By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 12 years ago

Quick hit: NOW NYC’s new tumblr targets offensive advertising

Sometimes when I’m walking down the street or waiting on the subway platform, I see an ad that makes me want to whip out a marker and scrawl “This insults women” or “Sexism sells!” all over it. Then I remember that graffiti is a crime and that defacing public spaces isn’t a good idea.

Luckily, NOW NYC has started a new tumblr called “That’s Not Cool,” which is meeting all my graffiti wish-fulfillment needs. And you can join in the fun by submitting your own picture of an ad that’s sexist, racist, homophobic or otherwise not cool. The result looks a little something like this.


And you should go ahead and submit – it shouldn’t be hard, because there are a lot of not cool ads out there.  In fact, as glad as I am that NOW NYC has given us an outlet to digitally graffiti offensive ads, I cannot be trusted not to sharpie the crap out of this Svedka vodka ad the next time I see it. Hey, Svedka, just because you’re using a robot lady doesn’t mean you aren’t contributing to human rape culture.

NOT COOL.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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