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Not your usual
nudie billboard flap

It's the tagline that's got folks in a big snit

By Toni Fitzgerald
Oct 6, 2009

There's always a swift public reaction whenever a billboard goes up with a nude woman splashed across it, no matter where. So it's no surprise that an outcry has erupted in South Africa over a billboard with a naked lady laying flat on her back.

But for once people are not in a bunch over the many womanly curves on display in the ad, which recently went up in the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton for the strip club Teazers.

It's the words.

Emblazoned alongside the woman--one arm strategically across her naked breasts with the other reaching suggestively between her well-oiled legs--is the tagline, "No need for Gender Testing!"

Talk about a hot political issue.

Folks are taking the quip as a thinly veiled reference to Caster Semenya, the world 800-meter track champ whose masculine appearance led to demands last month that she be stripped of her medal and subjected to gender testing.

Sandton residents in particular took offense to the ad. A number of complaints have been filed with the country's Advertising Standards Authority. The ASA is investigating, and should it find that the billboard is offensive, Teazers will have to take it down.

Lolly Jackson, the owner of Teazers, has been coy about the true meaning of the billboard. At first he insisted that Semenya was "the furthest thing from my mind when we did the advert," as he told South Africa's Star.

He claims the ad is meant to point out how desirable the club's women are. But he seemed to go back on his claim when he recently donated money to Semenya, saying he was sorry she'd been drawn into the controversy.

He also has blamed South African track and field authorities for creating the scandal by covering up the fact that they had undertaken gender testing before the world championships. The results have not been released, and that's only served to fuel the public controversy. There's some belief that Semenya, raised as a girl, may in fact be a hermaphrodite, having the sex organs of both sexes.

The controversy has been nothing if not colorful. Speaking to a reporter last month, Jackson had some choice words for the person who filed the first ASA complaint.

"Maybe the woman who complained should lose a bit of weight and her husband will then stop looking at the Teazers billboard, maybe she is fat and ugly. I don't give a s*#@ about her moral issues," he said.

Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life.	© 2010 Media Life Magazine

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