I remember there being lots of ads like this in the early '70s. I was only like eight or ten at the time and even then I knew they were insulting! Lucky for me, I was at a private progressive hippie school at the time with an openly feminist teacher! Damn, I was lucky.

Fascinating that advertisers hated women's liberation so much that they would actively turn off potential customers to tell them they hate them.

Anyway, the "feminists just need a man" meme is still going strong. Upon finding out that I have a man, conservative bloggers hating on me insult his manhood. It's the No True Scotsman fallacy.

But even if sexual attraction for men was 100% contingent on oppression, and they can't get it up without the boot on your neck, that wouldn't mean feminism was wrong. It would just mean that the rape culture is all that more powerful and we have that much more work to do.

BTW, to explain why the "feminists can't get a man" fallacy is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy---you ascribe what you believe is a virtue to a group (no feminist love), and when a member of that group defies your categorization, you claim he wasn't in that group. Christians are often very guilty of this, declaring people whose behavior they don't like aren't real Christians.

As a fan of Mad Men, part of me wants to admire the advertising firm for tapping into the ambivalent feminist market. They've pretty much said, "There, there, little girl. You've made a good show of being strong and independent. Now you can get back to the real societal role you're supposed to fill. Isn't that a relief?" It's certainly clever on a psychological level.

Mostly, though, it's just patronizing and insulting.

I'm thinking that the fact that the perfume is called "My Claw/Talon" makes the copy even worse.

Well I for one am so glad that a big strong man has come along to carry my placard for me. My little arms were getting so tired! Perhaps he will follow me home and do the windows and scrub the floors, too, since those household tasks are equally exhausting for a frail, delicate woman.

This reminds me of all those 1980s Virginia Slims cigarette ads with that, "You've come a long way, baby!" slogan which equated the social acceptance of women smoking in public with women suffragists earning the vote.

Complete with black-and-white pics of women in turn-of-the-20th century garb sneaking cigarettes in private, holding up pro-voting signs in public, accompanied by a huge, in-color, much larger photo of a 'liberated' 80's woman grinning with a cigarette in her hands.

Yay for lung cancer! Such an advance for women!

Yay for expensive perfumes! So much easier than agitating for social change. Because it's soooo tiring we need to be relieved of that duty by men.

Wow, what a stupid patronizing ad. I've never heard of this perfume, hopfully they failed miserably and went out of business after which the company was bought by a woman who did something successful with it while the men who came up with this campaign are now all "Would you like fries with that?"