Australia has got a pretty brawny reputation, but you’d have hoped that the whole beer-swilling brusque laddism was something that companies going for the youth market over there would want to shirk. Clearly not, however, if this sad example of a a campervan rental company with sexist slogans daubed in paint on their fleet is anything to go by.
Just for some background, if you’ve never travelled to Australia, there’s a company called Wicked Campers based in Brisbane who rent out campervans to travellers to go up and down the coast in, and they’re all marked up with graffiti pictures and bon mots.
One woman is the latest in a succession to go up against them, though, as she has started a petition to get the company to remove any slogans that are degrading to women after her 11-year-old daughter read one saying: ‘In every princess, there’s a little slut who wants to try it just once’.
Paula Orbea, from Sydney, helped her daughter file a complaint to the Advertising Standards Bureau. However, it’s not clear how much good that would do because when someone complained about another Wicked Campers slogan – ‘Fat girls are harder to kidnap’ – the response was that yes, it breached an ethical code by making light of kidnapping, but it didn’t actually discriminate on the base of gender, according to ABC Australia.
Ms Orbea’s petition has got over 100,000 co-signatories, where she wrote that the slogan made her daughter ‘fear being perceived that way – especially by someone she may cross paths with who may agree with that perspective. I agree with free speech, but where is the line? At what point do we say no, that’s not morally correct?’
The petition might not change Wicked Campers’ ways, but it sure has got a debate going about sexism in Australia, where today it was revealed that it’s going to take 75 years for the gender pay gap to close.
Wicked Campers haven’t commented on the issue yet, but maybe they’ll daub it on the back of a van. Other vans have messages like ‘Drink ’til she’s pretty’, and it’s not only sexism they’re going for; they’ve also had racist slogans on them, as well as date rape jokes and a heady combination of racism and homophobia. We’ve linked to them but just FYI they’re not very nice.
Maybe Wicked Campers should stick to graffiti of ‘free hugs’ and smiley faces and The Queens of the Stone Age. Because not everyone wants to drive around in a bigot-mobile.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.