Little Girls Cussing For Feminism Would Be Great If It Weren't an Ad

Here is a video featuring a passel of cute little girls dolled up in princess gear shouting the word “fuck” and spouting stats about pay inequality and sexual violence. It would be more entertaining if it weren’t trying to sell clothing.

If this were the D.I.Y work of some scrappy feminist and her obscenity-spouting Girl Scouts troop, I’d likely be charmed. But it’s not. It’s a slickly produced piece of viral marketing for “FCKH8.com,” a company that sells t-shirts emblazoned with liberal slogans. (They got their start with LBGT products, specifically.) Examples: “Girls Just Want to Have FUN-damental Rights,” “Racism Is Not Over. But I’m Over Racism,” and “Straight Against Hate.” Available now in racer-back and hoodie styles. $21.99 and $34.99 respectively. (Oh, and let’s not forget “Don’t Be Hatin’ on the Homos.”)

This is an advertisement for a for-profit company. It says so, right on their “about” page: “FCKH8.com is a for-profit T-shirt company with an activist heart and a passionate social change mission: arming thousands of people with pro-LGBT equality, anti-racism and anti-sexism T-shirts that act as ‘mini-billboards’ for change.”

Doing well by doing good is a lovely idea, but this looks to me more like an attempt to commodify deeply held values. They promise they’ll donate $5 to various feminist organizations for every “Girls Just Want to Have FUN-dametal Rights” t-shirt sold, but at the end of the day, the point of a for-profit company is making money.

This isn’t FCKH8’s first such stunt, either. Previously, they landed in hot Twitter water with the video “Hey White People,” featuring kids from Ferguson wearing FCKH8 t-shirts and talking about racism in America. Apparently they didn’t understand what people might find distasteful about using such an event to move t-shirts, because their response called out bloggers for “clickbait” and quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “We’d prefer that the video and message from the participating Ferguson families and kids be judged on the content of its character and not the color of the skin of the director who pitched in to help make it.”