The XX Factor: What women really think.

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  Is This the Message: Kick Me, Beat Me, Tie Me Up!?

  Posted Tuesday, September 23, 2008 2:34 PM | By E.J. Graff
  Ewww, Nayeli, I agree with you entirely: Those ads are creepy. Worse than creepy, really: They're advertising the sexiness of violence against women. Duct-tape her! Sew up her mouth! Dominate that chick! The voting tag line reads as an afterthought to the main message that rape is just soooo hot. Maybe there's a secret plan to bring out the misogynists while suppressing the women's vote?
  Filed under: advertising, voters, violence against women, misogyny

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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