Stupid Ad

Today I was confronted with a bit of a Catch-22 situation.

On the front page of a little local town-paper was an ad from a real-estate agency which I found to be unbelievably stupid and sexist.  I contemplated just leaving it be, because I hate giving them the added attention, but in the end I emailed the company, and posted a snippet of the ad on Facebook and Google+ because, really?  It’s 2013, not 1980!

Needless to say, I am not tempted to ever bring my business to that firm.  It looks like the place is run by chauvinistic pigs.

Here’s the ad:

So here you have pictures of five lovely looking ladies, with email and phone-numbers listed for four of them, almost personal-ad style.

The text on top translates to ‘THE GIRLS at the AGENCY LET THEIR ACTIONS SPEAK and SELL REAL-ESTATE”, which in and of itself isn’t terrible.  Sure, using ‘the girls’ about ‘women’ is a little silly, and somebody went on a drunken font-size and font-color rampage, but that’s not what caught my eye.

No, what caught my eye was that red box on the right where it says: “THE GIRLS are still all way under FORTY”.

What?!?!

Seriously!  What the heck does ‘the girls being way under forty’ have to do with them selling real-estate?!?!  Are they suggesting that by doing business with the agency, a customer has a chance of having a child with one of these women – because really – what other female ‘talent’ changes at forty except child-bearing?  Are customers perhaps more likely to buy houses if the agent is ovulating?  Or are they implying that I should stay clear of any female real-estate agent who’s over forty?  What, because they suck at their job?

I just didn’t get it, and I still don’t.

So I wrote them (the manager, and all the women listed) a letter saying that I was not interested in doing business with a company which values women over forty less than women under forty.  Because, really, what they’re implying is that there’s something ‘wrong’ with women over forty.  Yeah, the ‘barren’ ones.  Which is just stupid and sexist.

I did get a couple of replies from two of the women.

One of them noted that above the little red box is a logo celebrating the 40 year anniversary of Re/Max, and her ‘excuse’ was that the ‘under FORTY’ comment was supposedly reflecting ‘humorously’ on that… somehow.  She also added that most of the women that work there are actually older than forty(!!!).  Oh, and she promised that they’d ‘look into the matter’ in the future.

As it turns out, I also got a reply from the only woman in the ad who is actually ‘under forty’ and she emailed back agreeing with my sentiment.  If she happens to branch out on her own, I may consider doing with business with her in the future.  The rest, not so much.