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The ad, produced by Chinese cotton brand Purcotton, shows a woman walking down a dimly lit street at night, followed by a masked man. As the man begins to approach her, the woman is shown using a Purcotton wipe to remove makeup, apparently horrifying her potential attacker and scaring him away.
Although it is not known when the ad first appeared, social media users in China took to the short video, denouncing its apparent victim blame post and calling it “disgusting” and false”. Some even called for a boycott of the company’s products.
“You are using what scares women the most for an advertisement, which is beyond comprehension and unacceptable,” said one user on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.
China Women’s News, a website run by the government-affiliated China Women’s Federation, denounced the ad on their social media for “demonizing the victim.”
“(It is) full of prejudice, wickedness and ignorance. Women are consumers and not consumer goods. It is inevitable that ‘creative’ advertisements that insult women will be criticized by the public,” said the message on social networks.
Purcotton, which is owned by Winner Medical Group, has more than 240 stores in China and around 20 million customers, according to the company’s website.
Purcotton initially championed the advertisement as a creative way to advertise the “product cleaning function,” but as calls for a boycott increased, the company removed the video from its accounts and eventually apologized on it. January 8.
“We have put in place a team to ask people to report on the issue, and in the meantime, we will improve content production and the review process to prevent similar incidents from happening again,” the company said. Purcotton posted a second letter of apology on his Weibo account on Monday.
This is not the first time that a Chinese company has been forced to apologize for accusations of sexism.
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