Bruised Little Girls Curse In New FCKH8 Ad For Domestic Violence Awareness Tank Top

Article here. Excerpt:

'The "potty-mouth princesses" are back, this time with bruises.

For-profit t-shirt company FCKH8 has released a new shock-value video of little girls cursing to raise awareness about domestic violence -- and sell a t-shirt.

This video is promoting a new FCKH8 tank that reads "Break the Silence on Domestic Violence." According to FCKH8, 100 percent of the profit from these tanks (estimated at $9 per $15 tank) will go "directly to charities working to stop domestic violence in communities across the nation."

As Isha Aran at Jezebel pointed out, the ad is incredibly unsettling -- but so obviously intended to shock.

"The ad acknowledges how graphic it is, only to unload the discomfort it generates on the viewer -- it creates a zero-sum game of guilt where there isn't one," Aran wrote. "Yes, I have a problem with the fake fucked-up face, but that doesn't mean I don't have a problem with domestic violence, and it seems dangerous to conflate the two."'

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Comments

I submitted a comment to the article cited in the item at the Jezebel site reachable via the hyperlinked Aran wrote text. It's awaiting mod approval; in case it doesn't get posted, here it is for those who care:

Isha, why are you glad these little girls are angry and saying bad words? I'm not, even if it's in the name if speaking out vs. DV. Anger from kids or adults is natural when they feel hurt/offended/needing to defend themselves, and even when they feel grief (anger often masks grief since anger is used to defend weak/vulnerable parts of the self; grief makes ppl feel weak, and thus vulnerable, so to protect it, anger is often used by the psyche). But anger and profanity, if to be considered unaffected or manipulative, must come from a place of sincerity. Have any of these girls been DV victims due to abusive bfs/gfs/parents? Are their bruises real? (As you said, you didn't like that part of it, either.) Finally, will these sales stunts (putting it mildly) result in actual DV reduction or just add to the T-shirt makers' coffers and the girls' parents' bank accts.? Is not teaching children it's OK to curse in public like they are doing not just bad parenting, but when done for commercial reasons, child exploitation bordering on child abuse?

These "potty-mouthed princesses" ads are no example to anyone, adult or child, around how to call attention to anything. And a further consequence is for ppl to be inclined to minimize the supposed topic being addressed in favor of discussing the means being used to communicate concerns around it. Perhaps if ppl interpret this approach as being a mere stunt to sell shirts, they may also unconsciously adjudge the cause to be not-so-important; after all, if it were, it wouldn't be treated in such a "radio shock-jock" fashion.

PETA runs into this with their naked model/movie star campaigns denouncing animal fur in clothing. Ppl are so distracted from the point of the campaign by the chosen means that it doesn't have the desired effect of reducing fur sales and only encourages ppl to dismiss/minimize the animal rights cause that PETA is trying to support.

Nope, nothing redemptive for the DV cause in this approach, sadly. If they had both little girls and boys look into the camera and say something like "All victims of DV, female and male, child and adult, were like us once, and sometimes still are: someone's child. And for victims our age, typically it's one or both of our own parents. What is so bad that we can do to deserve being beaten, whipped, locked away for days? What as children or adults can we do to be treated like a big, inanimate, malfunctioning machine: yelled at, kicked, hit, threatened, called cruel names? We're people, not objects, whether we're children or adults. No one deserves to be abused, especially not by those who say they love them. If you're being abused, get help."

If I saw something like that, I'd buy the T-shirt from such a company airing such an ad. The one that made these "potty-mouthed princess" ads; well, I am skeptical of both their sincerity and reliability around their anti-DV organization donation promises.

And with that, happy T-giving.

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Abusing little girls to make a statement against domestic violence is, well, counter intuitive. Or better yet, nonsensical. Or just plain BS.

Definitive proof that feminists are more concerned about the safety of women than the safety of children. Even if this company is not, strictly speaking, a feminist organization, it clearly reflects feminist values. Only in a feminist society would this be considered an acceptable form of advertising.

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