Introduction
A commercial for the Peloton stationary bike went viral
recently based on widespread accusations of sexism. In this post I evaluate the
ad, explore the question of its alleged sexism, and (more importantly) assess a
much bigger problem illustrated by this flap.
The ad
You can see the ad here (at least for now; Peloton has pulled it down and might go after re-postings
of it). On Christmas morning, an affluent man has given his fit, pretty,
30-something wife a gift of a $2,300 exercise bike. She gasps, “A Peloton?” The rest of the ad is the
woman vlogging about her rides. She’s visibly anxious at first, telling her
smartphone camera, “‘I’m a little nervous, but excited.” Then, “Five days
in a row. Are you surprised? I am.” At the end the camera pulls back and she’s
just shown the finished video to her husband; it ends with her saying, “A year
ago, I didn’t realize how much this would change me. Thank you.”
After running for a while, the ad suffered (as detailed here) a widespread backlash across the Internet. The more people forwarded it in
disgust, the more of a story it became. Eventually it had amassed a reported 3.7
million views, with 2/3 getting a thumbs-down, before Peloton yanked it. Of
course, Peloton defended itself, and naturally a lot of anti-PC people joined
the fray.
Seizing the moment, the movie actor Ryan Reynolds, who is launching
his own gin brand, did an ad using the same actress, making fun of the Peloton spot. In the gin ad, this same wife is at a bar with two girlfriends. As the scene
opens, the wife just stares blankly ahead of her, for a solid ten seconds, as
if pithed. Then she toasts “to new beginnings” (she’s no longer wearing a
wedding ring) and aggressively downs an entire gin martini in one go, before
enthusiastically accepting another from her friend who says to herself (and
us), “It’s gonna be a fun night.” Clearly the wife has changed her mind about
this gift and her husband.
Further fanning the flames, the actress went on “The Today
Show,” along with Ryan Reynolds, to discuss the two ads. Lots of other
mainstream media have weighed in, including the “Financial Times” of London.
So … is the ad sexist?
My initial reaction to the ad was that it’s pretty stupid,
anyway. First of all, a $2300 exercise bike, which comes with a $50/month
subscription to online spin classes, doesn’t strike me as a very good gift. For
this kind of money, you’d have to really want it for yourself—which is itself a
big if. I know a ton of cyclists and very few of them are interested in indoor
workouts; those who are want to use their own racing bike, on a proper
resistance trainer or on rollers, rather than this clunky gym-ass thing with its unisex saddle and corny aero
handlebars. To shell out that kind of coin, you’d have to be really
committed—but the wife looked surprised to receive it, and a bit apprehensive. I
can relate … if my wife bought me a $2300 rowing machine or a fancy yoga mat, I’d
have even more trepidation than the Peloton wife (as would my wife upon
seeing my Year-of-Dana-Doing-Yoga vlog, which would be more unsettling than “The
Blair Witch Project”).
That said, the ad didn’t get my heckles up particularly. The
wife might have asked for the Peloton and is only pretending to be surprised to
receive it. And as my wife pointed out, she might have played up her
trepidation for her vlog, to seem more humble.
Curious about the opinions of other reasonable people, I
polled my bike team for input, asking who found it sexist. One pal replied simply, “nope,” and
another found it “no more sexist than any other commercial,” citing car ads
where the man always drives.
Another of my teammates had this observation:
Well, I’m not sure if it’s sexist but it’s definitely lame. What I find annoying about it is her fear and trepidation. It’s not like he just gave her a downhill mountain bike or a track bike. She’s going to be riding in her comfy home. Also, having gone through childbirth she knows more about pain than her husband. The fact that the ad makes her seem worried about that really makes her seem diminished, weak and lacking any confidence. Although they don’t show her husband out shredding it up on a bike or doing super ‘manly’ things, you get the impression it’s his role to bring her out of her meek little shell. [If I did my own version of this ad, she’d say] “Hell yeah, I’m going to crush this thing” or “Uh, I actually wanted a gravel bike.”
The “Financial Times” writer had a similar reaction, finding
the ad “unintentionally sexist” based on the woman’s statement, “a year ago, I
didn’t realize how much this would change me.” The writer points out, “Not only
did her husband know better, it seems, but he was right to push her into
becoming more toned.”
Moreover, just like with the clearly sexist Pinarello ad I reviewed awhile back, I cannot help but mourn the lost opportunity here:
the ad creators should have reversed the roles. This would lessen the risk of
anybody being offended, because fat-shaming is less often aimed at men. (The ad
creators rightly identified the fat-shaming risk and made sure this wife was
thin even before getting the bike.) In my experience men are more likely to blithely
let themselves go, so for a woman to give her husband the bike just makes more
sense. Males, who have historically enjoyed the power position and who also
seem to think a few extra pounds just makes them cuddly and/or Falstaffian, can
be expected to have a sense of humor about being overweight. I think an ad could
tastefully play with that. Upon receiving the Peloton the husband could say (a
bit too sincerely), “You shouldn’t have,” and then his wife could poke him in
the soft belly and say, “Actually, hon ... it’s time.” He could then mount the
bike with typical male swagger, only to have his first online spin class kick
his ass. From there, his gradual apotheosis into a truly fit person would make
a much more satisfying “personal journey” than the original Peloton ad is able
to provide.
So why did this ad agency go with the dangerous trope of a
guy pressuring his wife to get fitter? It could be unconscious bias. Perhaps
the idea of a generous guy, who knows what his wife needs, came naturally to
the ad creator, based on habitual, prevailing sexism.
My wife suggests a simpler reason for having the woman
receive the gift: maybe the ad creators focused on an attractive woman just to
get more people to watch. I asked her, “If the ad starred Chris Hemsworth,
wouldn’t you watch?” She replied, “I don’t think that would work … he’s too
large, he would dwarf the machine.”
A final note on the sexism question: frankly, I’m more
disturbed by the actress’s interview on “The Today Show” than by the ad itself. While an entire creative team failed to detect the
tone-deafness of the ad, the actress—as if conditioned by a society that blames
women for everything—takes full responsibility for the public reaction. She
declares, “Honestly, I think it was just my face. Like, I think it was my
fault! My eyebrows looked, like worried, I guess—I don’t know, people were
like, ‘She looks scared, she looks worried,’ and I’m like, oh no, my eyebrows,
they moved!” The female interviewer immediately responded, “That’s absurd. If
your face conveyed the wrong emotion, that’s not your fault. The director
should have spotted the problem and re-shot the scene.”
As if! Alas, what actually happened was that the interviewer
said, “I guess a lot of people have Botox and stuff and their eyebrows stay
straight.” (She really said this—look for yourself.) Cripes, where is the
support for this put-upon actress who was just doing her job as best she could?
Where is the sanity? Oh no, a commercial offended people—must have been the
actress’s eyebrows! Let’s prescribe a
toxic drug to fix that! Not that I’m asking for the “Today” spot to go viral
and launch a massive outcry. I think we’ve all suffered enough.
Should we even care
about this ad?
Okay, time to back up and consider: is it even worthwhile to
worry about any of this, when more than 3 billion people worldwide live on less
than $2.50 a day? Well, it can be. To ponder anything deeply, on a legitimate
intellectual level, has intrinsic value, so as long as we’re looking at a larger
question (e.g., what sexism is and how it manifests in human behavior), versus
trotting out some knee-jerk reaction based on an entrenched worldview we
already had. But I take issue with how the reaction was fueled: Americans have
been trained to react strongly to specific media moments, to the point that a
clumsily-produced ad gets thousands of people attacking each other in the
comments section of all the “news” articles celebrating and sensationalizing
the supposed scandal.
A few examples of these highly charged comments (below the “Inside
Edition” article here):
- “Getting your thin wife a weight-loss gift is bad husbanding. No intelligent man would do that. The commercial is cringey and weird. She looks like she’s going to cry in almost every scene and seems so desperate for his approval, like a child or abuse victim. It’s bizarre.”
- “lol fat shaming serves to put pressure to live a healthy life. America has become overrun with fattys and it has become normalized to the point noone cares anymore. Put down that donut lardass!”
- “If a woman wanted an exercise bike, she’d buy one for herself. Similarly, if she wanted to lose weight/get fit, she would do so. The idea that she needs to have these things bought for her/introduced into her life, continues the idea of women being economically dependent and/or passive, unable to make decisions for themselves. Similarly, the focus on a woman’s body, having a man re-design it for her, and for her to express gratitude at the end, is a long way from 21st century feminism.”
- “I hope all the haters don’t buy a Peloton and burn them in protest , PS Trump would hate that”
- “What’s with women freaking out about nothing all the time. Wtf!”
Whether or not the ad was sexist, the fact that it went
viral, and that this is such a common effect, starts to lead us toward what I
think the larger problem is.
The bigger issue
One of my cycling pals replied to my inquiry email with this
comment: “By talking about this you/we have fallen prey to their marketing
scheme. They made a somewhat controversial commercial and we’re spending time discussing
it. Free publicity.” I don’t quite agree, if we construe “they” to mean
Peloton. I don’t believe that the Peloton folks deliberately sought an ad that
would get them free publicity by causing controversy. If they had, they wouldn’t
have pulled the ad down once the controversy was sparked. Meanwhile, the fact
that people are discussing this ad won’t necessarily lead to more people
shelling out $2,300 for an exercise bike. Buzz might sell one soft drink versus
another, but nobody is going to spend big money on a complicated product they
only gained awareness of through a viral reaction to a poorly made ad.
That said, I agree that we’ve fallen prey—but the perpetrator
isn’t Peloton, it’s Google, Twitter, and Facebook (and to some degree CNN). Consider
what I (reluctantly) put you through earlier:
It’s impossible to follow scandals like this without wading
through a lot of ads, and telling Google (and/or your social media sharing
platform of choice) a lot about you. They are the real beneficiaries of Internet
content going viral, and not surprisingly they’re the ones training us to get
outraged, to leave comments, and to forward things along. To extend the virus
analogy, they’re the ones who have turned the Internet into a giant Petri dish.
A recent “New Yorker” article profiles Roger McNamee, a former tech investor who now denounces Facebook and
Google for “sowing discord among Americans.” McNamee, the article explains,
published a number of op-eds in mainstream magazines pointing out that “the
social-media business model thrives on divisive rhetoric: the more extreme the
content, the more users share it; the more the algorithms amplify it, the more
ad revenue is generated.”
Obviously ad revenue for news publishers is nothing new, and
I’ve quoted CNN and the “Today Show” in this post. So how does social media fit
in? Well, platforms like Twitter and Google make sure everybody sees
everything. The Peloton ad ran for three weeks with very little reaction—in the
“Today Show” interview the actress says initially her only comments were from
friends and family saying “I saw your commercial!” The complaints, when they
came weeks later, were all at once, out of nowhere. She hid out for a while,
thinking “it’s gonna blow over,” but acknowledges, “it didn’t really blow over
as quickly as I thought it would.” Well, making things go viral, and sustaining
controversy, are things Google is really good at. (I can’t pick on Facebook
because I don’t use it, but their role in our last election speaks for itself.)
I base my accusation on what I witness firsthand on Google.
For example, let’s look at how I stumbled onto this whole thing to begin with:
Google served up a link to the story, without my asking, when I opened a new
browser tab on my Android phone. I didn’t think to capture the original
click-bait but here’s one of the follow-up articles Google dangled in front of me:
I wouldn’t have even clicked the link, but after ignoring Google’s
unsolicited news feed for months, I was starting to get pissed off and was
already contemplating a blog post whining about all the crap Google has been
serving me up. Particularly annoying was a bunch of stuff about Chris Cornell,
the deceased former front man for Soundgarden. To some degree, I’d asked for
this, because I did do a Google search on Cornell. (Noting a strange similarity
between his song “Like Suicide” and the poem/novel Pale Fire, I sought to determine if Cornell had read Nabokov.)
Ever since that lookup, Google has offered me a drip feed,
through my phone browser, of some ongoing soap opera about Cornell’s death,
mostly just gossip that has nothing to do with my interest in Soundgarden music.
Look at this crap:
Note also that article about some protest of bubble tea …
what did I do to be presented with that?
I’ve also seen a bunch of headlines about some spat between Eminem and Nick
Cannon, whoever he is. This supposedly neutral delivery platform isn’t just
guessing about what content might interest me; it’s trying to serve up anything
that might inflame me. I asked my older daughter what’s in her Google feed, and
she said mainly FUD-type “articles” sowing college-related anxiety, like “Are
you in the right major?”
To come full circle on the Peloton ad: if I’d just seen the
commercial, without all the bolted-on outrage and counter-outrage, I probably
wouldn’t have thought much of it. I’d have shrugged it off like most stuff, and
I think most other viewers would too. But when the Internet dispute engine got a
hold of it and spun it up, telling us to weigh in and get indignant, we obeyed.
The Peloton company and its products are innocent, even if this ad was hapless.
It’s the Internet platforms, and their methods of escalation, aggravation, and
amplification, that are turning us into a bunch of indignant scolds.
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