Are You A "Bitch"?

Today I came across a disturbing social marketing campaign that makes the Philadelphia "Have YOU Been Hit?" campaign look good. As you can see the main media image features a young Black man, well built with his hand on his crotch and the tagline "Don't Be A Bitch. Use A Condom!". This imagery is yet another example of poor social marketing meant to get Black gay men to practice safer sex. This campaign was released in San Francisco and apparently was paid for with money from the SF Department Of Health, which is hard to believe, given the content of the media. However, this editorial in a San Francisco paper states otherwise.

So I cruised through the site to see what was there and with every page I became increasingly angered by the content. First of all, the term "homoboy" is an offensive play on the urban vernacular donned by young Black men. When you click on the dog, who I presume is a female dog, it takes you to a quiz that is supposed to determine if you are a "bitch" or a "homoboy" based on your sexual practices......sorry, but I'll pass on both terms. I took the quiz and answered the sexual questions with a high sexual risk and the quiz told me this. How is this message supposed to change my behavior? Someone please school me, I just don't get it!

So then, I looked at the outreach workers who did outreach for the project and while several of them appear to be Latino and one Black, this makes the issue more disturbing, especially with their "homoboy" bling necklaces. Regardless of race, this is just wrong. It's hard to believe that someone thought this campaign up, and it's even more difficult to believe that a funder paid money to develop and implement this campaign into the community and thought it was okay. For that one Black outreach worker in the photos, he needs to be bitch slapped for engaging in a campaign that makes a mockery of his race!

I don't think I've ever seen a media campaign so racist, sexist, judgmental and inappropriate. If you look at the staff of the agency, Better World Advertising, who developed this campaign, there is only one Black person and a few other people of color. I don't know how they could have in good conscious put this campaign together and expect it could be effective. So if I decide not to use a condom, I'm a bitch? Oh yeah that's going to get me to start practicing safer sex. If you look at the questions and the response categories in their survey they are extremely offensive as well. No wonder why HIV infections continue to rise among Black MSM, because many of the messages developed for us promoting better sexual health miss the mark and are inappropriate, culturally insensitive and just don't make sense!

This website needs to be shut down and removed from the Internet. Please join me in writing to the media firm who hosts this website and let them know your thoughts. Don't allow this offensive and racist content to remain accessible to the public. We should not allow our sexual health to be reduced to "bling bling" and racist notions of how Blacks act, dress and think. Send an email to the social marketing firm who created the media and hosts the website at: contact@socialmarketing.com .