Wish is a retail shopping website and app regularly used by 500 million people.
The shopping platform, unlike Amazon, was built specifically for smartphones and connects customers directly to Chinese manufacturers who provide “dirt cheap prices, from $7 sweatpants to $15 smartwatches, but also the long delivery times of two to three weeks.” As of November 2018, Wish is the #2 shopping app on iPhones.
Unfortunately, Wish’s meteoric rise in the world of retail rests on sex dolls, spycams marketed for filming women nude without their permission, and misogynistic apparel.
Collective Shout, one of our allies in this movement, successfully ran a campaign to remove child-like sex dolls from Wish’s online marketplace. However, many headless sex dolls remain. These dolls are deeply objectifying and dehumanizing of women. It turns the female body into a mere object of pleasure. Since Wish responded to the call to remove child-like sex dolls, we are confident they will respond to our call to remove all exploitive content.
As Dr. Maras and Dr. Shapiro note in the Journal of Internet Law, sex dolls “have the potential of altering individuals’ views and perceptions of relationships, ultimately, having them interact with humans as they would with the dolls and robots.”
Further, while any nanny cam can be misused, Wish is promoting products that have marketing imagery specifically advertising the use of spycams and nanny cams to stalk women and spy on them while they undress or have sex. And when Wish sells clothing items, such as t-shirts, featuring female nudity it minimizes women as two dimension sex objects.
When shopping apps normalize the degradation of women, it impacts not only the consumers but also the whole marketplace. Should Wish continue to sell such exploitive content, it could open the door for other rising shopping apps and websites to follow suit.
Help us send a message to this new and growing industry that misogyny has no place in marketing and retail!
.@WishShopping stop advertising spycams on your site for stalking and spying on women! The ads make it clear women are targets. Please fix this sexist marketing! #WishApp #StopStalking #NotBuyingIt Click To Tweet .@WishShopping needs to quit selling misogynistic clothing apparel - profiting off of messages that degrade women is exploitive. #WishApp #NotBuyingIt Click To TweetThis app is available on both the App Store for iOS devices and the Google Play Store for Android. Unfortunately, if you want to leave a review you have to download the app first, by going to the App Store or Play Store, searching “Wish” and then downloading it.
Once it is downloaded, scroll down to where it says Ratings & Reviews and click “See All.”
Then click the number of stars you want to rate Wish where it says “Tap to Rate.” Please consider writing a review in your own words, specifically mentioning any problematic content Wish is promoting.
