Green Party women on Thursday called the broadcasting authority to ban what they called a sexist carnival ad for the Jumbo toy store chain.
Jumbo received backlash from dozens of viewers of their recent advertisement broadcast this month, which as of Thursday had almost 673,000 views on YouTube with 1,400 dislikes compared with around 320 likes.
The ad shows a couple in their forties in which the woman has crafted a Brazilian-style carnival outfit from a Jumbo shopping bag and she is dancing on the bed as her partner arrives home. He then imagines his wife as a young Brazilian woman.
It is then implied they had sex as they are shown lying in bed breathing heavily and the man fantasises his partner has the face and breasts of a Brazilian woman while she imagines him having a tan and a ‘six-pack’.
“It is racist, sexist and promotes ‘body shaming’,” said Maria Kola, the general-secretary of women’s green movement.
“It views women as an object, but also men” she told the Cyprus Mail. “It is sexist for both sides.”
‘Body shaming’ is a current issue that concerns young people. “Instead of promoting the message that all bodies are beautiful and accepted, we see the idea promoted that only one body type is accepted” the green party women said in their statement.
They also called the broadcasting authority to immediately intervene and withdraw the advertisement.
Female environmentalists were not the only ones offended by the toy store’s new marketing idea.
Jumbo’s ad was published on YouTube on February 10 and has more than 300 negative comments in just ten days.
Many subscribers were shocked the Broadcasting Authority allowed the ad on media and called upon the authority to ban the “bad, kitsch advertisement” as they characterised it.
Others found it unsuitable viewing by their children while one commentator said: “I don’t want to have to explain your sexist cheap advert to my daughter.”
Yet more just found the ad cringeworthy.
The toy store had to apologise and retract an older advertisement which was also viewed as partly sexist during Easter 2016. The ad showed Greek singer Angela Demetriou asking her pretend former lover to “hit like a man” her Easter egg at the end of her song.
The phrase was viewed as promoting domestic abuse and gender stereotypes.
