Konditor - joy through cake advert

[SunsetBeetch]

"So who thinks this was made by accident and totally innocently? #pornculture t.co/JGfzd3uh0P"

twitter.com/SaraBrechGC/status/1148955967683534849?s=19

And their response:

twitter.com/konditorcakes/status/1149324367089848332?s=19

We created this campaign from a place of joy, especially the joy of cake. This image was curated by a diverse group of Konditor team members from different races, sexualities & inclusive of all genders. (1/2)

This image was never intended to be offensive or derogatory, it's just a person enjoying a slice of cake. The campaign includes images of everyone enjoying cake. (2/2) t.co/baAjRd0HLD

Disgusting. And our resident woman-hating gay man just loves the advert doesn’t he? Nothing like dehumanising women to get AH going. Well if they think their business can rely solely on creeps and gay men, they should probably think again. When it comes to consumer power, women really don’t understand just quite how powerful we are ( remember Ocado? )

Joani Walsh is not defending them

You are not looking at the Twitter thread I linked . She was defending them on using that really offensive name for brownies.
This is what she said.

You do realise the people who decided to use it in THEIR company are gay men... You obv know nothing of the history of queer. Ever heard of queer bashing?

So you've been selling this product for years but now, because a bunch of puritanical journalists have declared themselves the morality police and word witchfinder generals, it's suddenly unacceptable?

Queer used to be unacceptable, too. Personally I think if gay men want to use it to their advantage and 100s of 1000s of customers haven’t objected I don’t know what’s going on that two gay journalists think they get to be word witchfinder generals and the new morality police

Funny, isn’t it. All those years, all those customers, no complaint. Two humourless gay journalists with enormous reach decide they know best and a company that can be ruined by someone declaring them ‘offensive’ decides they are no longer autonomous after all

I think she's bang out of order on all the points she makes.

BobTheDuvet

The quotes you posted make me think even less of Joani Walsh. The word is not old-fashioned British humour- what a stupid thing to say.

She has a point that K & C caved in to the complaints about but she is showing herself up as a huge hypocrite given what she said about Patrick Strudwick.

Isnt she trying to defend freedom of thought and language. The freedom to say things others might disagree with. And the freedom of others to then disagree.

Isnt she trying to defend freedom of thought and language. The freedom to say things others might disagree with. And the freedom of others to then disagree

No. She was defending the use of a really vile word to describe gay men and criticising gay men for objecting to it.

Calling it old fashioned old-fashioned British humour-is incredibly stupid as well as inaccurate.

old-fashioned British humour

Donald McGill's seaside humour has never been my cup of tea but to each their own. (I admire the skill to tell a story in a simple image and limited text tho'.)

Is the phrase a useful barometer to guide current sensibilities? "Old-fashioned British humour" found a mass of misogynist, racist, *ist topics to be popular and humorous.

Yes.

One real problem though is many people shate that sense of humour. PC sensibilities may drive such stuff underground where it is not challenged. Hence real undercurrents of things like misogyny, lesbophobia, anti-semitism etc on University campuses.

Not that I am welcoming uncomfortable stuff, but policing of speech has potentially dangerous repercussions.

Joy through Cake does have weird Nazi undertones as a pp said. I thought of "Kraft durch Freude" (Strength through Joy) which was their state travel agency. Especially as Konditor is a German word meaning "confectioner" and cake shops are Konditorei - aren't they English?

(the company I mean)

Why not bring back the Joy Divisions and be done with it.

Clearly this is pornographic and incredibly sinister. Why is this normalised now?

Explanation of Joy Divisions here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Dolls

It's also antisemitic.

Years ago I stopped buying from Benetton as I felt their "edgy" advertisements were too much. My view, so presumably they were aiming at a different market. Ditto 18-30 holidays.

Konditor again seem to be aiming for a different market segment. They backed down when they might offerenays, they are not interested in backing down if they offend women.

This makes a certain amount of sense.I used to go in fairly regularly when they first opened. I now rarely pass that way, but the last time I did, the shop seemed full of small cakes with silly slogans.

I am not their market. They clearly don't want me as a customer. I am happy to ignore them, and leave them in their silly, misogynistic and offensive woke world.

And as for Joani Walsh, I appreciate her as an independent thinker. I will listen to her but don't automatically expect to agree with her. This need for everyone to agree to a Guardian type age is what is causing the problems in the first place.

The National Theatre is different as I help pay for them, and I am mentally preparing my complaint to Barclays. I don't want to bank with someone who promotes the normalisation of Kink and Queer and the rest of the ++ alphabet.

@placemats I was a bit surprised to see a glossy magazine showing a Joy Division t-shirt on its fashion pages recently for that very reason (I know it’s a band and all, but still we all know what it means...) and was even more shocked to see someone at work actually wearing one. Clearly this has been an epic marketing fail by this cake company on several levels (or maybe not, as we are now talking about it).

BobTheDuvet No worries. I realised after I posted the Twitter link that my reference to "thread" was ambiguous.

This is part of the normalisation of vulgarity which FannyCann pointed out. - what a giggle going into a bakery and asking for that.

I knew where the band name came from but ironically I knew people who didn't know where the name came from and didn't even know such things existed.

The band name highlighted the horrors that women endured. Of course it was dressed up in a jolly japes type of she has agency and choice name, hence Joy Divisions.

Bob, I don't know.

www.musicko.com/joy-division/where-does-the-name-%E2%80%9Cjoy-division%E2%80%9D-come-from-was-it-chosen-by-the-band-because-of-nazi-sympathies

I'm sceptical of this explanation
Ian Curtis, Stephen Morris, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner settled for that name because all their fathers had fought in World War II. They just wanted a name that had some kind of connection to that armed conflict, as a way of referencing its true weight and how it had touched the lives of their parents

Out of everything in WWII they picked that?

I think the name was picked simply to be shocking , not that they had Nazi sympathies or that they wanted to highlight these women.

It is isn't it? They could have picked say "Dunkirk" or "The Normandy Beaches" if they wanted to reference the conflict.