SnoreStop's 'be together' billboard campaign is racist and repugnant

The ad placing a covered Muslim woman with a US soldier perpetuates stereotypes. As an Iraqi, it's horribly offensive

Aseel Machi

SnoreStop billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Photograph: SnoreStop.com

SnoreStop, a company who boasts the number one position in sales of throat spray that reduces snoring, has unveiled a billboard that "is part of a larger marketing campaign". The product may be number one for reducing snoring, but the company's newest form of advertising has blown up on the internet in a not-so-number-one way

The billboard features what appears to be a US soldier and a Muslim woman covered in a niqab (a form of hijab that covers everything besides the eyes), who are happily married. She is wearing a wedding band and he is embracing her lovingly. "As a snoring solution company, we're in the business of keeping people together", said Melody Devemark, spokesperson for SnoreStop.

Though SnoreStop may be well intentioned, their campaign has gone viral and left many people confused, offended, and upset, and with good reason. SnoreStop went where no other company has, at least with the military: they put two perceived polar opposites together and marketed them as the couple that could survive snoring (of all things).

To many, seeing a US soldier and a Muslim woman who is almost completely covered as a happily married couple is odd and unfathomable. Never have Americans been faced with such a unique image of people who come from such apparently different worlds – one being "the Muslim world" – who can also be married. What's particularly frustrating is that according to SnoreStop, the average Muslim woman is covered in a niqab. Let's have a little reality check here, the niqab something that the majority of Muslim women in the world, let alone in America, do not even wear. It was as if SnoreStop couldn't think of any other way to identify this woman as Muslim is if she wore a full niqab.

SnoreStop did not stop at profiling and stereotyping what a Muslim woman looks like, they placed her in the arms of a US solider. As an Iraqi, when I see a man dressed in camouflage and matching hat with a Muslim woman in his arms, I think of the atrocities committed against not only men, but women and children, during the brutal years of "democracy and liberation" that ravaged my country on the whims of US and international armed forces. Women and girls – some as young as 15 – reportedly raped by soldiers between 2003 and 2004 may have something else to say about this billboard. To place a Muslim woman, who does not even represent the mainstream image of a Muslim in America, in the hands of a man who represents an institution responsible for the terror and agony of many Muslims in the world (not only in Iraq) is not simply insensitive, but disturbing.

This is not to say that relationships never occur between US servicemen and civilians in the countries they enter, whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan or any other nation the US military has had a presence in, but the marketing of this advertisement could have been done in a different manner. Instead, we are given a billboard that features a stereotype of a Muslim woman, with a US soldier who may at one point have invaded this woman's country.

I am in no way against a woman covering fully, as I myself practice a form of hijab, nor am I against happy marriages with men who aim to serve and protect. SnoreStop does claim this is a real couple, and I hope they are happy. But this is also an ad where we don't get to hear any more of this couple's story than a single photograph. I am against the stereotyping of Muslim women and what the US military represents to Muslims: a violent institution that does not seek the freedom of Muslim countries or the security of theUnited States, but instead, has been misguided by other interests.

These interests are materially based and cause problems well beyond the petty nuisance of snoring. If only SnoreStop could develop a spray to solve these problems as well, then they wouldn't need a racist and offensive marketing campaign to sell their product.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/snorestop-billboard-muslim-woman-soldier