L'Oreal bot reaches new height of stupidity

I wrote about L'Oreal's animal testing procedures a while ago. It wasn't the testing I was shocked about though, it was L'Oreal's blatant ploy to purposefully deceive it's customers into believing that they don't test on animals. When curious Facebook fans ask about their testing policies, L'Oreal Paris UK assert that they "do not test our finished products" on animals and haven't done for some time - how noble of them. What they don't tell you about this cleverly worded reply however is that they continue to test the ingredients that go into said finished products, on, you guessed it - animals. Their copy-pasted stock responses seem to be enough to fool the majority of their Facebook fans, until one lady cottoned onto their stock-response pasting routine.

They pasted the anticipated response anyway. Proving that "L'Oreal" don't even read their customers queries on animal testing but simply fob them off with deceiving copy-pasted nonsense. Oh and L'Oreal are the worlds most profitable cosmetics company, smaller companies like The Co-Op and Superdrug manage to create their own BUAV approved home brand products, so L'Oreal sure as hell can afford to follow suit.

Facebook sexism double-standard continues.

The Wipeout Sexism group on Facebook have just updated their list of pro-rape and pro-violence Facebook pages. I'm not surprised to find that the list is still long after an arduous campaign in which Facebook responded simply by implementing a 'humour' tag and ignoring their hypocrisy. This tag excuses groups whose sole aim is to mock women, violence and rape under the ancient guise of "I'm just joking". Hey, comedians, you know who else finds rape jokes funny? rapists do.

Still no sexism option, because it doesn't exist/ doesn't matter. In a world where we are increasingly taking the serious problem of internet racism seriously, we are not taking the serious problem of internet or real life sexism seriously. It's just not seen as a serious issue, unlike racist hate speech, it is legal and acceptable to exert sexist hate speech and encourage large groups to laugh about drugging and raping women ... because women have equality now? because rape isn't a real problem in our society? Wrong. I hear the word 'rape' being thrown around in a similar way as the word 'gay' used to be thrown around. The latest experience of mine was hearing a young man comparing being charged an extra 50 pence for a drink with being raped - if only, I thought, if only that were like being raped.

 So, what is it? why do most people realise racism isn't okay in the form of a "joke" but sexism is perfectly fine? Is it because for many of us, racism is a distanced issue but admitting to sexism would mean admitting we've been discriminating against 50% of the people we know? I know most men and women see this as a personal attack on their morals and therefore immediately defend their sexist behaviour. I don't think that rape joke makers are bad people, they're just naive and often stubborn. What's wrong with listening to another point of view and admitting that maybe you were wrong?

 I went to see Germaine Greer give a talk last month. While she didn't talk about this topic, she said "we need to think of ways of playfully taking revenge...and then say, 'Only joking!'" I'd probably take out the "playfully" in this situation.