FYI, my email to ALAC today. I also sent an email to National Radio expressing disappointment that in its interviews about all kinds of aspects of these ads, nothing was said about their glaring sexism.

Dear ALAC,

I am not bothered by the shocking nature of your latest television advertisements, and I commend your aims. However, I am deeply concerned about the anti-male sexism your advertisements are spreading.

In the latest series of ads, the two featuring males as leading characters both involve harm being done by the men to others, while the one featuring a woman involves her putting herself into a vulnerable position and then being violently sexually assaulted by a male. My recollection of your previous series of tv ads was that they showed males embarrassing and letting down other people, while the one featuring a woman only showed her feeling embarrassed about her own drinking. The underlying misinformation throughout your advertisements is that only men do harm to others and women are victims.

Such gender bias in your advertisements does not fairly reflect reality. Gerard Vaughan when interviewed on Radio NZ yesterday stated that the advertisements seek to hold up a mirror to NZers to show them what is happening on a day-by-day basis. But drunk women often harm others through violence, abuse, neglect, clumsiness and impaired driving, yet your ads do not reflect this at all, instead implying that only men when drunk might harm others. Another frequent harm that drunk women bring about is that they consent to sex, or more often they actively pursue and initiate sex that they then later regret or fail to remember important details about, whereupon they accuse the man of rape or they allege (almost always falsely) that their drink was spiked by some drug. Such terrible accusations ruin men’s lives regardless of any subsequent acquittal in Court.

I guess that your underlying anti-male messages were not intentional but simply reflect the PC (politically conformist) fashion of our era and the extent to which feminist propaganda has captured our belief system. I request that your agency avoid the gender bias in all future campaigns.

Hans Laven
Tauranga