"Bad-ass", or just another instance of the typical feminine stereotype?Youtube H and M

We can all agree upon the fact that the advertising world is terrible to women. Whether it is by imposing impossible beauty standards or by reducing women to a mere commodity for men, the marketing business has always been one of the strongest bastions of the patriarchy.  

During the last few years however, we have seen how this trend started to change. As feminism became something cool and commercially useful, a word that could be used as an entire background for a singer to perform in front of, publicists started to play with this idea, trying to exploit it in their products.

The latest example of this tendency being the advertising of the last H&M autumn collection. The whole point of the clip is to feature models that do not correspond to the traditional image of beauty that we expect from a fashion video: Black women, LGBT women, overweight women, hairy women.... By acknowledging the existence of all these women who are different in their own way, the advertising aims to be seen as a statement of empowerment.

It is not. The message that I think this video conveys is indeed an integrating one: all women can be sexualised by men, no matter their race, body or sexual orientation. The advertisement makes you adopt a masculine perspective, and the women featured in it endure the symbolic violence that is normally reserved to models that correspond to traditional beauty standards. We thus see the fragmentation of the overweight model’s body by the sole display of her butt and her breasts. We gaze at the hypersexualisation of the hairy woman who is placed on a bed with an evident connotation. We regard the representation of the old woman with a suit as a femme fatale, one of the stereotypical female roles.

We even look at black women not showing any kind of education in a dinning room, which is supposed to be “bad-ass”, in the words of the company, but that is just the old association between sex and the breaking of social rules. All this is joined by a version of the classic song ‘She is a lady’, a version that is cut off at the end of the second verse, when the singer says “and the lady is mine”.

This commercial is, as any other, just a display of the hegemonic vision of women that permeates society as a whole. The problem comes when this manifestation of masculine fantasy is presented as a feminist product. If this discourse is accepted, the product will not be equality between genders but rather an equal distribution of masculine domination. And that is not exactly empowering, is it?