Back in April, model/actor/Internet person Ashton Kutcher, otherwise known as @aplusk, along with his wife Demi Moore, launched the “Real Men” campaign, a star-studded series of public service announcements intended to raise awareness about child prostitution.
“We came up with the concept of the ‘Real Men Don’t Buy Girls’ campaign, which aims to engage people, specifically men, in the issue. To do so, we filmed short, funny videos about things ‘Real Men’ do, starring high-profile influential men and women,” Kutcher said at the campaign’s launch. “The concept of the campaign is that real men do a lot of silly, even foolish things. But one thing they don’t do is buy children for sex. That’s not funny, and real men don’t do it.”
Here’s the spot Kutcher filmed for the campaign…
Fast forward to now and the Village Voice, which is laden with sex ads in its back pages, has run a cover story blasting Kutcher and Moore’s campaign, saying that it “reeks of frat boy humor” and is based on a myth — specifically that the campaign’s calculation that the United States currently harbors between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves is wildly off (Sadly, it makes no mention of the fact that the “real men” featured in the campaign are all rich and famous and probably never have to consider paying someone to bone them). If that weren’t enough, the photo accompanying the article in the Voice, which coincidentally is on the verge of an employee mutiny, is one of the couple holding a Photoshopped sign that reads, “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.”
Ashton Kutcher was not going to take this sitting down! No, he unleashed a steady stream of invective on Twitter, of course…
For now, it seems as though Voice executives are more concerned about all their employees going on strike than they are Twitter-fighting with Ashton Kutcher, doing little more than flicking his ear in response.
The predictable news: The spat seems to have inspired the Internet to follow the Voice’s lead and Photoshop their own “Real Men” signs, as evidenced in the one below the campaign collage beneath this.
Oh, Internet…