The ad, produced by Chinese cotton brand Purcotton, shows a woman walking down a poorly lit street at night, followed by a masked man. When the man begins to approach her, the woman is shown using a Purcotton cloth to remove her makeup, apparently horrifying her alleged attacker and making him run away.
While it is unclear when the ad was first launched, social media users in China took advantage of the short video, denouncing its apparent message of blaming the victim and labeling it “disgusting” and “wrong”. Some even called for a boycott of the company’s products.
“You use what scares women the most in an ad, which is beyond comprehension and is unacceptable,” said a user on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like platform.
China Women’s News, a website operated by the Chinese Federation of Women, affiliated with the government, denounced the ad on its social networks for “demonizing the victim”.
“(It is) full of prejudice, malice and ignorance. Women are consumers and not consumer goods. It is inevitable that ‘creative’ ads that insult women will be criticized by the public,” said the post on social media.
Purcotton, which belongs to Winner Medical Group, has more than 240 stores in China and about 20 million customers, according to the company’s website.
Purcotton originally defended the ad as a creative way to advertise the “product cleaning function”, but as boycott requests increased, the company removed the video from its accounts and ended up apologizing on January 8.
“We have assembled a team to hold people accountable for the problem and in the meantime, we will improve content production and the review process to prevent similar incidents from occurring again,” said the company’s post. Purcotton posted a second letter of apology to his Weibo account on Monday.
It is not the first time that a Chinese company has been forced to apologize on charges of sexism.