CAPE TIMES
Mavericks is in the firing line over the risqu� advertising of its new fragrance line, Alibis. Pictured is one of its billboards in Long Street. Picture: David Ritchie
Mavericks strip club says it plans to take the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to court for ruling that two of the club’s billboards be removed by Friday.
The authority found they promoted gender stereotyping.
“If advertising didn’t objectify women, most female models would be out of work,” Mavericks owner Shane Harrison said on Sunday.
Mavericks is marketing scents as “alibis” for men who lie to their wives about staying out partying and, complainants claim, engaging in extramarital affairs. The fragrances are “My Car Broke Down”, “We Were Out Sailing”, and “I Was Working Late”.
The ASA received complaints that the ads portrayed pornographic imagery in public, demeaned and objectified women, and contained wording that encouraged cheating.
Harrison said he was seeking legal advice and planned to sue the ASA. He said other fragrances and clothing campaigns were more promiscuous than Mavericks’s ads, and Mavericks was being unfairly targeted.
“We are a legal business. Why shouldn’t we be able to advertise?”
The billboards, near a children’s park on Kloof Nek Road and the N1, advertise Mavericks’s “Alibi” fragrances and feature scantily clad women.
Responding to the charge that the ads promoted adultery, Harrison said: “They are tongue-in-cheek, and they are not meant to hint at cheating, just staying out late.”
Mavericks argued that the aim of the billboard was to promote its fragrances, not its strip services. It also offered to hire an artist to paint clothes over the models in their ads.
The ruling coincides with the start of Cape Town’s 16 Days of Activism of No Violence Against Women and Children Campaign.
The director of the Family Policy Institute, Errol Naidoo, said there was a relationship between ads that objectified women and domestic violence.
“Men are raised by the media on a steady diet of sexuality, making it okay to use women as sexual objects. Mavericks’s ads advocate adultery, which leads to divorce, the breakdown of the family, and then the social ills that plague our society: domestic abuse and drug use.”
Harrison said the ads could not be linked to domestic abuse, and trying to do this was stretching the truth.
Condom maker Durex has also come under fire, for its Twitter account’s tweet: “Why did God give men penises? So they’d have at least one way to shut a woman up.”
Durex has apologised. – Cape Times
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Mavericks to fight back over sexy billboards