The ad, produced by the Chinese cotton product Purcotton, shows a woman walking down a dimly lit street at night, followed by a masked man. As the man begins to approach her, the woman is shown using a Purcotton wipe to remove her makeup, making her potential assailant seem gruesome, and causing him to run away.
While it’s unclear when the ad was first released, social media users in China have confiscated the short video, denouncing the seemingly victim-blaming message, labeling it as ‘disgusting’ and ‘wrong’. Some have even called for a boycott of the company’s products.
“You use what scares women the most from an ad, which is incomprehensible and unacceptable,” said a user on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like platform.
China Women’s News, a website operated by the government-affiliated All-China Women’s Federation, denounced the ad on their social media for “demonizing the victim.”
“(It is) full of prejudice, malice and ignorance. Women are consumers, not consumer goods. It is inevitable that ‘creative’ advertisements insulting women will be criticized by the public,” according to social media.
Purcotton, which is owned by Winner Medical Group, has more than 240 stores in China and an estimated 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 calls for a boycott grew, the company removed the video from their accounts and finally apologized on January 8 .
“We have created a team to hold people accountable for the issue and in the meantime, we will improve content production and the review process to prevent similar incidents from happening again,” the company’s post said. Purcotton posted a second letter of apology to their Weibo account on Monday.
It is not the first time that a Chinese company has had to apologize for allegations of sexism.