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  • 2022-11-12 (xsd:date)
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  • Is This 'Beat Your Wife Tonight' Ad from the '70s Real? (en)
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  • As we've noted a few times before, viral images of politically incorrect ads from newspapers and magazines of the previous century are not only quite common these days, but quite commonly fake. Fake vintage ads are popular on social media because it hasn't escaped most people's notice that the real advertising from that era can look so outrageously inappropriate to our eyes that it fairly begs for parody. Sometimes it's difficult to tell the spoofs from the real thing. For example, the advertisement below allegedly ran in newspapers and on billboards in the early 1970s, and appears regularly in online memes: This is a real ad, first published in 1973. Interestingly, it was notorious almost from the get-go. In the first mention we found of it in the news media, Detroit Free Press columnist Bob Talbert wrote on May 4, 1973: The fun wasn't destined to last, though. By July, women's liberationists had defaced a billboard bearing the slogan on the outskirts of Detroit, United Press International (UPI) reported. The contemporaneous press coverage was routinely condescending towards women who voiced their objections to the ad campaign. Sign Brings Out Libbers, read one headline placed atop the syndicated UPI story, which ran throughout the country. Ad Brings Bowling 'Bawls, read another. A columnist for the Amarillo Globe Times weighed in: Meanwhile, the concept was being unashamedly copied elsewhere. This ad appeared in the Lansing State Journal in July 1973: (Lansing State Journal, July 5, 1973) By then, the Detroit ad campaign had caught the attention of Ms. magazine, which published a copy of the ad in its July 1973 No Comment section, which was devoted to flagrant examples of sexist advertising. It made a lasting impression on the feminist movement and achieved iconic status in the fight against domestic violence. In a 1980 article on the growing feminist backlash against depictions of violence against women, Chicago Tribune writer Barbara Brotman featured it prominently in the lede: To this day, the Beat Your Wife ads are cited in discussions of domestic violence and the long struggle to raise awareness of it as a serious issue in a culture that much preferred to treat it with belly laughs and sweep it under the rug. (en)
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