With social media becoming a powerful medium to express one’s thoughts, brands, celebrities, and other famous personalities, in general, have become hyper-aware about the type of content they put out on the internet. Akshay Kumar was recently embroiled in a controversy for a tobacco brand. Now, another commercial has been slammed for promoting rape culture. 

A perfume brand campaigned a new series of commercials where young boys are seen talking in innuendos after seeing a girl alone. For obvious reasons, the ads did not go down well with people and they called out the brand for being tone-deaf about women safety and for casually promoting rape culture. Celebrities like Farhan Akhtar, Priyanka Chopra, Richa Chadha also spoke up about the theme of the and slammed the makers. 

Akhtar wrote, “What incredibly tasteless and twisted minds it must take to think up, approve and create these stinking body spray ‘gang rape’ innuendo ads..!! Shameful.”

Priyanka Chopra Jonas also expressed her anger and tweeted, “Shameful and disgusting. How many levels of clearances did it take for this commercial to be green lit. How many people thought this was ok? I’m so glad that it was called out and now the ministry has taken it down. Appalling!”

The Information and Broadcasting Ministry were quick to take action against the commercial and issued a statement. “The above-mentioned videos are detrimental to the portrayal of women in the interest of decency or morality, and in violation of rule 3(1)(b)(ii) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 which inter-alia provides that the users shall not host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share any information which is insulting or harassing on the basis of gender,” the statement said. The Ministry has mandated the suspension of the advertisement and instituted an investigation under the Advertising Code.

(Featured Image Credits: Twitter)