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Red Shoe Metro Diary

By David Topping

2007_11_2FioritoLegs.jpg
The Toronto Star. July 18, 2007. Joe Fiorito column:

The other day I noticed a Red Rocket, defaced from stem to stern with a depiction of a bottle of vodka and the comely legs of a party girl whose dress was hiked up around her thighs.
Let me count the ways this is wrong. But first, my bona fides.
I grew up during the sexual revolution. I also learned a variety of useful lessons about the objectification of women, with the help of some charming feminists.
The use of flesh to sell booze is pimping….So why is the people’s car decorated with the spread legs of a party girl and a bottle of booze? What might the lesson be? How about this: You can get a girl to part her thighs with a few drinks.
That is more or less what Mr. Giambrone and the TTC are telling the young girl who boards that streetcar on her way to school. It is what they shove in the faces of all the women who work in the glass-and-steel towers downtown. And it is the message they send to the working mothers and fathers of daughters.

Of course, the leggy ad here isn’t for vodka but rather “laser hair removal.” Charming.
Photo of the not-quite-legal (but hopefully soon-to-be-gone [PDF]) billboard at 4155 Yonge Street, just north of York Mills, taken by Jonathan Goldsbie.

Comments

  • Kevin Bracken

    Haha! I love that circumstance is showing Mister Prude who’s boss. I viewed the ad he wrote about not as objectifying, but sex-positive.
    And, as you mentioned before, you own the exclusive rights to the word “pimp”.

  • Gloria

    I dunno about sex-positive. That’s a pretty easy label to apply to anything without defining criteria. What’s the line between objectifying and sex-positive? I usually find things sex-positive when there’s an indication that both (or more) partners are having fun on an equal, consensual level. Was there anything in the ad that shows it’s about women’s pleasure too, and not just the male viewer’s pleasure? I don’t remember too much about those ads.

  • antiboy

    I hardly see how an almost naked girl with a bottle of booze is “sex-positive”.
    We all know you love to party and stuff… you’ve made that clear in just about every comment that you make here and on spacing. And just because Fiorito calls her a “party girl”, I’m sure, set off your alarm bells but that doesn’t mean that ads like this are anything remotely “positive”. Besides the point, I don’t think alcohol ads have any place being splashed all over the TTC (I mean, those Amarulla ones are just ridiculous).
    I also fail to see how the ad displayed in the main picture is ironic in any way or taught him any “lesson”. It’s not like Fiorito goes around deciding what ads his face will accompany.