Hitler’s unmistakable moustache leers up to camera as he gyrates away at a beautiful woman at the climax of a new Aids awareness advert in Germany. The payoff is: “Aids is a mass murderer”. There’s 44 seconds of face-obscured graphic nudity before you get to see she’s brought Adolf home at 2.33am, a man who will shag her to death.
Here we’re basically saying sex with an HIV-positive man is like having sex with Hitler. If you’ve got an HIV-positive son it’s like having Hitler for a son. It’s not saying use a condom it’s saying don’t have sex with someone who’s infected at all costs. You’ll be sleeping with a Nazi and not in a kinky F1 Max Mosley sort of way.
It’s throwing out any consideration for your HIV-positive population in order to frighten people and deter infection. It’s disturbingly retro: groping back to an eighties tenet which has faded, namely that HIV-positive people are evil. As global figures of HIV have increased we’ve gone an encouraging, community-based, tolerance route with campaigns. The focus has been for people to live healthily with HIV.
There is a fair argument to lean back a little heavier on the fact that this person can kill you, but what’s illogical about using Hitler is it puts a malicious twist in the person you’re sleeping with. This turns against decades of tedious education trying to stop people from judging HIV status by appearance. Whoopi Goldberg has painstakingly tried to stop intelligent adults from sitting at a bar and trying to guess if the person they’ve just met is nice enough, amusing enough, to be HIV negative. Hitler is a pop-cultural icon recognisable for mass murder, but your average HIV-positive man or woman might not know themselves. It alludes to a world where everyone with Aids wears little Hitler moustaches — then we would know for sure.
The campaign will be on television till Aids Day in December. They are not going to release an Aids ribbon fashioned as a curvy swastika, though if all they want is “awareness” then they should. That’s what the agency claim they were after: awareness — “and see you’re talking about it at the water cooler, we win!” More talking means more awareness. On a painfully oblivious level the advert works to remind you that Aids exists and is killing lots of people. Being a European campaign this could be considered enough. Germany has an HIV-positive prevalence rate of 0.1%. Across Europe it is still a (comparatively) rare occurrence with 2.2 million people living as HIV positive. I don’t support the advert or the message but Germany’s concern is not their infected population. In South Africa if we see an HIV-positive man on television he’s usually just run a marathon or built a house in an advert for insurance.
What’s frustrating is our campaigns against HIV haven’t worked either. Plus LoveLife only ever showed a naked woman if she was pregnant and without a head. The sad part is, like any argument, if anyone mentions Hitler or the Holocaust it means they are truly out of answers. Which I guess everyone has to admit — when it comes to Aids “awareness” — the well is dry.
Hey Paul
I posted this comment on Jennifer Thorpe’s post about the issue. But I think it is very relevant to your post too.
This ad is not AIDS, it is about the ad agency. It is PR for them.
They have chosen to work on this client, pro bono, because it brings them press. It makes people say: Oh, it was you guys who did the Hitler thing. Woh, man that was out there!
This happens all the time in the ad industry. And often to the detriment of the NGOs they are meant to be helping.
A couple of links to similar cases:
One in Brazil
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/04/ddb-brasil-wwf-twin-towers-ad
One in France
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/article/122306
All this said there are good people in the ad industry trying to do good and relevant work for charities and Awareness campaigns.
But these guys are glory hunters. Out for cheap press. And unfortunately they are getting it.
oops, left out a word!
meant to say
This ad is not about AIDS, it is about the ad agency.
I echo your concern that associating an HIV positive person with Hitler opens us up to a new surge of stigma which we’ve tried so hard to get rid of.
But for me, the danger lies in humanising the virus. HIV does not have a human face and it doesn’t have intent – it’s a virus.
This isn’t the only campaign which gives HIV a personality. And HIV isn’t the only virus that’s portrayed as an evil killer. Swine Flu has been given the same label, as was meningitis earlier this year.
Maybe our campaigns are failing because we’ve complicated basic disease prevention messages by combining them with social issues?
Of course, I know it’s not that simple. But surely the thought that you may have a serial killer working it’s way through your immune system is enough to trigger denial and put anyone off testing? And it doesn’t do much to reinforce the message that an HIV positive status is not a death sentence.
Good piece.
i think that the sex scenes are a little graphic, but that aside this is just like the ads against smoking where they show pics of lungs or drinking and driving where they show graphic images of car crashes. people dont care unless it affects them personally.
my 2 cents
I agree with you, Paul. There are many problematic aspects of this advertising campaign. Nazism and the global HIV epidemic have nothing in common and suggesting the opposite is dangerous. I wrote a bit more about the topic here: http://bit.ly/FBz35
Great ad. If you know you have HIV and you don’t disclose it before humping anyone (with or without a condom), you’re a potential murderer – simple. It is only all the namby-pamby politically correct types that look for other interpretations to justify their ridiculous stance of granting privacy at all costs to those with the condition – even at the expense of those who do not (yet).