Spirit Airlines — they of the multi-year labor dispute and the charge for carry-on bags — would like to encourage you to buy tickets to Cancun, Puerto Rico, Atlantic City or Fort Lauderdale with a timely new ad campaign called Best Protection. The tag line? “Check out the oil on our beaches.” And you thought Haley Barbour’s tourism promotion campaign was offensive.
Spirit Air is using the new campaign to promote its sale fares to beach getaways unaffected by BP’s massive oil spill, and they’d like potential customers to know that the only oil you’ll find on those beaches is slathered on the bodies of bikini-clad women who will all stare at newcomers with come-hither eyes and pouting lips. Get it? Their oil will protect you — or, at least the scantily clad women you slather it on.
The campaign is, of course, as sexist as it is offensive to the residents of the Gulf Coast who are watching their livelihoods, wildlife and property values swallowed up in caustic and deadly crude oil as a result of the explosion aboard BP’s Deepwater Horizon and the subsequent spill. So, what better time for a few puns about what BP really stands for and some women you can objectify!
Because, to point out: in the photographs, the oil isn’t on the beaches of Atlantic City or anywhere else. The “oil” is on the women on the beaches. And, although Spirit Air hardly owns the beaches, they do own the rights to the pictures of the oiled-up women they use to promote their $50 coupon. Come check out their sexy, oiled-up women! There’s nothing like a good pun and a bikini-clad woman to objectify to help you forget about all those nasty dying animals and sad people losing their livelihoods.
