My Favorite Comment

I am on vacation and may not be posting for a while.

My post on Monday (called I Am Offended) about web bullying and free speech received a lot of interesting comments. In addition to the "official" comments posted on the blog, I also received several emails about it. My favorite was one I received this morning:

I'm 87 years old. I used to be art director for some small agencies, but became disgusted by the inbuilt fear I saw all about me. Please continue to anger the assholes who are afraid of differences of opinion.  - Sam Salant

I Am Offended

Last week I wrote a post entitled Invasion of the Talking Vaginas. It was about a campaign for Summer's Eve (what an awful name) in which human hands represented talking vaginas.

I ended the post with this comment: I don't hate this campaign because it's offensive. I hate it because it's done so witlessly.

That same day, an article appeared in The New York Times about the California Milk Processor Board having pulled a campaign for milk that poked fun at women with PMS. This campaign offended great swaths of people. It created a huge uproar. It was pulled and the usual mea culpas were issued.

I loved the campaign.  I didn't love the campaign because it was inoffensive. I loved it because it was artfully done .

In fact, while the the campaign was assuredly sexist, it was way funnier and more intelligently conceived than the dreadful spoof of it which appeared in Funny or Die.

I am afraid that we are in a slow but inexorable slide toward the erosion of free speech. To a significant degree, this erosion is due to the erroneous belief that people have a right to be free of offense.

In fact, our constitution guarantees exactly the opposite. It guarantees us the right to offend whomever the hell we want whenever the hell we want to. That's what free speech means.

Our courts have held that as a general principle commercial speech enjoys similar protections as individual speech. This means that businesses and advertisers have the same right to offend that individuals do.

I happen to hold very liberal views about individual liberties, including free speech. But there is a branch of "liberalism" these days that has become very intolerant. These people are humorless scolds who are very easily offended and demand instant redress for their injured sensitivities.

There is also a branch of conservatism that thinks we need to be protected from "dangerous" ideas. Well, I appreciate your concern, but if it's all the same to you, I'd like to draw my own conclusions.

The tricky part is this. Government is prohibited from censoring what we can say. But well-meaning citizens, believing they are protecting society from dangerous, offensive, or prejudicial ideas, have substantial power to censor by applying economic pressure.

In the internet age, it has become much easier to band together to exert pressure for the purpose of silencing ideas we don't like. And we have every right to do so. But before we exercise this right we need to think seriously about the implications.

I don't believe our sensitivities are so profound that they trump someone else's right to offend us. I don't believe we want to allow the limits of commercial discourse to be determined by the loudest bullies on the web.

Do ethnic, racial and sexual stereotypes cause offense? Absolutely.

Should we act to silence them? Absolutely not.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I am very curious about the reaction of readers. If you have an opinion either way, please leave a comment.

Invasion Of The Talking Vaginas

There is an alarmingly awful series of commercial videos currently on YouTube for Summer's Eve.

For reasons of propriety I am not going to embed them in this post, but here are some links: Link #1, Link #2, Link #3.

The premise of this campaign is that your vagina (portrayed by a hand) is talking to you. Not being the proud owner of a vagina, it's hard for me to comment on the effect this campaign might have on someone who does have one. But from the verbal reaction I am getting from women, I don't think this campaign is making Summer's Eve any friends.

Here's the thing about this campaign. I'm sure the Summer's Eve people were not naive about the effect it would have. I am sure they understood that there was a significant portion of the population who would be offended by these videos, but they were willing to take the chance to get some attention.

While I think the decision was misguided, I can see how it might have paid off. It might have paid off if the campaign was funny; if it wasn't so appallingly executed; if it wasn't so poorly written and performed.

Back when I was a creative director I used to drive the people in my creative department crazy with the following criticism of their storyboards: This is not  a spot. It's an idea. Now you need to make it into a spot.

What happened in this Summer's Eve travesty is that someone had an idea. The idea was that a "hand puppet" could substitute for a vagina and a vagina could talk. It's a pretty damn gross idea, but it's an idea.

In the hands of someone who could write, this idea might actually have been turned into something interesting. In the hands of the dullards who wrote and produced it, it is awful.

Regardless of what they did with it, Summer's Eve were going to offend some people. That's fine. The problem with this thing is, even the people who were not automatically going to be offended will be horrified because the writing and voice over performances are so astonishingly dumb.

Comedy is a funny thing. It's easy to be funny over lunch. It's very hard to be funny standing up in front of hundreds of people. It's the same in advertising. It's easy to have a funny idea. It's very hard to make a funny spot.

The Summer's Eve campaign had a very slight chance to be successful. It might have been successful if it was funny. It is stunningly unfunny, and as a result it is a disaster.

I don't hate this campaign because it's offensive. I hate it because it's done so witlessly.


Thanks to Sharon Krinsky for calling this campaign to my attention