To persuade Mexican men not to illegally consume turtles’ eggs which they believe to be aphrodisiacs, the California-based group Wildcoast has launched an ad campaign featuring models with bulging breasts with the headline, “My man does not need turtle eggs because he knows they don’t make him more potent.” Unfortunately, few women are as hot as those found in models and, correctly or incorrectly, some men may feel the need for a little boost with sexual arousal.
As is always the case with these campaigns, anti-women-as-sex-objects group are speaking out against the campaign. The National Women’s Institute, while behind the effort to end consumption of turtle eggs, feels the campaign portrays women as sex objects. But, stepping back for a moment and looking at this from a basic, instinctual perspective, women, for most men, are just that: sex objects. Now we don’t mean that in a bad way and before the hate mail rolls in, putting aside the whole notion of human’s higher intellectual yearnings, men are innately programmed to be sexually attracted to women. There’s no changing that.
This ad (see another here), although created with an unrealistically hot model, is simply reinforcing the natural sexual desire a man has for a woman (yea, yea, there’s the whole homosexual thing but that’s another subject) and, by association, saying aphrodisiacs are unnecessary. The ad is using basic human emotion to appeal to men’s basic human needs to deliver an important endangered species message. Does anyone really think an ad with a bunch of dead turtle on a beach would be more attention-getting?
