Victory! Got Milk Ends Sexist PMS Ad Campaign Early Amid Public Outcry

After receiving a flood of angry feedback, including emails from over 8,000 Change.org members, Got Milk has decided to suspend their sexist "PMS" ad campaign.

Last week, Got Milk released a new ad series targeting men who evidently suffer greatly when their lady friends have PMS. The solution? Milk.

The pictures show cowering men holding out bottles of milk, with faux apologies over their head’s like “I’m sorry for not reading between the right lines.” The seemingly caveman created campaign came complete with a website just for men, www.everythingidoiswrong.org, that featured an “emergency milk locator” and a “Global PMS Scale.”

Women (and men) across the internet weighed in immediately, condemning the portrayal of both women as hormonal “volatile monsters” and men as unable to deal with relationship conflict as sexist. Ms. Magazine introduced their Change.org petition with a post called “Nothing Like an Ice Cold Glass of Sexism” that noted the campaign uses “the same stereotypes cited by those trying to keep women out of good jobs, and those who say we shouldn’t have a woman president because she’d start a war just because it was her time of the month.”

As of yesterday, the campaign URL reroutes to www.gotdiscussion.org, where the California Milk Processor Board -- behind the Got Milk? campaigns of the 1990s and today -- notes that “some people found our campaign about milk and PMS to be outrageous and misguided - and to those we offended, we apologize.” The front page of the site samples some of the comments, positive and negative, that they got and encourages users to talk about the campaign by following them on Facebook and Twitter.

As Ms. Magazine noted in their post detailing Got Milk’s change in course, “the URL change is serving as a flimsy stand-in for a real apology and a real end to the campaign.” The site is still using the controversy created by the ads, if not the ads themselves, to sell their product. But, their ploy doesn’t seem to be working out as well for them as they might have hoped -- the #gotdiscussion stream on Twitter is dominated with people who are glad the campaign was pulled or who are unsatisfied with Got Milk’s non-apology apology.

This wasn’t the first time Got Milk? used the stereotype of afire-breathing PMS woman and terrified dude to sell their product. In 2005, they aired a commercial that showed a man racing around to find milk to placate his raging girlfriend. The ad drew some criticism from feminists but completed its run as scheduled. When the New York Times asked Jeff Goodby, one of the ad executives responsible for both campaigns, why the ads had to be pulled this time, he responded, “It was a different world in 2005.”

That it was. Six years later the prevalence of social media, blogs, and petition sites like Change.org mean that people can see something that offends them and immediately start an online action and encourage their friends to join. Mr. Goodby and Got Milk, you’re just the latest example of how consumers can and will hold companies accountable for sexist and otherwise offensive conduct. Reader, it’s up to you to decide who will be next -- start a petition today!