‘Be’ marketing manager shocked to learn rape pre-dates hot pants

Ba Đình, Hanoi – Following consultations with company lawyers and Google, marketing manager at home-grown ride-hailing service ‘Be,’ Nguyen Đồ Ngốc was earlier this week horrified to establish that rape does in fact pre-date hot pants, miniskirts and other items of women’s clothing.

The revelation came after Nguyen and his team released a series of advertisements for the ride-hailing app, notably asking women to cover their legs, lest drivers become distracted.

“While we initially toyed with the idea of simply asking women to remove their legs before travelling with ‘Be’ that was deemed barbaric, impractical and didn’t really resonate with any of the focus groups we did,” explained a perplexed Nguyen.

Claiming that he and his team only ever sought to further protect their beloved customers, Nguyen went on to explain alternative ideas of protecting women that now seemed obsolete given his recent discovery of the prevalence of rape throughout human history.

“We pondered with the idea of making all female passengers don chainmail or, where possible, a cast-iron deep sea diving suit – doing anything to present themselves as an amorphous blob of shapelessness – but all of this feels so foolish and narrow-minded when rape appears to have existed long before revealing items of women’s clothing,” he added with a grave shake of the head.

The visibly depressed marketer confessed that he had always understood the violation of a woman’s sovereignty over her own body to have stemmed from “evil clothes” that he believed “whispered in a voice that only men could hear” and convinced them to overlook a woman’s humanity.

“This always seemed like such a cut and dry scenario,” explained Nguyen, scratching his head.

“Is there nothing that we, a company profiting from cheap labour in a gig economy, can do to prevent sexual assault without incurring additional expenditure?” he lamented, before going on to detail very specific blueprints for a pair of goggles that limit a driver’s field of vision to above the neck.

Online outrage has poured forth like a torrent of piss at a bia hoi and has soiled the reputation of the fledgling ride-hailing service, with numerous netizens highlighting the obvious victim-blaming aspect of the advert.

“It just felt less like a warning and more like a disclaimer, as though the driver could be blind drunk and yet blame for the crash and the deaths of those involved could be pinned firmly on my ankles for not being properly covered,” wrote one woman.

But as with any issue pertaining to the internet in Vietnam, a cacophonous gaggle of scarcely pubescent males raised concerns that ‘Be’ was unfairly criticised for its stance.

“So some uppity feminist SJWs don’t want to get groped by their drivers, but that doesn’t mean they have to spoil it for the rest of us,” wrote one man using a cartoon penguin for his Facebook profile.

At the time of writing the death toll is rising as many of ‘Be’s marketing team perished en route to a company retreat – it is thought that the driver of their bus became distracted by one of the team’s decision to wear shorts. More as we get it.