You see the advertising, you know how it works, you can trace the psychological mechanics and the profit motive underneath it, and it still lands. The system wants you to feel like you’re not enough—too weak, not enough hair, wrong shape, not the right product away from being acceptable. It’s so routine that challenging it reads as uptight or humorless, and conforming to it reads as just being normal. The demonstration wanted to make it public, to ask out loud whether this is actually okay, whether these are stories we want to keep telling ourselves about what men and women are supposed to be. I don’t know if it changed anything. But at least someone said it out loud.