Disembodied lady parts! Oppo ad shows sexism lives on

Good grief, Charlene Brown.

So this smartphone company comes up with a cool, wonderful idea: a phone with a touchscreen on the back and the front. Gee whiz! We’re into that.

Then they go and smash our love of innovation with an advertisement so blatantly ass-backward that the VentureBeat newsroom once again echoes with the cry, “What were they thinking?”

Here’s the ad, showing a woman’s nude back with the copy “Don’t just touch the front, the back is also interesting…”:

Lovely, isn’t it? More disembodied lady (or very shapely man) parts, conveniently stripped (pun intended) of face, personality, etc. And then there’s the sexual innuendo of the ad copy.

Without question, they could have done better. They could have been clever instead of offensive and cheap.

But since we all know women don’t buy smartphones, who cares? Let the sexist free-for-all continue!

We’ve ranted about this kind of thing before. Last time I wrote about tech ad discrimination, commenters chimed in with statements such as:

Crazy liberal thinking is invading everything these days in the valley. Absence of women equals discrimination against women, so the argument goes. This article is yet another attempt to paint the brush of discrimination.

Le sigh.

As a crazy liberal ball-busting hairy-legged man-hating feminazi, I admit that I’m a bit oversensitive to sexism in media. But as a person who finds the ladies extremely attractive and knows when to “suck it up,” I can tell you that I still find this ad unnerving and indicative that we don’t have enough strong women in tech or in advertising who are willing to take a stand against pervasive patriarchy.

If you feel like we feel, please let Oppo know this kind of low-brow imagery is offensive and that the tech community demands better. You can use the company’s online contact form or holler at them on Twitter or Facebook.

I hope that by the time I retire, I won’t have to write this kind of crap anymore.

via GigaOm