MBTA employees are annoyed, but not for reasons you might think. What really irks them is an ad on the side of trains that suggests they resemble fish.

Legal Sea Foods, in a move that seemed calculated for heaps of free publicity, created ads that declared, "This conductor has a face like a halibut!"

The president of the Boston Carmen's Union told Michael Levenson at the Globe that he didn't have anything against fish personally, but ...

"Who the hell wants to say they have a face like a fish?" he said. "I happen to like to eat fish, and I like seafood, and I like going fishing, but I don't want anybody saying that I or any of my members look like a fish."

Interestingly enough, an ad from the same campaign that declares, "This train gets around more than your sister" didn't cause as much of a problem. Ever since Hitchcock's North by Northwest, the image of a train going into a tunnel has a decidedly sexual connotation, but did the ad campaign really need to conjure up the cliched image of an easy woman? No one ever says that men "get around."

Not that the "fresh fish" campaign is that big of a deal. Frankly, last year's movie ads for the horror flick "Captivity," which included an image of a woman in a cage were far more offensive, and no one removed those. Ditto those ads for "Skin Walkers" which featured a lot of saliva, which wasn't offensive but was still gross. So, it seems that perhaps the MBTA could reconsider its policies instead of just reacting whenever employees don't like being told that they resemble creatures of the sea.

[Boston Globe]

Opinions stated in this post belong solely to this Bostonist. Image of one of the sample "fresh fish" ads from the Legal Sea Foods press page.