On Monday, January 18th, the start of cervical cancer prevention week the UK-based charity Eve Appeal posted a message to their Twitter account encouraging women to attend smear tests, under this message they posted a piece of artwork featuring the outline of a woman with her legs spread wide open exposing a heart-shaped vagina with the words "have no fear, get your smear". 

The image was crass, sexualized, and made the viewer extremely uncomfortable, it did not look like an ad to promote cervical screening, it looked like an ad you'd see in the men's room of a seedy bar advertising the services of a sex worker. Eve Appeal quickly started receiving backlash and criticism for it, their response was to quietly delete the image and say nothing publicly about how negatively it had affected some members of their audience despite many people who had criticized them calling for them to apologize. 

most of these criticisms came from the sexual violence survivor community, who found the sexualization of a medical exam triggering and upsetting and were having trouble understanding what on Eve Appeal was thinking posting something like that. We are told again and again that there is nothing sexual about smear tests, and that it's silly and childish among many other significantly crueler descriptions, for sexual violence survivors to struggle with smear tests and face barriers in attending them. 

Eve Appeal has a long history of extremely insensitive, belittling, and just downright weird and creepy posts, including one post from august of 2020 in which they encourage people to do kegel exercises by asking them to imagine that they are "in a bathtub full of eels and the eels are trying to get into their vagina" and to imagine using the muscles in that area to "keep the eels out". A post that triggers a visceral reaction of disgust and violation at the thought. 

As a person who is a survivor and has been hurt by the actions of Eve Appeal like many of my friends and fellow advocates online, I am here today to formally ask Eve Appeal to publicly apologize for this harm, and make us a promise to do better, to work to represent a message of positivity, acceptance, and sensitivity for all women and all people, and to accept criticism with grace and consideration.