Yelp Sorry About Ruining Anti-Rape Message
Whoops: Yelp signed up “SF Women Against Rape” as a sponsor of its email newsletter, then ran their ad under an insinuating headline about bicycles that read, “Put the Fun Between Your Legs.” Cue the outrage!
One furious blogger promised to yank her contributions to the user-review site, adding:
I’m not willing to contribute to padding the wallets of anyone who thinks nothing of pairing innuendo with sexual assault.
Yelp promptly apologised, and tried to recall the newsletter and replace it with a tamer one. But it couldn’t keep the fuss from spreading to Twitter and various weblogs (including TechCrunch).
For all the fist-shaking, the ad is basically some silly humour put in a terribly inappropriate — and, we’re guessing, unintended — context. If some critics are ascribing the crudest of intentions to the site, well, perhaps that’s the price it must pay for throwing such notorious parties.
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
I don't get what there is to be offended about. Is sexual innuendo supposed to be like being raped a second time?
...and so the dialogue begins.
at least they didn't use the go-to "rode hard/put away wet" joke.
shostakobitch
@DonLaFontaine: Yeah.... no. What you're not seeing is this isn't automatically generated advertising randomly placing these two things together. It's a newsletter that someone at yelp wrote and the Women against Rape group paid to sponsor. So somewhere along the line of putting that content together, someone has to review this and see this and say "hey... that's not ok."
xhack
Badvertising? Pot calling the kettle black, Gawker? Isn't this a little soon after the whole Blood Copy fiasco?
Forbesian
Would the person writing the newsletter have any idea who this week's sponsor was? I can see it being a simple, if inconvenient and offensive, error of coincidence.
@DonLaFontaine: oh bullshit. there's a person at every single one of these companies that's supposed to catch this shit. yelp is a scummy company all around and let's not pretend some "customer service guy" (they exist at yelp?) is getting a ton of undeserved ire over this.
Instead of directing her rage at the "I joined yelp after all the serious equity had already been doled out" customer service guy, who's working this gig for about 10 bucks/hour, Random Facts Gal should have unscrewed the lid to her computer, yanked out the hamster whose job it is to place the names of appropriate advertisers next to content and give him a serious talking to ... I mean he was the one who really fell asleep on the job.
Harrumph. To begin with, that's a boys bike.
Rumpelstilskin
All's I want to know is - is there a group called "San Francisco Women For Rape? Cause I don't know anyone who's actually for it.
snidelywhiplash
In addition to the less-than-tasteful placement of the headline - although, as noted, it could well be accidental, so I'm not sure how much scorn is really justified here - Yelp also jacked the joke from a popular T-shirt. This design from Portland's Microcosm Publishing is big in the cycling community.
[microcosmpublishing.com]
Patrick Caldwell
@snidelywhiplash:
Rapists, mainly.
j.blo
@AwakenedDesires: Never mind. I looked at it again and I see that it is about the placement of the ad, not the innuendo itself.
AwakenedDesires
@lawnsprinkler: Neither do I. I saw it as an allusion to the ability of some women to have orgasms from riding bikes. Rather unobjectionable in my opinion.
AwakenedDesires