If you’ve been busy binge watching season three of Orange Is the New Black (and you really should be) you might have missed the latest issue of Rolling Stone with OITNB stars Taylor Schilling and Laura Prepon on the cover. The magazine’s cover story devotes significant column inches to talking about how historic OITNB is. […] More »
Is dissecting a woman’s picture to prove it has been Photoshopped really body positive? Media is a big message transmitter and dictates feelings, philosophies, morals, values—pretty much everything that makes up society rules. No matter how critical the viewer, we are still subjected to ads in subway stations and on buses, on billboards and in […] More »
I really, really hope it is obvious to everyone that “the Holocaust was a bad thing” is a sentiment we can all agree on (if not, you might be reading the wrong magazine). It is certainly something that Prime Minister Stephen Harper believes in strongly. Strongly enough, apparently, to imply that the Holocaust is enough […] More »
When the mammoth pharmaceutical company Bayer announced in 2009 that it would be making NorLevo, a morning-after pill, available over the counter to women in Toronto, it failed to mention one small detail: it doesn’t work for every woman. The drug, which is identical to Plan B One-step, (the more popular emergency contraception pill), may […] More »
You’ve got nothing to hide. You’re an upstanding, shoes-wearing citizen who smells like soap and carries good conversations. You haven’t a single thing to hide. What does it matter if Bell Canada, this past week, announced that it will track their customers’ location, media habits, search activity, website interests, and application usage? You’re a modern […] More »
Cleaning commercials have always been crystal clear on whose job it is to keep the family home sparkling. It is a pretty standard formula to show women on the brink of orgasm, dancing over their whites getting their whitest, high on the fumes of the chemicals responsible for their Martha Stewart castles. It’s been a […] More »
When I was nine years old I was reading The Baby-sitters Club and eating, what some would say to be, way too much lasagna. This nine-year-old girl, however, left her home in Kelowna, B.C. to attend the 2013 Annual Shareholders’ Meeting for McDonald’s Corporation in Chicago on May 23—and it wasn’t for a sneak peek at the […] More »
He could be the one, soul mate, husband, loving father to your children. But first, you’ve got to get him to say hello. These are actual words from an actual Crest 3D White Arctic Fresh Toothpaste commercial that started airing last November (and is still on air). Naturally, the commercial suggests the only way to […] More »
Ladies, rejoice! We’re now allowed inside Mark’s Work Wearhouse! In a recent rebranding effort, the Canadian Tire-owned retailer Mark’s Work Warehouse has changed its name to just “Mark’s”—oh, and they’ve also written one of the worst ad slogans we’ve seen in a while. Posters showing sophisticated, smiling women with the tagline, “Now Welcoming Women,” have […] More »
This weekend, queer folks and friends at Toronto Pride who reach for a Bud Light under the beer’s namesake music stage may be surprised to know what they’re drinking. Budweiser is just one brand sold by Anheuser-Busch, the American arm of Brazilian-Belgian multinational beer conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev. Just this May, Anheuser-Busch was targeted by Pulitzer […] More »
Whoever’s pulling the strings at one major tampon-maker has had it with euphemisms. It’s Kotex-ploitation! Finally, an ad about tampons spoofs stupid ad lingo—”down there,” “sanitary napkins,” “that time of the month”—and dares to actually say the word vagina (you know, where it goes) in a television commercial. The run-down: “How do I feel about […] More »