Britain Brings the Hammer Down on Traditional Genders

[DBTrek]

An article on how the ASA will be censoring any advertisement that might reinforce "stereotypical gender roles’ that might ‘cause harm’ and ‘reinforce assumptions that adversely limit how people see themselves and how others see them’."
For real.
In a Western, first world nation.

Why we should oppose the ASA’s gender jihad

The most shocking thing about the Advertising Standards Authority’s announcement that it will censor ‘gender-stereotypical’ images in ads is that there has been so little shock in response to it. Censorship once stirred up passion and opposition. People bristled at being told what they could see or hear. Not this time. The ASA, which regulates the content of ads in UK newspapers, on TV and radio and online, bullishly declared yesterday that it will take a ‘tougher line’ on ‘ads that feature stereotypical gender roles’ and ensure they are expunged from public life. And there was barely a flicker of fuss. It is terrifying how normalised censorship has become.

What the ASA is proposing should alarm everyone who believes in the free exchange of ideas and information. It is effectively instituting a vast, sinister programme of social engineering via the control of the images we see. In a report published yesterday, it boasted about its longstanding clampdown on ads that contain sexualised imagery — Mary Whitehouse lives! — and said it will now go further down the road of policing gender imagery.

It will wage a gender jihad against any ad that shows ‘stereotypical gender roles’ that might ‘cause harm’ and ‘reinforce assumptions that adversely limit how people see themselves and how others see them’. For example, if an ad shows a woman having ‘sole responsibility’ for cleaning up a family’s mess or a man ‘trying and failing to undertake simple parental or household tasks’, it will be declared verboten and wiped out. In order to shape society’s ‘assumptions’ — that is, how the masses think about gender — the ASA has taken it upon itself to exterminate certain images. It will seek to reshape the throng’s mind through dictating what pictures and ideas we can see in ads. As I say, social engineering.

The ASA’s embrace of gender censorship has already led it to make some deeply paternalistic decisions. In March this year it banned an advert for Black Cow, a brand of vodka, because it showed a couple walking through a field, ‘flirtatiously’, and then there was a cut-away to a depression in the grass. And in the ASA’s hysterically prudish words, viewers were ‘likely to understand from the combination of the couple’s body language [and] the depression in the grass… that they had just had sex’. Fetch my smelling salts! When you’re extinguishing an image of a depression in a field of grass then you’ve truly entered the realm of the puritan. You’re seeking to save the nation from any hint — and it really was just a hint — that there is fun in drink and sex. . . .<-(See that fourth period, grammar nazis)

What exactly is Britain trying to protect people from with this?


EDIT: Story link - http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/ar ... Xe1qYjyuM9

[Ex-California]

This is fascism.

[heydaralon]

Glad I don't live there. Britain's worst fear is that some acid throwing Imam disapproves of a bus ad's pronoun usage.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Well, the depression-in-grass ad would never have made it past our own corporate censors in America. We can't show anything other than a tickle fight with feet in the air, lest the children all start fucking each other.

[ssu]

Why do I have the feeling that this will focus on good-looking women (likely scantily clothed ones) and not on British Army enlisting ads?


Because doesn't the above be about traditional gender roles?

[Montegriffo]

Nice try DB but I'm not biting. That's an appalling bit of sensational journalism. What we call an empty falafel of a story.
Back under the bridge....

[TheReal_ND]

An island of cucks.

[Montegriffo]

Islands.

THE ISLANDS of all sorts and sizes are, in the true sense of the word, innumerable. But considering only those which are 0.2 hectares (half an acre) or more in area and are islands at all states of the tide, the British Isles total about 4,400; of these about 210 are inhabited. An additional 6,100 are islands at high tide, consequently not all at the same time. The foregoing figures include respectively about 850, 70 and 1,000 which are in the Republic of Ireland.

[Kazmyr]

Well, the depression-in-grass ad would never have made it past our own corporate censors in America. We can't show anything other than a tickle fight with feet in the air, lest the children all start fucking each other.

You must live in a different America than everyone else does.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Well, the depression-in-grass ad would never have made it past our own corporate censors in America. We can't show anything other than a tickle fight with feet in the air, lest the children all start fucking each other.

You must live in a different America than everyone else does.

We can do a stripper dancing in commercials, or all manner of sexy prowling, but nothing that shows evidence of sex or nudity.