Encouraging folks not to drink and drive is a good idea with many ways of implementation. You could make it harder to drink, you could make it harder to drive, you could make it easier to get home. Or, you could simply remind young men of the danger that they might fuck a girl who isn’t really that hot. That’s what Tennessee did in a recent—and even more recently cancelled—campaign to raise awareness.
Reporting at the Tennessean, Jordan Buie and Natalya Neysa Alund note that the Tennessee Governor’s Highway Safety Office took some heat for their messages aimed at young men to help them realize they’ve had too much to drink. They write:
The campaign boasts slogans that refer to girls looking “hotter” when guys are under the influence and finding out “a marginally good-looking girl” later is “chatty,” “clingy” or “your boss’s daughter” as signs that maybe a man has had too much to drink.
Here’s a photo of the coasters sent out as part of the campaign, which a server at Nashville bar/restaurant Charlie Bob’s found offensive:
Drunk driving: Just like fucking a 2, am I right?
Also in the bathroom at Charlie Bob’s was a flier that read: “After a few drinks the girls look hotter and the music sounds better. Just remember: If your judgment is impaired, so is your driving.”
The Tennessean got to the bottom-dwelling bottom of it:
The fliers and coasters seem to be part of a form of “social norms marketing” mentioned by the Governor’s Highway Safety Office in a 2015 Highway Safety Performance Plan. The plan said this type of marketing targets high-risk populations with messages about normal behaviors, as opposed to “commonly held beliefs about exaggerated substance abuse norms.”
Another part of the campaign mimics the graffiti on the inside a bathroom stall in one section of the highway safety office website, impaired.tntrafficsafety.org. In the section called “Legends of the Stall,” behaviors such as binge drinking, promiscuity and cleaning up vomit with a cat are among the activities of featured graffiti characters who, at the end of their nights, choose not to drive home drunk.
…In one stall story, the drawing of an inebriated young man proclaims that although he bet everyone at the bar $100 he was the best dancer, he didn’t drive home drunk or sleep with a “creepy older woman” who got “lucky” that night.
Those creepy older women will getcha every time, won’t they? They should be lucky we even let them out of the house, in a legal sense!
Following complaints from consumers, bar-goers and a state representative, the videos, posters, and other associated materials are no longer up at the Tennessee traffic safety site section on drinking and driving. The Washington Post reports that the Tennessee Governor’s Highway Safety Office issued a statement via director Kendell Poole, reiterating that no state dollars were used for the campaign, and also:
“It was never the intent of the GHSO to be insensitive or insulting to women.”
The coasters, posters and table tents associated with the federally funded campaign “will no longer be distributed and are being removed from bars across the state,” Poole said, adding that a companion Web site has been shut down.
That companion website is Booze It and Lose it, and it’s indeed dead. But, before it was pulled, Chris Butler made note of the campaign’s other dubious aspects in a post at Tennessee Watchdog:
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