To All The Girls I’ve Loved (and offended) Before

Today I sent out a newsletter with a nice infographic as an illustration. I’m showing it here in full glory on the right. As you can see it lists “prerequisites 2 be my girl” based on the famous song “Kiss” by Prince.

We featured a similar one before based on Rick Astley’s ’never gonna give you up’ which was just as funny.

Or so I thought. Minutes after sending the email I got a message from one of our readers:

“Really? Really? What were you thinking with the “Prerequisites 2 Be My Girl” sidebar? You should issue a public apology.”

I had no idea what she meant so asked

Really? Why???

Her reply:

I’m surprised that you don’t understand. In the united states, sexualizing women in a business context is considered extremely inappropriate, and in certain cases legally actionable.

I’m not interested in having a lengthy conversation about this, as I’m busy and you can easily educate yourself. A quick search of amazon or google would probably yield all the material you need to become savvy in this area. Here’s a start —

Google Book Results: http://bit.ly/14nuJo

I figured she just didn’t know ‘Kiss’ from Prince so I explained it to her with a link to a videoclip of the song and  included the Rick Astley image too.

Issue solved? No such luck. Her reply:

No, really — you don’t understand. The cultural reference doesn’t matter. This is inappropriate in the same way that the big butts reference was inappropriate in Dave McClure’s post a few months ago. And I like Dave. You still shouldn’t do it.

Here is that ‘big butts‘ post. It shows a big butt. Not very classy and a lot of women felt offended and asked if that was really necessary. I get that.

But this? That Prince song?
And the infographic? Is that image sexualizing women in a business context???
Offensive to women? Prince?? Really???

Well, if that was offensive to women I hereby issue a public apology to all women who were offended.

So tell me now, who else was offended? Comments please…

For the girls who didn’t understand the title of this post here is the original. No offense intended there either.