Cars are women, women are crazy...

And crazy Italian cars are... supermodel Catrinel Menghia?

A new series of Fiat 500 Arbath ads was just produced by Sapient Nitro. The first two are pretty typical "hot woman/ hot car" mindless series of beauty shots.

But the third... well...



When Ms. Menghia walks up to the photographer and caresses him, she asks (in Italian) "wanna go for a spin?" After he beats her in a road race, she slaps him and screeches "just who do you think you are?"

And then she flirts again, because Italian women are pazze that way.

Of course, if you follow advertising (or the NFL) you'll recognize this approach from Fiat's 2012 Super Bowl ad:



That one was ranked the second most sexist Super Bowl ad of the year by Fem2.0, with the comment:

"This ad not only objectifies a woman’s body, it hyper-sexualizes a car as a woman’s body. Fiat asserts women and cars are interchangeable. Duh! A fast car is like a fast woman and they’re both commodities men want. So men can “own” women…you know, cause they’re just objects (oh, I mean sex objects) after all. But this ad goes a step further. The Italian-speaking Romanian model Catrinel Menghia slaps the man for leering at her as she’s bent over. In reality, women face leering, ogling and street harassment on a regular basis. But in the ad, she shifts from anger to sexuality and quickly starts seducing him. Contributing to rape culture, Fiat’s ad associates and normalizes violence with sexual arousal."

In the new ad, she's the one who initiates the sexual play (as well as ending/inflaming it with violence) and it doesn't actually say that she's an object, but it's not much better than its predecessor.