Ripped from the press release: A Swedish underwear company announced Tuesday that it recently “love bombed” North Korea with “weapons of mass seduction” in the form of 450 pairs of hot pink underwear, a move that is ever-so-slightly tone deaf given the country’s escalating issues with sex trafficking.
Björn Borg allowed consumers to vote for the country “in most need of love and seduction,” and the economically and politically troubled North Korea was named winner.
“We had planned how we would pursue an airdrop, and we could have done it almost anywhere in the world – except North Korea,” marketing director Lina Söderqvist all-too-incredulously explained to Swedish-English news site The Local. “It was impossible to do an airdrop in NOrth Korea, someone would get hurt.”
So they hired an undercover journalist “whose name is withheld for security reasons” to write a riveting blog about the 10 day journey — “the weather’s cloudy again today;” “today I’m visiting a middle school, and some other stuff;” “I finished last at bowling” — to drop the panties from his or her 41st floor hotel room window.
While this could be written off as a strange stunt, it has deeper flaws. Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told NK News that given the country’s high sex trafficking rates, “Bjorn Borg’s idea that North Korea’s problem is that it’s a ‘sexual cold spot’ in need of ‘weapons of mass seduction’ denotes poor judgment, to say the least.”
Furthermore, it “distracts attention away from North Korea’s real issues, and provides more material to those keen on a superficial tabloid-style approach to that country.”
But Söderqvist countered that its hands were tied as “the world chose Pyongyang in North Korea, and we find that everybody should have the right to some love and seduction, no matter where you live… it was completely out of our hands.”
Söderqvist says that 100,000 of the votes came from South Korea over the course of a night.