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NavigationDisclaimerThese blog entries represent the views of their authors, not necessarily those of the CWRL, the University of Texas at Austin, or any of its affiliated entities. |
You've never seen sports bras like these.Submitted by erinhurt on Wed, 2008-02-27 21:16.advertising | Feministing | gender | sports | violence | visual argument
I ran across this via Feministing.com, and thought these almost-ads needed to be on the website. The backstory for these ads is that an ad agency pitched them to a running company, which passed on them. They are advertising sports bras, supposedly in a humorous way. They seem menacing to me:
See the other two ads after the jump: Here are the others:
For me, the blood on these women's faces has overtones of violence, especially domestic violence. Furthermore, I find it hard to imagine that an advertising agency wouldn't be aware of these connotations. Trackback URL for this post:http://viz.cwrl.utexas.edu/trackback/240
I like your interpretation - including some kind of sports equipment would have contextualized these injuries in a way that certainly challenged gender norms. But unfortunately, I don't think that's what they were going for. The product being sold in these ads (sport bras) seems to imply that the women's injuries are caused by out-of-control cleavage - hence, the need for these (better and more containing) support bras. I think that's another reason of what grosses me out so much about these, the idea that women's bodies could cause this kind of battery. |
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The referencing of battered women in these photos is obvious, and unfortunate. But in defense of the advertising firm, I can see what they were trying to do here, which is show tough women, to show women wearing the wounds of sport (glorious in our culture), rather than the wounds of abuse (all too common in our culture).
Maybe one way the ads might have attempted to reference sport (which is what I assume they're doing since the goal is to sell sports bras) would be to have shown some sports equipment in the photos. They could have slung a pair of boxing gloves over the shoulder of the woman with the black eyes, put a hockey stick in one of their hands, or otherwise visual referenced the ways these women could have been hurt in competition, from being tough, athletic competitors. Maybe that wouldn't have been enough to off-set the connotations of violence on these women's faces, but it certainly seems to me that it could have mitigated that issue some.
I think this is ad campaign is an excellent example of good intentions poorly executed, and thus, a failed message nonetheless. But the company didn't buy the ads, so somewhere along the line things worked.