So last night while I was I was working on homework, my roommate handed me his computer and said, “Just look at this…”
The video he had pulled up was the advertisement below from Veet, a hair removal product company saying that we need to be “womanly around the clock”.
Because the video is already receiving backlash, I’ll explain it just in case it gets pulled from YouTube. Essentially, a man wakes up to roll over and see a hairy, overweight man instead of his girlfriend. The hairy man says (in a woman’s voice) I’m sorry I am prickly, but I shaved yesterday. The commercial then says to not risk dudeness and instead wax with their product to be a “real woman”.
There are just a lot of things going wrong in this commercial. First of all, it is homophobic. We are getting humor out of men waking up together? It makes two men in bed the butt of the joke. Second, it puts women in a position to fulfill a “real woman” standard. It equates not shaving your legs to not being a woman. Why are we shaming women for something as insignificant as grooming?! Women have the option to do with their body as they wish and if they choose to shave or not to shave, that shouldn’t enhance or negative their femininity.
Veet, I am more of a woman than you can ever portray in your advertisements and if not shaving my legs every day to be unnaturally smooth “around the clock” then I reject your flawed perception of femininity.
ShoutOut! James Madison University 
So glad you wrote about this! My concentration is public relations so all I could think of when I saw this was…who thought this campaign would actually be a good idea? Like…how could they not predict that this was going to (obviously, because it’s freaking ridiculous) recieve backlash?? Also another good point that people were making on twitter/facebook comments was that this commercial enforces homophobia because if a man would wake up in bed with another man it MUST be some sort of mistake/crazy thing. Great post!!
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