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So the Eve Appeal has a page up about their Funny Feet Campaign, an idea shamelessly stolen from Jeans for Genes Day, where people can wear the ‘wrong’ shoes for a day and pay for the privilege to raise funds for cancer awareness. Don’t get me wrong; gynaecological cancer awareness is a great cause and if wearing slippers to the office is the current zenith of fundraising activity, then go for it. But oddly, it’s paired with the slogan “Stop pussy-footing around.” After a couple of people had tweeted it at me, I sent an email to their contacts team:
Dear Funny Feet,
I’ve just seen your website page with the heading “Stop Pussy Footing Around… and support Gynaecological Cancer Awareness Month in September.” The headline is next to your logo which depicts an outline woman’s body with a red heart where her reproductive system would be.
Is the “pussy footing” reference intended to be a vagina pun? If so, it’s in enormously bad taste given that many people find the term “pussy” a derogatory term for a vagina. Sniggering at vagina jokes on a gynaecological cancer support website seems really odd.
If it was unwittingly done, are you likely to change it? It’s been tweeted at me twice today so people clearly are seeing a pun even if it wasn’t intended.
Best regards
I got a response:
Thank you for getting in touch with us here at The Eve Appeal, we welcome any feedback on the work that we do. I am sorry that you feel so upset about the stop pussy footing around funny feet campaign.
The concept for this came out of a pro bono workshop with a leading London creative agency. There is an enormous amount of ignorance and embarrassment surrounding gynaecological cancers and this is not just confined to women, it includes partners and arguably some of the medical profession too. In order to cut through the 3,000 messages adults receive every day, intent on trying to persuade each one of us to do something or buy some product or other, we needed something punchy, controversial even, to get our message to hit home. We felt the phrase worked well as although it is a tongue-in-cheek pun, which will make people sit up and take notice, it also completely sums up how many women react to problems of a gynaecological nature which is something that we at The Eve Appeal would like to change.
This is predominately a fundraising campaign – this is after all the remit of The Eve Appeal – and therefore stop pussy footing around allows the funny feet fundraising activity to be communicated with both supporters and the general public.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or need any more information.
Well, it’s a response, I guess. But I wasn’t upset – or even offended – by the slogan; I was just a bit bewildered. And yes, it is indeed meant to be a vagina joke, designed for attention grabbing and fundraising. They don’t particularly care if you remain too embarrassed about your vagina / pussy / {insert coy euphemism of choice} to make a date with that speculum, but they’d quite like your money, please.
They’re quite right that the main reasons for not getting cervical screening are embarrassment and ignorance (as per this study). Embarrassment about the sexual and reproductive organs is caused by a society which either pornifies them (and pussy is a common word in porn) or considers them so dirty that they should be referred to only with euphemism and a hushed giggle. I’m not sure how embarrassment is helped by Mrs Slocombe-style pussy jokes, nor how ignorance is alleviated by connecting the entire reproductive system to the vagina.
This isn’t a new concept; exploiting the sexual potential of breasts for “awareness” of breast cancer has been done a million times. Exactly the same arguments apply to the dehumanising, objectifying, just plain gimmicky adverts for breast cancer awareness as to the Eve Appeal’s pussy foot campaign: see here, here, and here for starters.
Still, at least they didn’t pay for it.
I’m a womb cancer survivor and Macmillan CancerVOICE. Here’s what I sent to the Eve Appeal:
Dear Robert and Liz
STOP PUSSY-FOOTING AROUND
1. Oh dear! Your kind pro bono ad agency needs to do a workshop with some gynae cancer survivors.
I worry that what was extremely well intended as a provocative bit of sexual innuendo could alienate many gynae cancer survivors who are among your best potential fundraisers.
2. Here’s what I wrote to Womb Cancer Support UK earlier:
The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1990) defines Pussy as colloquial for ‘cat’ and “COARSE, SLANG, USUALLY CONSIDERED A TABOO USE FOR VULVA”. Yes – it’s good to use provocative double-entendre if it saves lives but if it insults and degrades a large population of potential fundraisers then the provocative campaign backfires. My husband says the word ‘pussy’ is vulgar. I can’t imagine going to my GP and saying “I have a problem with my pussy”. He’d tell me to see a vet. “Pussy” is coarse slang used by men not women. I can’t imagine a breast cancer campaign talking of jugs or knockers. Or a rectal cancer campaign beginning “Stop arseing about”. What makes it even worse is that the Eve Appeal covers cervical cancer and many of these patients are already horribly stigmatised and often falsely accused of being promiscuous and somehow to blame.”
3. Wikipedia confirms that “pussy” is often used provocatively in advertising. See footnote below.
4. The Eve Appeal is signed up to the Fundraising Standards Board’s ‘Fundraising Promise’, explained here:
The Fundraising Promise is a really important document because it tells you how your chosen charity will behave when raising money.
We Are Respectful
We respect the rights, dignities and privacy of our supporters and beneficiaries
We Are Fair and Reasonable
We take care not to use any images or words that cause unjustifiable distress or offence
http://www.frsb.org.uk/english/give-with-confidence/how-we-can-help/fundraising-promise/
5. Rightly or wrongly the term “pussy-footing around” has distressed and offended a fair number of gynae patients and survivors. Is this distress and offence justifiable? Will more lives be saved by using a vulgar word for vulva? I honestly don’t know.
Thanks for listening.
Very best wishes always,
Katharine
* * *
Wikipedia on “Pussy”
WORDPLAY BETWEEN MEANINGS
The double entendre has been used for over a hundred years by performers, including the late-19th-century vaudeville act the Barrison Sisters, who performed the notorious routine “Do You Want To See My Pussy?” (see entry for more); the Popular Great Depression Era song My Girl’s Pussy, the Funkadelic song “Pussy”, and the character Pussy Galore in the James Bond series, as well as the 1983 film, Octopussy, which refers to a female gang leader. On his album, The Gold Experience, Prince sings a song about a female protagonist named Pussy Control. The Belgian band Lords of Acid also has a song called Pussy, almost every line of which is a double entendre.[3]
One surprisingly risqué joke, especially for 1940,[citation needed] appears in the W. C. Fields movie, The Bank Dick. The bar that Fields frequently attends (tended by Shemp Howard) is called the “Black Pussy Cat”, with “Black Pussy” arched over “Cat” to give it some visual separation. However, it was apparently tame enough that the Hays Office did not take action.
Another notable usage is in the British comedy Are You Being Served?. The character Mrs. Slocombe is often heard to be concerned with the welfare of her pussy (cat), presumably unaware of the secondary meaning. This joke was also used with some other cast members of the show (particularly Messrs. Rumbold and Grainger), showing their unawareness, with lines such as “I hope this (meeting) won’t take very long, it’s very unfair on Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy”.
In the episode “Calling All Customers”, Mrs. Slocombe calls a lonely trucker on Mr. Humphries’ CB radio, setting up perhaps the most intricate “pussy” joke of the series. The trucker tells her he’s hauling dynamite, and proceeds to ask her about her interests. She notes gardening, but that her pussy is her favorite hobby. She exclaims that she has a mantel full of trophies and that it wins a medal every time she shows it. Then follows the sound of screeching tires and an explosion. Mr. Humphries laments, “He’s pulled off for a coffee”.
The double meaning of the word was exploited in a 2005 episode of the American comedy program Arrested Development, where the word was censored if used as an insult, but not censored if used to mean sweet or gentle (as in pussycat). This also can apply to using pussy as a word for weak. On the television series Drawn Together, the episode “Alzheimer’s That Ends Well” features yet another instance of the above. In this episode, Princess Clara receives an “extreme vaginal makeover”, but continually exclaims that something is wrong. In one scene, she claims it has freckles, to which Wooldoor replies, “Lots of pussies have freckles, like Ron Howard”. In the South Park episode “Fun with Veal”, after giving up meat temporarily, Stan Marsh discovers his body is covered in sores. The doctor informs Stan that the sores are actually tiny vaginas, and that not eating meat is turning Stan into “a giant pussy”. In neither of these latter two instances is the word censored.
Steve Martin had a stand-up bit (found on his A Wild and Crazy Guy recording) in which he declared that a woman he’d met had “the best pussy . . .” He then realized what the audience was thinking and immediately expressed outrage and disgust by explaining, “I’m talking about her cat!” and that “You can’t say anything any more without people taking it dirty”. He then muttered that “that cat was the best fuck I ever had”.
An English company has created an energy drink called Pussy. As they state on their web site, “The name Pussy shocks and demands attention – that’s the point”.[4]
Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist punk-rock collective that stages illegal protests in Moscow against the Putin regime and the status of women in Russian society. In an interview, one of the members said that band members are well of aware of the word’s vulgar connotations in English. But “pussy” can also be taken as a term of endearment for girls in Russia. The group members liked the tension between that word, and the rudeness and aggression of the word “riot.”[5]
Thank you for sharing that, Katharine. I’d be really interested to hear what, if anything, they have to say in response.