I seem to remember there was another poster in that campaign which hinted at the possibility of the man being raped himself if he went to prison for rape.

And here it is.

A significant proportion of young British men have poor literacy skills – they won’t read it.

Young drivers account for the highest number of RTAs, hence pay the highest insurance premiums (if they insure at all). ‘No Entry’ signs mean nothing to them.

The turn-on image cancels out the turn-off message.

Increasing numbers of Young British men read lads’ mags, which aren’t on the top shelf but should be. Lads mags are full of ads for ’services’ like phone sex. The same young men are increasingly likely to end a stag party with a visit to a prostitute. Their attitude to women is generally rubbish. An ad like this won’t change that.

Rapists are unlikely to be prosecuted, so why should they care?

It gets worse. When I was in Japan, the big compliment Western men coveted from a Japanese sex partner was “Itai!!” (“It hurts!!”) I had to listen to that night after night (different women, of course) from my stockbroker flatmate’s room downstairs, so I know.

“Rather than demonizing rapists and what they do, the ad actually shows a kind of concern for them”

Right, J. I think that’s what bugs me about it.

I agree with the posters saying that humiliating someone is a big turn-on for a lot of guys. Some of them know that about themselves and are perfectly okay with it, some don’t know that about themselves but still act on it under the influence of alcohol or drugs. And then there’s the whole slew of ‘em that like to cast themselves as “protector” in their rape fantasies so that they can spend lots of time thining about rape AND thinking about what a great guy they (theoretically) are.

Well geez, haven’t Operation Rescrew and the rest of the fetus-flingers reminded you of that for years?

I should be the first to point out that this is almost kind of slightly hypocritical of me to say, given that I also said the ad’s fault is with the fact that it is more about the rapists than their victims.

A thoughtful and responsible acknowledgement of the wrongness of rape will focus on how it hurts the victim, not on how it reflects badly on the rapist.

The argument about whether the ad is effective or not needs some context. Nuts magazine (along with its evil twin, Zoo), is one of the most disgusting publications I’ve ever seen. I believe Gloria Steinem once said that for a woman, reading Playboy was like reading Mein Kampf; well, Nuts and Zoo are ten times worse than Playboy. Even within media circles, I have heard these mags described with horror as ‘rapist training manuals’. They are filled with endless pictures of extremely young, photoshopped, identikit sexbots, bending over to proffer their bald undercarriages to the reader, no gleam of life in their sad, dulled eyes. One of these magazines recently featured a competition to win ‘your girlfriend’ a boob job. An omnipresent characteristic of the journalism is the connection between masculine success and persuading girls to do something sexual which, implicitly in the magazine’s rhetoric, they won’t like. (Yes, ‘they’.)

So you have an entire magazine visually devoted to belittling, ridiculing, objectifying and humiliating women. This is supplemented by copy implying that the relative success of a man’s interaction with a woman can be measured in terms of whether he has persuaded her to go down on him, take it up the arse, or whatever other act they have decided is suitably submissive to the great phallus that week.

So the Home Office is probably right to place its anti-rape advert in Nuts: it’s where the rapists hang out. But the image of yet another image of disembodied female flesh is, in context, just another image of disembodied female flesh. And the juxtaposing of a no-entry sign with some virginal white cotton panties is, I think, less likely to put the rapist-in-training off than to appeal to him as an exciting new challenge.

In conclusion: ad not only yucky, but potentially counterproductive. If rape is to decrease, women have to be seen as human beings. Not very likely to happen overnight. Best buy one of SusanM’s jackets.