Crossposted at Deeply Problematic
This problematic poster is currently making the rounds
Issues:
1) The onus is placed on the women being preyed on, not the predator. The young women manipulated and hurt by older men are constructed as more culpable than the men wronging them.
2) The girl in this picture is clearly white, but is the man black? The lips and the dark hair seem to code him as black, and it would fit neatly into our cultural narrative of relations between black men and white women as predatory and scurrilous .
3) Illegitimate children constructs the family as necessarily nuclear (along with other issues).
4) AIDS is not equal to death.
Thoughts?
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I don't necessarily read the girl as white. She's sort of ambiguous to me. The man does look black or possibly Latino, though I suppose he could be a curly haired white man? It makes me wonder more about my own assumptions when I look at imagery.
Yes, older men can give you STDs. So can the ones your own age. If they want to address the problem of STD's wouldn't it be better to have posters about responsibility aimed at everyone? If they're trying to address the problem of older people taking advantage of teenagers, is scare tactics like this the best way to go about it?
Yeah, the girl looks kind've Asian to me, and the guy looks Latino or white.
I don't think the guy looks black so much as shoddily drawn (as does the girl, for that matter)...
Just as a matter of curiosity, where (in the real world) has this been posted? I tried to read the bottom to see if it would at least give a hint, but the print was too small and blurry for me to make out.