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Ms. Sue Hearn 21 April 2002 Dear Ms. Hearn, Thank you for taking the time to review my letter and comments. Unfortunately I am unsatisfied as your customer and stand by my choice to boycott your products for life and to raise awareness with the public. On Monday I will be sending out a petition in the hopes that other students in my classes will realize how irresponsible your company is-that with a bottle of vodka you are selling dangerous messages, concepts, and lifestyles. In the end it will be their choice to boycott but I am sure they will do so. Your advertisements are quite blatant and degrading. Your response to my latest letter brought back memories from two years ago-when I received an email from you. Your latest response was practically verbatim, which tells me that your company does not plan to be responsible in the near future. You simply printed out another fancy letter with the exact same wording. I am not surprised. Your company still chooses to rationalize, deny, trivialize (take your pick of terms) the fact that your advertisements sell more than alcohol. You ignore the fact that your advertisements are dangerous, simply calling them "art." Well, you went on and on about it in paragraphs two and four of my letter. You defend yourselves by the thought that you are exempt from blame as your artistic expressions are "socially acceptable." I must laugh at the fact that you have a multicultural female/male team. Just because your team is made up of different skin colors (and perhaps different religions and sexual orientationsä) and have male and female reproductive organs does not mean that they believe in equality or feminism or pacifism. You have only sold the image of sex and objectification. Would you hire anyone who would contradict that? Doubtful. You may not intend to offend anyone! You have offended me and you have not apologized. There is not a direct correlation between violence in media and violence against women in the "real world" but you sell messages consistent with the way women are treated in this society. It offends me that as a woman, you do not understand how I feel. I will tell you that you know exactly what you are doing. Not many people believe advertising effects them but I know it does. I ask that you remove all of the advertisements featuring the image in question. I guess you cannot resort to the old picture of the Skyy Vodka bottle. It was a safe image and an honest one at that. Please look for the letter (and ad in question) I wrote to you in March 2000 at About-Face.org. Hopefully through websites and future presentations in psychology and women's studies classes, you will hear from even more people who feel the way I do. Jennifer Reger
P.S. A man rapes a woman every 5 minutes. 1 in 3 women will experience sexual assault in her lifetime. 1,500 women in this country are murdered every year by people who vowed to love them. Every 15 seconds a woman is battered. ~The above statistics represent crimes in the good old US of A.~Advertising is a form of education. The mass media (news, music videos, advertisements, radio and TV commercials, billboards, the internet, clothing...) influence consumers. "If you buy this product (in this case your alcohol) you will get the girl to "open up." The consumer never sees an ad contradicting your messages of sex and alcohol. You say you value freedom of choice. Women who are raped by men who use alcohol as a weapon (and countless ads that reinforce this sex norm of men forcing themselves on women) do not always have a choice to get up and leave, despite saying "no" and often times trying to fight them off. 90% of all campus RAPES occur when ALCOHOL has been used. A picture is worth a thousand words-you do not have to have a slogan on your ad-it speaks for itself. It's a dangerous visual message-one of objectification! (www.factsontap.org) Pretend for a moment that your logo was not on the bottle for the ad in question. What is the content/context of your message without the alcohol? You and I both have the right and freedom of choice to "express" ourselves (however you only do it for monetary gain and that monetary gain relies on consumers "buying" into your messages-If you drink our vodka you'll get the girl!-this is just my opinion although I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks that). I also have the right to live in a society that doesn't reinforce the OBJECTIFICATION of women! I will not support you or anyone who does. Your letter never really stated your advertising intent. It is to make money (at any costs), right? Despite your saying so, you pranced around the actual definition of your intent.
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