Yesterday, I caused a minor X storm. On the grand scale of X storms – a phrase which, it must be said, simply doesn’t carry the same sensation as what was once known as a ‘Twitter storm’ - my small account barely created a breeze. However, a few dervishes did do the odd whirl.
Thanks for giving us the low down on this Katrina - my 2 cents is that this billboard is deliberately ambiguous AND it erases biological women - it's a really insidious nasty billboard and well deserves calling out. It reeks of TRA messaging to erase women as a sex to be replaced with gender ideology. It's disgusting how biological adult human females are being gaslit in this way - subsuming and erasing them by playing the whanau/family card. As you and others have detailed so well - this is a strategy used by the Midwifery Council already to gaslight and erase individual women. They may as well have said 'people who have ovaries' / 'ovary owners' and all the rest of the misogynist BS terms that try to subvert language about biological women's bodies and health. We know what "Ovarian cancer can affect anyone" is about.
I tend to agree that it has TRA hands all over it. Someone else asked why a more direct message like "I lost my mum to ovarian cancer" wasn't used. The 'anyone' is classic TRA inclusion language.
Agreed, it's not just deliberately ambiguous but skilfully done - both the choice of model with feminine (rounded) facial bone structure and the wording (even the haircut). No way this was not assembled to push the Overton window and make people second guess what 'normal' now means.....
FWIW I think the whole 'erasing women' angle is flogging a dead horse. It's also dividing society and missing the bigger picture. This is not about men or women, it's not even about trans people (those who wish to live as men or women).... it's about de-gendering society and pushing non binary (genderless) identities, in preparation for a transhumanist future without natural reproduction, natural pair bonding, natural parenting.
The fact is artificial wombs are only a couple of decades away and the social engineers have no need for families, gender binary, pair bonding. They want an atomised, genderless, sterilised, self absorbed, population of grey worker drones. That's why they are offering 100 new pseudo genders to choose from, while they erase male and female from our language, legal system and culture.
I'm sorry but feminism brought us 70% of the way to this goal with its social construct theory and push to erase traditional gender roles and gender identities in favour of gender subversion and gender neutral everything.
There are some feminists (TERFs) who will play the victim of this and use it to demonise men, but they are already being marginalised from society. The only positive change will come from men and women working together, making up, and remembering that male and female are complimentary forces and better than grey-gender transhumanism.
Academic feminists, like all academics in the 'social sciences', had a lot to do with steering us towards believing in ideology over reality. They have been no different to any religious zealots at any time anywhere.
Gaslighting: psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency (on the perpetrator).
The ambiguity should be questioned. It’s deliberate, devious and devilishly designed to silence women and make them self-silence in the future because a seed of doubt has been sown and there’s a smidge of a chance they may be wrong 😑. It’s typical abuser/groomer behaviour. Don’t feel bad, don’t feel guilty, don’t ever be what your abuser needs or wants you to be.
Not personally directed at you Katrina #justsaying.
I am sure the Ovarian Cancer Foundation NZ used an Advertising Agency to create this.
Possibly, they had little to say in its creation; handing it over to intimidating advertising
experts with an ulterior motive. An illusion was created of a male, succumbing to ovarian cancer.
It is not a clear message to women. The 'selling point’ of the advertisement is to change people’s perceptions by having a picture of a male. This sends their message: Men can be Women.
Advertising is considered successful if it gets a reaction.
It is clear what they want people talking about and it's not ovarian cancer.
If it’s about families why not have an image of a family? Daughters are impacted by the death of a mother to ovarian cancer too. They also have to consider whether they too will succumb to this awful disease. We’re truly living in a feminist backlash where men’s feelings are more important than women’s and EVERYTHING has to centre men! 😡🤬
My repost of your post here (with added snarky comment) has one observer coming after me in full snarl. But I am not taking down the repost. This isn't Twitter. This is Substack. And Substack is for readers and not for the birds. If some one don't read deep (and didn't even read your post here for proper context), and don't think deep, then maybe one is confused about which platform she is on.
Sorry you're experiencing that, but thank you for not caving into the 'snarler'. There are those who are either wide off the mark of the point I was making, or are irredeemably TRAs.
I do understand, if one has recently started to learn about the "movement" they see small glimpses here and there, they may well be concerned, but still possess an idea that these are small problems, that there is not a long march through every aspect of our lives. When one is bobbing out in a sea of BS, then the signs are writ large.
Pure misogyny and female erasure. Shame on them and on every organisation and individual who participates in this farce. Women are adults human females and we will keep shouting that until THEY listen ,or we become hoarse ,whichever comes first. We WILL NOT be silenced ,Thanks x
Anyone who thinks a person with a penis is a woman, shouldn’t be allowed to leave their house 🏠 Unless they under 3 years old. Don’t like my opinion? That’s ok but I won’t cave in or use language I don’t like. I choose my language. I choose what pronouns to say and denying that a male human being is not a female human being is beyond delusional. It’s evil. And I’m not religious.
Featuring a grieving son might be a great campaign. This billboard is poorly composed. The art. The font size. The chosen quote and the grammar are confusing.
I read in this ad and the subtext that the man’s mother had stage 3b ovarian cancer, indicating it had spread to local lymph nodes, and possibly due to being a caregiver (probably the only euphemism which isn’t sinister) he’s going to have to understand it, the impacts on his mother, her life and his relationship to her.
I saw no attempt to imbue an iota of trans context I to the message, it was fairly straightforward and the implications were clear.
It seems to be part of a class of messages used to remind people to have empathy, and contribute in some way to the charity - these are pretty common. In this case it used irony that a male would have an impact from a female malady to create cognitive dissonance to penetrate attention.
Had the ad had any trans implication it would have undercut the ironic message and dependency on the mother-son bond to elicit attention. The possible implication that the young dour man in the image had ovaries would have been slightly repellant, and derailed the focus on the mother son bond. That would be a failed advertisement.
I say this because even in NZ, Mother’s Day is celebrated the 2nd Sunday of May, and all ads involving mothers are using the heightened attention to motherhood to gain relevance.
Honest feedback:
I might gently say that you misjudged the ad, not because of past ads, but because you simply didn’t read and parse the text.
It’s easy and honest to simply say you misread the ad, and take responsibility for your unfounded criticism for this instance rather than claim it’s due to past ads. That’s an act of trying to find fault where none exists to claim an error wasn’t an error which tends to be taken as petty.
You didn't understand it at first, thinking it was something it was not.
Then other comments felt the clear English language wasn't clear, that Sarah had stage 3b ovarian cancer, and.that it was somehow attributed to the dour man.
It wasnt, the phrase "stage 3b cancer" was diretly adjacent to the name Sarah.
There was little to get other than the mother had cancer and the son would be involved.
Then poster was adjacent to monthers day and was to elicit an emotion in children to contribute to a charity that affecta their mother.
Any other interpretation has null content and is specious.
Surfeitzy is partly right, though the concluding sentence is “over the top” to say the least. Also why “even” in New Zealand? Because it’s not spring there? Because the movement went far and wide?
S’s interpretation would have been exactly correct–ten years ago. I vaguely recall charities using similar tactics in advertising, to draw attention to the wider effects of an illness, usually though not always to attract donations, after creating attention by the shock of the oddness. It even became easy to realize what they were getting at in these ads.
However this interpretation ignores changes over time. Starting some years ago I have seen ads with altered images apparently meant to “ affect” without “registering.” In one (print) case a girl in a dress was photoshopped to be faintly larger than all the other dress models. Later, in a both print and digital mode, an ad appeared most of you have probably seen, for a well known instant, and now flavored too!, coffee brand. It featured women appearing to coffee klatsch in a living room. Three wear fifties’ dresses and are clustered on a couch. Number four sits in a chair at right angles to them, all at the coffee table. Owing to the chair the dressed up person is a bit larger than the others. Look very closely: the figure is a man in a dress. Around this time I began to wonder if graphic designers were secretly making fun of their employers.
Once again a subtle oddness? Or an early incursion of the TRAs? Would the execs reviewing the ad department’s submission not notice that? IDK. But,
today’s ad may very well have a dual purpose: to get that attention by cognitive dissonance, to bring attention to the people surrounding the ill person, AND to say to the trans man who hasn’t had ovaries removed that it could still affect them/her. How many young trans “men” are surprised when they get pregnant? Even the population who *want* to be pregnant men will still forget about female illnesses which (usually) lie in the future.
I can find any number of ads in NZ and AU with people in the ad clearly not afflicted by the disease, purely used to drive awareness, and involving men - or women - clearly not afflicted. The number of men in ads for breast cancer fundraising is so large as to be completely unremarkable. It has nothing to do with trans.
Completely unconvinced the original complaint was merited - the author admitting they hadn’t even looked at the text. The author then re-engineered an explanation of their irritation (surprised they got pushback) using a completely different line of reasoning that the (clearly male) person “might be a trans signal”. Quite a conspiracy from an ovarian cancer ad.
Just some honest feedback.
When you see mysterious signals which are completely illusory and fall apart on simple inspection the feeling may be specious.
It was not ‘fairly straightforward’. This advertisement was on a billboard, with the man’s
face clearly dominating with wording “I never thought cancer would be part of my life”.
Then, in much smaller, ‘type’, unable to be read when passing, was some clarification.
The draw-card was the large picture of the man with the above wording.
Why did the creators of this advertisement put his personal information in such small type?
Was it to mislead, a deliberate attempt not to focus on his history, but to present another agenda? The advertisement is misleading and women have a right to be offended by it.
Imo, it’s noteworthy that the billboard does not refer to women once. It’s assumed that people will associate ‘ovarian’ with women, know it’s them who get ovarian cancer, and that ‘Sara’ is a woman because that’s traditionally a woman’s name. There’s no mention of ‘mum’ or ‘woman’ or anything else that’s specifically refers to females - i.e. the ones who get ovarian cancer.
You’re creating an interpretation for this particular ad - as are other people I may add - out of thin air. It’s a common ad structure among a wide range of charities to drive awareness, empathy, and probably money,
I’m curious about this exchange, it’s exposing a conversational style I’ve only had with trans people who vehemently disagreed with me in the past. Fascinating, sort of opposite polarity in a way.
There are hundreds of ads in quick perusal with people of a sex opposite the afflicted participating in fundraising for the cause.
These types of ads are so common that I find it remarkable that we are deflecting onto typography as a problem worthy of debate on a global public forum.
Once I read the caption, the message of the billboard was beyond clear to me. Any reasonable, typical person reading this is going to ding this tweet and this double-down article as an L for radfems. Good.
Thanks for giving us the low down on this Katrina - my 2 cents is that this billboard is deliberately ambiguous AND it erases biological women - it's a really insidious nasty billboard and well deserves calling out. It reeks of TRA messaging to erase women as a sex to be replaced with gender ideology. It's disgusting how biological adult human females are being gaslit in this way - subsuming and erasing them by playing the whanau/family card. As you and others have detailed so well - this is a strategy used by the Midwifery Council already to gaslight and erase individual women. They may as well have said 'people who have ovaries' / 'ovary owners' and all the rest of the misogynist BS terms that try to subvert language about biological women's bodies and health. We know what "Ovarian cancer can affect anyone" is about.
I tend to agree that it has TRA hands all over it. Someone else asked why a more direct message like "I lost my mum to ovarian cancer" wasn't used. The 'anyone' is classic TRA inclusion language.
yeah that was me lol
Lol!
Agreed, it's not just deliberately ambiguous but skilfully done - both the choice of model with feminine (rounded) facial bone structure and the wording (even the haircut). No way this was not assembled to push the Overton window and make people second guess what 'normal' now means.....
FWIW I think the whole 'erasing women' angle is flogging a dead horse. It's also dividing society and missing the bigger picture. This is not about men or women, it's not even about trans people (those who wish to live as men or women).... it's about de-gendering society and pushing non binary (genderless) identities, in preparation for a transhumanist future without natural reproduction, natural pair bonding, natural parenting.
The fact is artificial wombs are only a couple of decades away and the social engineers have no need for families, gender binary, pair bonding. They want an atomised, genderless, sterilised, self absorbed, population of grey worker drones. That's why they are offering 100 new pseudo genders to choose from, while they erase male and female from our language, legal system and culture.
I'm sorry but feminism brought us 70% of the way to this goal with its social construct theory and push to erase traditional gender roles and gender identities in favour of gender subversion and gender neutral everything.
There are some feminists (TERFs) who will play the victim of this and use it to demonise men, but they are already being marginalised from society. The only positive change will come from men and women working together, making up, and remembering that male and female are complimentary forces and better than grey-gender transhumanism.
Just my 2 cents :)
Academic feminists, like all academics in the 'social sciences', had a lot to do with steering us towards believing in ideology over reality. They have been no different to any religious zealots at any time anywhere.
Gaslighting: psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency (on the perpetrator).
The ambiguity should be questioned. It’s deliberate, devious and devilishly designed to silence women and make them self-silence in the future because a seed of doubt has been sown and there’s a smidge of a chance they may be wrong 😑. It’s typical abuser/groomer behaviour. Don’t feel bad, don’t feel guilty, don’t ever be what your abuser needs or wants you to be.
Not personally directed at you Katrina #justsaying.
I am sure the Ovarian Cancer Foundation NZ used an Advertising Agency to create this.
Possibly, they had little to say in its creation; handing it over to intimidating advertising
experts with an ulterior motive. An illusion was created of a male, succumbing to ovarian cancer.
It is not a clear message to women. The 'selling point’ of the advertisement is to change people’s perceptions by having a picture of a male. This sends their message: Men can be Women.
Advertising is considered successful if it gets a reaction.
It is clear what they want people talking about and it's not ovarian cancer.
If it’s about families why not have an image of a family? Daughters are impacted by the death of a mother to ovarian cancer too. They also have to consider whether they too will succumb to this awful disease. We’re truly living in a feminist backlash where men’s feelings are more important than women’s and EVERYTHING has to centre men! 😡🤬
My repost of your post here (with added snarky comment) has one observer coming after me in full snarl. But I am not taking down the repost. This isn't Twitter. This is Substack. And Substack is for readers and not for the birds. If some one don't read deep (and didn't even read your post here for proper context), and don't think deep, then maybe one is confused about which platform she is on.
Sorry you're experiencing that, but thank you for not caving into the 'snarler'. There are those who are either wide off the mark of the point I was making, or are irredeemably TRAs.
I do understand, if one has recently started to learn about the "movement" they see small glimpses here and there, they may well be concerned, but still possess an idea that these are small problems, that there is not a long march through every aspect of our lives. When one is bobbing out in a sea of BS, then the signs are writ large.
So glad I read your substack, thank YOU.
The closest any man will come to a woman's malady is when they're diagnosed with terminal never-endingmememememetriosis.
This is #ByDesign and they can get fucked.
Thanks Rex, a great insight there.
Me is diagnosed with terminal never-endingmemememetriosis, which is forcing me
to demand attention. I have me ‘rights’ y’know!
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…
Pure misogyny and female erasure. Shame on them and on every organisation and individual who participates in this farce. Women are adults human females and we will keep shouting that until THEY listen ,or we become hoarse ,whichever comes first. We WILL NOT be silenced ,Thanks x
Anyone who thinks a person with a penis is a woman, shouldn’t be allowed to leave their house 🏠 Unless they under 3 years old. Don’t like my opinion? That’s ok but I won’t cave in or use language I don’t like. I choose my language. I choose what pronouns to say and denying that a male human being is not a female human being is beyond delusional. It’s evil. And I’m not religious.
Bewildering is the perfect word
I’m just waiting for Bruce Jenner will give birth 🤷🏽
Pretty sure he’s menopausal. Emphasis on “men.”
You’re right. Clever 😂 MENopausal. Haha
Featuring a grieving son might be a great campaign. This billboard is poorly composed. The art. The font size. The chosen quote and the grammar are confusing.
Look at that. We're back to women being defined by our relationship to men, not full persons in our own right.
This makes my prostate hurt.
I’ll put on my semiotics hat for a moment.
I read in this ad and the subtext that the man’s mother had stage 3b ovarian cancer, indicating it had spread to local lymph nodes, and possibly due to being a caregiver (probably the only euphemism which isn’t sinister) he’s going to have to understand it, the impacts on his mother, her life and his relationship to her.
I saw no attempt to imbue an iota of trans context I to the message, it was fairly straightforward and the implications were clear.
It seems to be part of a class of messages used to remind people to have empathy, and contribute in some way to the charity - these are pretty common. In this case it used irony that a male would have an impact from a female malady to create cognitive dissonance to penetrate attention.
Had the ad had any trans implication it would have undercut the ironic message and dependency on the mother-son bond to elicit attention. The possible implication that the young dour man in the image had ovaries would have been slightly repellant, and derailed the focus on the mother son bond. That would be a failed advertisement.
I say this because even in NZ, Mother’s Day is celebrated the 2nd Sunday of May, and all ads involving mothers are using the heightened attention to motherhood to gain relevance.
Honest feedback:
I might gently say that you misjudged the ad, not because of past ads, but because you simply didn’t read and parse the text.
It’s easy and honest to simply say you misread the ad, and take responsibility for your unfounded criticism for this instance rather than claim it’s due to past ads. That’s an act of trying to find fault where none exists to claim an error wasn’t an error which tends to be taken as petty.
The deeper and wider point of what I'm driving at has been missed by some, and 'got' by others.
You didn't understand it at first, thinking it was something it was not.
Then other comments felt the clear English language wasn't clear, that Sarah had stage 3b ovarian cancer, and.that it was somehow attributed to the dour man.
It wasnt, the phrase "stage 3b cancer" was diretly adjacent to the name Sarah.
There was little to get other than the mother had cancer and the son would be involved.
Then poster was adjacent to monthers day and was to elicit an emotion in children to contribute to a charity that affecta their mother.
Any other interpretation has null content and is specious.
Surfeitzy is partly right, though the concluding sentence is “over the top” to say the least. Also why “even” in New Zealand? Because it’s not spring there? Because the movement went far and wide?
S’s interpretation would have been exactly correct–ten years ago. I vaguely recall charities using similar tactics in advertising, to draw attention to the wider effects of an illness, usually though not always to attract donations, after creating attention by the shock of the oddness. It even became easy to realize what they were getting at in these ads.
However this interpretation ignores changes over time. Starting some years ago I have seen ads with altered images apparently meant to “ affect” without “registering.” In one (print) case a girl in a dress was photoshopped to be faintly larger than all the other dress models. Later, in a both print and digital mode, an ad appeared most of you have probably seen, for a well known instant, and now flavored too!, coffee brand. It featured women appearing to coffee klatsch in a living room. Three wear fifties’ dresses and are clustered on a couch. Number four sits in a chair at right angles to them, all at the coffee table. Owing to the chair the dressed up person is a bit larger than the others. Look very closely: the figure is a man in a dress. Around this time I began to wonder if graphic designers were secretly making fun of their employers.
Once again a subtle oddness? Or an early incursion of the TRAs? Would the execs reviewing the ad department’s submission not notice that? IDK. But,
today’s ad may very well have a dual purpose: to get that attention by cognitive dissonance, to bring attention to the people surrounding the ill person, AND to say to the trans man who hasn’t had ovaries removed that it could still affect them/her. How many young trans “men” are surprised when they get pregnant? Even the population who *want* to be pregnant men will still forget about female illnesses which (usually) lie in the future.
And yes, it’s capitalizing on Mother’s Day.
Nonsense, of course, you’re not speaking to this specific ad, you’re complaining about utterly unrelated material.
Your interpretation is somewhat bizarre and does not lie in reason, By extension breast cancer ads involving men are stealth advertising for trans.
https://m.facebook.com/NBCFAustralia/posts/jacobs-world-was-turned-upside-down-when-his-mum-was-diagnosed-with-breast-cance/10158207967979524/?wtsid=rdr_0id9dQyD83DC1WMRp
I don’t think so.
I can find any number of ads in NZ and AU with people in the ad clearly not afflicted by the disease, purely used to drive awareness, and involving men - or women - clearly not afflicted. The number of men in ads for breast cancer fundraising is so large as to be completely unremarkable. It has nothing to do with trans.
Completely unconvinced the original complaint was merited - the author admitting they hadn’t even looked at the text. The author then re-engineered an explanation of their irritation (surprised they got pushback) using a completely different line of reasoning that the (clearly male) person “might be a trans signal”. Quite a conspiracy from an ovarian cancer ad.
Just some honest feedback.
When you see mysterious signals which are completely illusory and fall apart on simple inspection the feeling may be specious.
It was not ‘fairly straightforward’. This advertisement was on a billboard, with the man’s
face clearly dominating with wording “I never thought cancer would be part of my life”.
Then, in much smaller, ‘type’, unable to be read when passing, was some clarification.
The draw-card was the large picture of the man with the above wording.
Why did the creators of this advertisement put his personal information in such small type?
Was it to mislead, a deliberate attempt not to focus on his history, but to present another agenda? The advertisement is misleading and women have a right to be offended by it.
Imo, it’s noteworthy that the billboard does not refer to women once. It’s assumed that people will associate ‘ovarian’ with women, know it’s them who get ovarian cancer, and that ‘Sara’ is a woman because that’s traditionally a woman’s name. There’s no mention of ‘mum’ or ‘woman’ or anything else that’s specifically refers to females - i.e. the ones who get ovarian cancer.
It refers to a “mother” of course, before Mother’s Day.
Factually speaking, mothers are uniquely female regardless of your beliefs.
There are hundreds of similar ads for breast cancer awareness and charities in your region with men extolling their support to fight the cause.
https://m.facebook.com/NBCFAustralia/posts/jacobs-world-was-turned-upside-down-when-his-mum-was-diagnosed-with-breast-cance/10158207967979524/?wtsid=rdr_0id9dQyD83DC1WMRp
You’re creating an interpretation for this particular ad - as are other people I may add - out of thin air. It’s a common ad structure among a wide range of charities to drive awareness, empathy, and probably money,
Irrespective of the sex of the afflicted.
Your comment has been noted, and upon consideration, not found to carry any weight.
I’m curious about this exchange, it’s exposing a conversational style I’ve only had with trans people who vehemently disagreed with me in the past. Fascinating, sort of opposite polarity in a way.
You have missed the point I was making in my blog-piece, but thank you for your engagement, anyway.
The above ad at Noosa Tri is very different - no comparison.
Yes, it’s very different. The only similarity is the concept, but it’s put across in a very different way.
There are hundreds of ads in quick perusal with people of a sex opposite the afflicted participating in fundraising for the cause.
These types of ads are so common that I find it remarkable that we are deflecting onto typography as a problem worthy of debate on a global public forum.
It of course means reason has left the room.
Same reply as above.
Once I read the caption, the message of the billboard was beyond clear to me. Any reasonable, typical person reading this is going to ding this tweet and this double-down article as an L for radfems. Good.
What does "an L for radfems" mean?