Oils aint oils...

A Complaint about a television advertisement that showed an oil bottle leering a a woman in a bikini:

Monday 18 February 2008

Marketing Director
Castrol Australia Pty Limited
132 McCredie Road
Guildford NSW 2161

RE: Castrol Magnatec television commercial featuring Adam Gilchrist

Dear Sir/Madam

I wish to make a complaint about the currently aired advertisement for Castrol Magnatec engine oil featuring Australian international cricketer of renown, Adam Gilchrist. Therefore, I am writing both to you and the Advertising Standards Bureau explaining why this advertisement is inappropriate in its current form and requesting its correction before future airings.

Whilst I have no objection to athletes endorsing products unrelated to their sporting endeavours and their fields of expertise, I do find it offensive when such endorsements feature behaviour that might constitute sexual harassment and reinforce sexist stereotypes.

The objectionable sequence involves an animated oil bottle, finding itself bounced from the tray of Mr Gilchrist's utility, flying through several domestic back yards in order to intercept its no doubt bereft owner further in his journey. Ostensibly, this sequence is mildly amusing as such chase sequences involving pursuers racing through houses and yards to head their quarry off at the pass are a popular culture cliché. However, it is perplexing and disappointing to find the lost and anxious oil bottle pausing in its flight to ... leer ... at two young women in bathing costumes before resuming its journey.

If any human protagonists were to imitate this behaviour, they would be liable to complaints of sexual harassment, an offence under the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act 1984 and the analogous state anti-discrimination legislation. The subjects of such complaints can be called before the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and face civil prosecution in the Federal Magistrate’s Court.

Section 28A of that Act declares sexual harassment as having occurred if:
(a) [a] person makes an unwelcome sexual advance, or an unwelcome request for sexual favours, to the person harassed; or

(b) engages in other unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature in relation to the person harassed;

in circumstances in which a reasonable person, having regard to all the circumstances, would have anticipated that the person harassed would be offended, humiliated or intimidated.

As a ‘reasonable person’, I would consider invading a young woman’s privacy by leaping over a her back fence and, finding her and her associate clad only in their bathing costumes, leering at them before making a hasty escape to be unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature. Further, it is ‘reasonable’ to anticipate the young women in question would be offended, humiliated or intimidated by such behaviour.

Not only is it regrettable for an advertisement for engine oil to feature sexual harassment, it is also disappointing for utility drivers and male athletes to be depicted, by the proxy of their oil bottles’ behaviour, as unreformed misogynists.

Professional male athletes of all sporting codes are under intense media scrutiny and reports of their sexual misdemeanours have frequently wrecked their careers and personal lives in addition to the harm this conduct causes the female recipients of their unwelcome advances. In this context, advertisements like yours for Castrol Magnatec oil and many others produced by the motoring industry send confusing messages by apparently endorsing the oafish blokey behaviour which gets so many young men into so much trouble.

If your oil is as good as you claim, if it truly contains “intelligent molecules” that “protect your engine from the moment you turn the key”, you should not need to associate your product with the sexual desires of your most ignorant and unrefined customers.

I therefore request that you withdraw this commercial in its current form and refrain from airing it until the offensive scene in the chase sequence is edited from it.

Yours sincerely

etc.


The response of the advertising complaints board in a future post.