Yelp Sorry About Ruining Anti-Rape Message
Whoops: Yelp signed up "SF Women Against Rape" as a sponsor of its email newsletter, then ran their ad under an insinuating headline about bicycles that read, "Put the Fun Between Your Legs." Cue the outrage!
One furious blogger promised to yank her contributions to the user-review site, adding:
I'm not willing to contribute to padding the wallets of anyone who thinks nothing of pairing innuendo with sexual assault.
Yelp promptly apologized, and tried to recall the newsletter and replace it with a tamer one. But it couldn't keep the fuss from spreading to Twitter and various weblogs (including TechCrunch).
For all the fist-shaking, the ad is basically some silly humor put in a terribly inappropriate — and, we're guessing, unintended — context. If some critics are ascribing the crudest of intentions to the site, well, perhaps that's the price it must pay for throwing such notorious parties.