Burger ad banned for degrading women

A Bondi burger restaurant's advertisement depicting a woman's bottom as a hamburger has been banned from use.

GoodTime Burgers, which opened at the Eastern Hotel in Bondi Junction last month, had published the ad in the December issue of eastern suburbs community magazine The Beast before its launch.

The ad showed a woman lying on a beach in a bikini with her bottom forming the buns of a hamburger, under the tagline "the freshest fun between the buns".

One of the complaints to the Advertising Standards Bureau was that the "woman's body and private parts are objectified as something for people (probably men) to consume".

But GoodTime Burgers defended the ad, saying it could just as easily have featured a man "and would continue to have similar meaning for the purpose of the advertisement".

"[The] rear end is used to emulate the same shape of a burger bun and not used as a means to either objectify or vilify women," the business said in its response to the ASB.

But the bureau disagreed, writing in its determination that the ad breached Section 2.2 of the Australian Association of National Advertisers code in that it was exploitive and degrading to women.

It also determined that the "fun between the buns" tagline was "sexually related innuendo" and, while the magazine was not targeted directly at children, it was "easily accessible to a broad audience" and therefore did not treat issues of sex and nudity with sensitivity to its audience and breached Section 2.4 of the code.

GoodTime Burgers agreed not to use the ad again but pointed to an article in The Sunday Telegraph in December in which "the online feedback . . . was overwhelming support that the ad was not offensive".