During the week the below ad was released in Ireland, to much international commentary/ hilarity/ mockery, but then a subsequent backlash. It’s the work of Cuan, a government agency established to address gender-based violence, and was jointly produced with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. The stated purpose of the ad is to teach about consent, which it does by encouraging grandparents not to pre-emptively hug their kids and kids to feel empowered to reject unwanted grandparental advances. The initial derision was so strong that the government disowned it and the ad has now been taken down from their official accounts. A full breakdown of the incident is here.
The core of the criticism from people who hated it - aside from the idea that it was bizarre for a government to try and regulate this behaviour - was that the ad constituted an instance of wokeness gone mad, and also that it’s part of a continuing attempt to delegitimise normal Irish family life. This response became so over the top that it inspired a backlash to the backlash, with a smaller group of people defending the ad on the basis that while it made it’s point clumsily that it addressed something real, and in any case the controversy around it was cynical and disproportionate.
From my own point of view, before I watched it through I had assumed the ad would use the idea of unwanted hugs as a metaphor for bodily consent in a wider sense. My main feeling upon watching it was surprise and confusion that it really doesn’t do that - it really is just a public health infomercial about innocent but overbearing touchy-feely relatives; while it’s not the biggest deal in the world that is quite strange, and I can see why it irritates people. The presence of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre logo in the final frame implies the government itself was drawing a linkage between this behaviour and actual rape/ assault, which is not helfpul. But I think everyone is a little bit right and a little wrong about this. The ad is innocuous in and of itself while still being representative of a larger issue I haven’t seen anyone put their finger on. To me it’s an inconsequential symptom of a consequential problem, like a skin rash that just happens to be the side effect of a degenerative neurological illness.
