Yesterday, the beautiful city of Newcastle – hometown of one half of the Vagenda, both halves of Ant and Dec, and the endless source of entertainment that was Byker Grove – was marred by the appearance of a terrible visitor: the Piri-Piri Chicken Van.
What is the Piri-Piri Chicken Van, we hear you cry. Well, it basically does what it says on the flimsy foil lid, being as it is a van launching a new flavour of Pot Noodle here in the lucky, lucky UK. Pot Noodle and its compatriots haven’t exactly been known for their sensitivity in the past when it comes to gender issues (it is, after all, the “slag of all snacks”), but this latest incarnation of their marketing strategy really does take the preservative-laden biscuit. “Peel the top off a hottie!” is the slogan, plastered alongside two closely aligned Pot Noodle lids that are deliberately juxtaposed to simulate breasts. And if that reference was too subtle for you, there’s a half-naked girl on the photo beside it, just waiting to have her top peeled off by the slathering consumer who’s in the mood for a walk down – in their words – “Easy Street”. It’s enough to make you crawl back to the Iceland store, apologising for any offence you saw in “Because mums are heroes” and begging them to employ you permanently in their managerial scheme.
Of course, we’re not the first ones to raise objections to this questionable campaign. One unfortunate young lady known only as Emma dared to stick her head above the parapet on the Piri-Piri Chicken Van’s Facebook page – prompting a response from official Pot Noodle social media that she didn’t understand “tongue-in-cheek fun for all” but “sorry you feel that way”. Our own attempts to contact Pot Noodle PR resulted in an email that similarly told us they were “sorry if they had caused offence”, which, as anyone who has been forced to apologise against their will for a misdemeanor which they still view as entirely justified knows, is the biggest cop-out apology known to humanity.
Now, we all know that “hipster sexism” has been all the rage ever since American Apparel first launched their “now open” campaign, and it has been operating alongside the recent “new wave of feminism” as ostensible proof that we’re really not needed. We’re past all that now, you see. All this sexism stuff in the media might well be exactly the same as it was 50 years ago, but this time around it’s ironic. So can you leave us to stare at some tits in peace? You’re making too much noise at the back.
Except, of course, there’s nothing all that hip about Pot Noodle. Pot Noodle is Lad Culture in snack form, an edible Page Three; drooling, retrograde sexism, and any PR exec who tries to tell us otherwise (Hi, Alex!) can jog on. Pot noodle aren’t cleverly challenging sexist stereotypes by mocking them – they’re perpetuating those stereotypes, one “hot bird” at a time.
Such a lack of imagination in advertising is enough to make anyone as bored and jaded as a steaming hot model hired to “sex up” a pot of instant noodles. Is this really all that the collective human imagination can give? In a month where Cambridge University students have been celebrating the end of the long long-held tradition of bikini-clad women jelly-wrestling in a paddling pool to (mostly male) spectators to signal the end of their annual exams (yes, really), did nobody over at Pot Noodle raise a tentative hand when “Peel the top off a hottie” came to the drawing board? Or are they all actually, seriously a bunch of back-slapping misogynists who were raised in a vacuum and presumably laughed raucously at one customer’s response to brave old Emma on Facebook – “Feminist, get back in the kitchen and make me a Pot Noodle”? If so, then maybe they could use that line for their next product launch.
The failure of executives from the macho world of advertising to gauge the public mood is nothing new (just look at what happened to Femfresh last year), but surely it’s high time that they start listening. From Pot Noodle’s campaign, you’d think that no one with a vagina had ever ingested one, when in fact Holly once felt so strongly about her right to consume one that, after being shouted at during her snack break, she quit her job over it. Is she to be condemned to the fluorescent umaminess of supernoodles? It looks like it.
And thus, Pot Noodles have been added to the list of foods that women the country over are seemingly not permitted to consume. A list which includes McCoys (Man Crisps), Yorkie Bars (Not for girls), Irn Bru (weird preoccupation with mum’s boobs), Burger King (blowjob imagery) Weetabix (girls can’t be superheroes) and, thanks to the date-rapey tendencies of their advertising, microwaveable burger manufacturers Rustlers.
Are these companies, along with Gwyneth Paltrow, part of some kind of global conspiracy to keep the female sex hungry? Because, from where we’re standing, the only food we’re allowed to eat is a green smoothie and a fucking insubstantial Cadbury’s Crispello.
It’s all very well blaming magazines for our current food neurosis with their championing of emaciated bodies and their diet tips, but food manufacturers are some of the worst culprits for gendered advertising. It’s about time someone brought them up to date. The worst thing about the Pot Noodle campaign is its predatory sense of entitlement, as though ‘peeling the top off a hottie’ is as simple a transaction as picking a snack pot off the shelf. According to Alex from Pot Noodle, this is “not intended to demean women in any way”. “As a brand targeting a male, youth audience, we do push the boundaries”, he emailed from the 1970s.
The solution, of course, to this kind of thing is a easy one: don’t let anyone who eats Pot Noodle take your top off, ever. A philosophy that we’re sure many of you lived by anyway. As you were.
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