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Due to an extremely high amount of traffic "Hit the Bitch" has been
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Huffington
Post
| Nicholas Sabloff
11-18-09
The intentions behind it may have
been noble, but a Danish public service announcement about violence against
women called "Hit The Bitch" has people asking just what those behind
it were thinking.
Made by a Danish advocacy group
as a web campaign (www.hitthebitch.dk), the site allows you to
use your computer's mouse to move a gigantic hand so that it repeatedly strikes
a female model in the face. The site then rates each hit on a scale beginning
at "100% pussy" and ending at "100% gangsta." As you hit
the woman her face begins to show bruises, and once enough blows are struck and
the user reaches "100% gangsta," the woman falls down and the phrase
"100% IDIOT!" appears on the screen. It then shows her sobbing and
grabbing her neck in agony on the floor. The spot's message about violence is
then presented in Danish while mournful music plays in the background.
The response from the handful of
sites that have written about the PSA has been one of discomfort. The PSA
"takes things to a a disturbing level," writes Nick McMaster at
Newser. Meanwhile, Tana Ganeva of Alternet has accused the
PSA of having gone "very, very wrong":
Seriously though, this seems like the end result of some people sitting around a table trying to figure out how to make domestic violence edgy and attention-grabbing. Are we really so inured to the standard imagery of wide-eyed kids cowering in the background, or the bruised faces of women?
Ganeva isn't totally dismissive
of the PSA, however, and concludes her article by suggesting that since
domestic violence is rarely discussed in the mainstream media, the makers of
the spot may be on to something in their approach: "even though it's
pretty fucking tone deaf and horrifying, are they on the right track by trying
to be aggressively controversial?"
The confusion that the PSA causes
for the user -- is this raising awareness to the severity of the problem, or is
it unintentionally trivializing the issue -- was captured by Tim Nudd at Adweek: "Perhaps
you're supposed to feel guilty, like a real-life abuser might, for continuing
to hit the woman just to see what happens next? Who knows. Maybe something's
getting lost in translation from the Danish," Nudd writes.
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