Hit the B*tch: Crossing the Line
Much type has been poured over last week’s viral ’sensation’ - Hit the Bitch – a controversial web campaign by a Danish Advocacy group bringing attention to domestic abuse. If you missed it, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the site is no longer available outside of Denmark, no doubt part product of the international outrage because of it.
The Huffingston Post summarizes the campaign including some of the leading thoughts on it pretty well here so I’ll provide you with a 140 character explanation: “Hit the Bitch” is an interactive website that encourages you to continue hitting a virtual female until she is too beat up to take anymore.
Its easy to understand why the PSA caused an uproar, but its worth noting that as bizarre as it might seem, it didn’t fail in its intentions. In fact, it excelled. The target of any awareness campaign is to get people talking about the issue, which is an increasingly hard task in our information overloaded world especially if your issue is one that the public is already familiar with. Remember acid rain? People don’t talk about that anymore either and yet when I was growing up, I was lead to believe that our entire environment was at severe risk because of it (as an aside, I’ve always wondered if the silence had to do with the lobbying efforts of those behind bottled water products). Domestic abuse is important, don’t get me wrong, but without personal experience with it, I can’t recall the last time I found myself discussing it. Of course, that’s now all changed.
Hit the Bitch, although crude and ugly, was effective and quite creative. Interestingly, very few people have used the word creative when describing the campaign but that’s exactly what it is. Knee jerk aside, do we celebrate it as successful marketing or is there a line that even creativity cannot cross and if so, where is it?
I sympathize with the creators. Sure they were a little bit misguided and lost their legitimacy, but if millions of people are talking about your issue today – and they were not yesterday – then maybe it was worth it. Or maybe, thinking too freely is not so good after all.
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If you really want to see it, someone put a screen cast of it up on Youtube but I really don’t want to share it here.
One Comment
1 Mya wrote:
wow…never heard even heard of such a campaign! Yuck!! does this provoke the the question of free speech however? can there be a line drawn within free speech? is a campaign even considered a form of free speech regardless of how effective it is? It appears as though content doesn’t matter as much as the effect/affect is has on the general public, but is it still a good way to promote discussions of issues still prevalant in today’s society? Hmmm….to be honest I really don’t know.
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