Political correctness vs customer base: UK computer retailer with 87.5% male buyers forced to pull ad that featured only men

A PC Specialist ad has been pulled in the UK for "harmful gender stereotypes," after a handful of politically correct whiners reported it to the Advertising Standards Authority for showing just three men and zero women.

Following the implementation of new guidelines less than a year ago, marketing within the United Kingdom is coming under scrutiny from the weakest in society's rank who choose to take offense at nearly everything. The victim this time being a PC retailer who was simply trying to market to their core demographic, but ran into the other kind of PC – political correctness.

After receiving a mere eight complaints, the company was forced to pull a recent ad in which three ethnically diverse men are seen making music, gaming, and coding. According to those taking offense, the advert pushed the notion that only men are interested in fancy tech.

The absurdity of the situation revolving around the current marketing rules is that companies are being stripped of their creative freedom, all to provide comfort to people who choose to play victim. Browsing the stories behind various banned ads shows that often they're canceled because of just a handful of complaints. The offended are quite literally being empowered, and now we must all conform to their will or suffer the consequences. Creative expression be damned.

For companies, it becomes even more of a headache as they now face hurdles in marketing to the people who actually buy their products en masse. According to PC Specialist, their customer base is comprised of almost 90% men, 35 years and younger. So an ad was developed with them in mind. But to the ever perpetually offended, they saw something they didn't like, and hence the ad was reported and pulled.

The reasoning for such actions, according to the Advertising Standards Authority, is that it wants to limit "how people see themselves and how others see them and the life decisions they take." But being real here, if someone is getting uppity over an ad with a handful of men, they have other life decisions to reevaluate. Especially as nowhere in the ad does it suggest anything along the lines that only men can use computers, or that only men are interested in them. It's just a flashy 39 seconds created with a core demographic in mind.

Outside the scope of advertising, this all plays into a much larger picture where as previously mentioned, the perpetually offended are being empowered. All across society, we are seeing situations where victim olympians are getting the final say in how the mainstream public must speak or act. This is throwing a wrench into the idea of free expression and creative output. It is also an emotional dumbing down of the masses, as we are forced to lag behind with the weak.

Social media bans people for backwards reasonings. Books have been refused sale at retailers to appease the easily upset. TV series have retroactively removed scenes to please outrage mobs. Movies were pulled from release schedules to avoid controversy. Game developers have been blacklisted for comments made in private. Comedians have been bombarded with hate for telling jokes. Speakers face riots or outright cancelation on college campuses. And even all this is just scratching the surface of what we now see almost daily.
What the future holds, no one can say for certain. But at the rate we're going, we'll all be forced to live our lives as genderless sacks of meat, walking around in a drab grey world because any inkling of color or sex carries the risk of offending somebody else. Maybe it's best we stop letting the inmates run the asylum, while we still have the chance.