Re the knife block:
Jeez, there’s a plethora of gender-reversed equivilents to this product. It took me about two seconds to find this, for example: http://www.gobaz.com/prodpage.asp?ProdID=7032 Come to think of it, the advertisment that this article criticises is another equivilent. All treat violence directed at one gender by another as a joke, or a way to sell a product. And if you’re looking for an ally, Melinda’s your lady. This is exactly the same issue that concerns her. Just reverse the gender.

Meanwhile, it’s exactly the kind of issue that irritates this lady. Who cares? Both the voodoo doll and the knife block are tacky novelty gifts. They’re completely harmless. They’re jokes — albeit not my style, I’m more the book of New Yorker cartoons type, and my birthday’s in September — which play on the idea that each sex gets frustrated with the other that we want to stab them. As the hilarious saying goes, “Women! Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em!”No one is *actually* going to think any differently about the opposite sex because they get a novelty gift. No one is *actually* going to stab anyone. Just like no one is going to look at this ad and *actually* going to stuff someone in a boot.

It doesn’t matter which gender you are, if you want to walk around this green earth feeling offended and abused and oppressed by inconsequentialities, then the earth will provide and you will succeed. If men want to make the knife block an issue or MTR wants to make the advertisement an issue, then go for it, but don’t kid yourselves that you’re doing your gender any favours. Because most of us care about important things. Besides, so much of culture disparages one sex or another that it ends up in pointless your-advertisement-is-more-sexist-than-mine competitiveness.

Find something real to fight for, I reckon.

Col: “Hey my daughter has one of the chrome ones, its cool.”
Heh heh heh.

Elka,
a. Why do you think she's dead?
b. No one is trying to silence anyone. We're debating it.

Strange bedfellows!

And most definitely 'self-righteous prats'!

Debate it is, Vanilla, and as such it's 'real' to me.

You have some difficulty in accepting an alternative point of view don't you?
Is that why you resort to ridicule?

Good for you Elka!

Vanilla,
I thought the knife block in the shape of a man was funny for about 0.75 seconds, and then I thought it was feminist.

Ginx,
The term 'self-righteous prats' is abuse.

You must be aiming to win the most abusive feminist award on OLO. There is quite a lot of competition.

Elka, " It was around 40 *women* who were raped on bike tracks in Brisbane last year."

Are you sure of that? There were a lot of women (and girls) sexually assaulted in one way or another but my impression is that the vast majority were subjected to groping and or unwanted exposure rather than rape. I could be wrong. Still a potentially devistating experience with the risk of long term impacts on sense of personal safety.

I posted a link on the Fair Go thread to ABS stats on violence.
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/4B2A703C9CB10C90CA25732C00207D2C?opendocument

It includes the summary info

"In the 12 months prior to 2005, 46,700 (0.6%) men and 126,100 (1.6%) women had experienced sexual violence. Most of these men and women were sexually assaulted (0.6% of all men and 1.3% of all women)."

If those figures are correct men experience sexual assault at almost half the rate that women do.

It also includes the following

"The majority (87% or 36,800) of men who had been sexually assaulted said that the perpetrator was female. Almost all (99% or 101,000) women who were sexually assaulted, reported that the perpetrator was male."

What that does not tell us is the severity of the attack or the long term impacts.

The issue is not as cut and dried as some would have us believe although men do commit the vast majority of sexual assaults and women are by far the majority of victims.

R0bert

Vanilla, though an end-of-the-line baby boomer I loved Twin Peaks. Love Wild at Heart as well. Have you ever seen Blue Velvet?

Aside from that, this ad is not an ad for an opera, but for shoes. I clearly said that it disturbed me. Not that it offends me or abuses me. But that it is disturbing. There is nothing wrong per se with being disturbed because of a violent depiction when it is for telling a particular story, making a point. As in a movie, opera, painting or photography. Not for selling an object, except maybe if it is in context. Condoms vs the ravages of STD's eg.

To use something as powerful and moving as violence so gratuitously just desensitized us. The paintings you described with such eloquence would loose their power. Violence shocks, but those old glorious art works and operas are fading because they're looking tamer by the day. We're losing sight of the human drama.

Artists making art for commercial reasons vs government funded. This is a red herring. It is immaterial to the debate on whether an ad like this is acceptable.

Man with the knifes, I've seen it and wouldn't want it in my kitchen. Maybe because I've seen enough violence and the effects of violence on men, women and children not to be able to see the funny side of it. Today, again we had an admission to our hospital Emergency Dep of a woman with the effects of sustained physical violence perpetrated on her by her male partner. So, violence just doesn't do it for me as light entertainment.

I've discussed with my tail end genX ers how violence is far more acceptable than nudity or sex. Yet the funny side of sex is something the majority of us could relate to

Yvonne: Yes, a David Lynch fan, absolutely.

“This ad is not an ad for an operal, but for shoes…” & etc
I basically agree with everything you say. The Loula ad isnt’ great art or anything. (Though I don’t hate it as much as everyone else.) But what can we do? We can’t ban stuff just because we think it’s in poor taste. We can’t tell Quentin Tarantino that he can’t make Kill Bill because it desensitises us to the real horror in the Rape of Lucretia. (And because it wasn’t as good as his early work.) As for the knives, personally I’d be happy to never own any product that one could conceivably place the word “novelty” in front of. But I wouldn’t feel comfortable actually banning them.

Elke and those who want to ban the ad,
This is going to seem like a dumb question, but I still don’t really know *why* you want it banned. Because people with copy the behaviour? Because men will believe that the ad wouldn’t exist if violence wasn’t acceptable? How do you think it affects men? Women? Will women see it and think that’s all they deserve? Or do you think we should ban it because it contributes a general culture that accepts violence? Or trivialises it? In which case, must we ban all ads that depict violence? Or only those which treat it without requisite seriousness?

How, specifically, does “glamourising” violence affect the statistics? Even re-reading the Tankards article, I realise I still don’t understand exactly how people believe this ad works to contribute to, say, the horror on Brisbane bike paths.

Another question we haven’t touched is the fact that this ad would be disturbing if you had a family member die in this way. To my mind, we should not use as a critierion in censorship. Terrible things happen all the time — surely if we sought to remove all suggestion of things that might offend someone because they’ve had a similar experience, we’d have to shut down culture.