The following was submitted to the Bellingham Herald, March 31, 2008, in response to Scott Ayers' blog posting entitled "Trying to get conservatives to take part."

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While they may broil up a decent burger, Burger King’s advertising strategy is puzzling to me. Several years ago, Burger King invested a substantial sum on a series of ads featuring their trademark King. This King character is annoying and as nightmare-producing as any I’ve seen. He jumps out from behind trees, appears outside the window of your home like some sort of peeping –Tom, has a fairy-tale love moment with a burly logger, and in some cases you wake up and find the King lying next to you in your bed. It is no wonder a subsequent series of ads portrays three crazed women bent on murdering the King.

Then there was the ad campaign Burger King launched featuring the fictional heavy-metal band named Coq Roq wherein all the band members wore some form of chicken head. In these works of art, audience members were seen holding signs proclaiming “Girls love Coq” and “Groupies love the Coq,” while the band screamed out the song, “Bob Your Head.” Okay, I get the innuendo in this Middle-School gutter humor, subtle though it may be, and call me a prude if you must, but it disgusts me.

Just as disturbing, and Middle-Schoolesque, is the Burger King ad with the character in a chicken suit jumping around in a pen while some musician drones on in tones reminiscent of Bob Dylan, singing “Big Buckin’ Chicken.” It was no great surprise when shortly thereafter, Burger King changed the ad, and rather than jumping around in a corral, the chicken suited acrobat is doing motorcycle stunts, as the deep voiced announcer proclaims him the “Big Huckin’ Chicken.” Why not just produce an ad, tossing in the adjective that says what they really want to say, and be done with it?

The current ad campaign has flushed all sense of decency and decorum. Beginning March 1, Burger King launched an ad campaign expanding on their 1973 campaign, “Have It Your Way.” In today’s vernacular, Have It Your Way translates to, “Pimp My Burger,” a take-off on the MTV program, “Pimp My Ride.”

We live in a society in which, increasingly, “good is called evil and evil is called good.” Pimping is so celebrated that a major US Corporation can now utilize it as a positive thing in an ad campaign. Rapper, Nelly, sells Pimp Juice. Consumers can buy a Pimp Watch. Virgin Atlantic Airways markets a service they call “Pimp My Lounge” and “It’s Hard Out Here For a Pimp” gets a nod from the Academy as Best Song. Pimp and Ho costumes are marketed in sizes for children four to six years old. Now, I sit, incredulous, wondering how in the name of human decency Burger King can play on a trade in which women are exploited sexually for the profits of their “owner.”

An overstatement? Hardly. Let’s consider the reality of pimping for a moment. Pimps do not think of their Ho’s as women, but as property. Forced to perform the most unspeakable acts for the pleasure of their Johns, these women are usually desperate, often runaway teens, either tricked or forced into trafficking their sexuality. Women enslaved to their pimps are beaten into submission and a state of helplessness, where their only hope to survive is to receive some benevolence from the pimp. The pimp takes all the money from the sex trafficking, and in return, provides his commodity with food, shelter, clothing, minimal medical care, and bailing out of jail as needed.

So mainstream and acceptable has this behavior become, that rapper Snoop Dogg can stroll into the audience of a major awards program dragging a pair of provocatively-clad women on leashes, and he is applauded for it. We see in this, that trafficking of women as subhuman sex objects is not only accepted, but praised and endorsed.

I cannot shrug my shoulders and act as if this is no big deal; that it is not tearing at the very fabric of our humanity. The moral degradation of our society, and objectification of women, is something I find deeply disturbing. The fact that Burger King, a major US Corporation, finds this acceptable subject matter for an advertising campaign aimed at women and youth only deepens my concern. I am compelled to speak out against it.

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