Recently, Suistudio launched the campaign #NOTDRESSINGMEN in order to advertise their line of business suits created for women.
The images that have been released for this campaign are, in some ways, fairly standard for this sort of product: two people, one dressed head-to-toe in a suit and standing in a position of power and domination, the other posed provocatively, their identity meaningless, their body completely on display.
Now, this is an image that we have seen before—many, many times. Yet there is one thing about this campaign that not only makes it different, but also has made it pretty controversial, and that is the fact that a woman is placed in the position of power, while a male model is the one being sexualized and objectified.
There are many who have taken to social media to show their disagreement with this campaign, despite the fact that these images are not entirely new. In fact, it is nearly common for us to see the genders reversed. In many advertisements, women are depicted as sexual objects, to the point where we barely even think about it anymore. We’re used to the images of big-breasted women with their heads tipped back and their lips parted. All the time, we see men squarely facing the camera, their stances strong, their jaws locked, their power confirmed.
This is the language of our media, and we speak it fluently.
But at the same time, the majority of comments that I have seen disagreeing with the #NOTDRESSINGMEN campaign have not been upset with it because it dares to reverse the gender roles; rather, they disagree with it because they know that this is an injustice that society already does to women all the time, and they don’t think that it’s right to spread this injustice to men as well.
As one Instagram commenter said, “If it was the other way around with the woman on the couch and man above her, feminist groups would jump and criticise. This double standard needs to end.”
Some people have accused this campaign of “making feminism look bad,” turning it into a movement of women who merely want to dominate and control men, rather than being about equal rights. And is this what the campaign is doing? Are these images trying to destroy the patriarchy and replace it with a matriarchy?
Well, the way I see it, our opinions should rest heavily on the campaign’s intent.
On the one hand, it is very possible that the commenters are correct, and the purpose of this campaign is not necessarily to challenge anything, but rather, to use the accepted language of our media to convey the age-old message, but with the genders swapped. And, in fact, many of the images do seem to be indicating that.
The reason why we often see men standing firm and square-jawed, staring directly at the camera, is because the image is very clearly trying to convey a message, and that message is deeply connected to gender: he is strong. He is capable. He can do whatever he needs to do, and he can do it without wrinkling his suit or breaking an expression.
It just so happens that all of these tend to be masculine traits, and I don’t think that’s incidental. Similarly, when we see women draped over objects without much of anything on, that too is meant to convey a message: she is passive, but sexually available. When we see women compared to or used in place of objects, then that is the ultimate passivity: she isn’t even a person; she’s just a thing waiting around to be used by whomever shows up and wants her.
So when we see the same poses used but the genders reversed, the messages don’t really change, although the gender roles might be challenged. But, still, the photographer is relying on a specific language—one that the viewer will undeniably be familiar with—to convey a message. And the message really isn’t okay. End of day, whether it’s a man or a woman being objectified, the message is that they aren’t really a person. They’re a sexy object, a thing that can be used and disposed of.
So, essentially, if the intent behind this campaign was to rely upon a harmful perception that feminism is, in fact, trying to combat, all so that they could convey to their presumably female audience that this company’s suits will make them powerful and alluring to men, then that is not okay.
But there is one other possible intent that this campaign might have, one that I am more comfortable with accepting: the intent to challenge the large swath of media that depicts women as objects.
As I have mentioned, advertisers have made use of sexualizing and objectifying women for decades in order to make their product look somehow superior, and one thing that I think many commenters are forgetting when they show their distaste for the #NOTDRESSINGMEN campaign is that it is only one campaign. It is not an entire industry, meaning that women are not quite at the precipice of taking over the world quite yet. And, more than that, campaigns that rely on switching societal roles are released all the time with the intent of showing just how unfair our society really is.
For example, in 2004, the Disability Rights Commission released a short film called “Talk,” which follows an able-bodied man who suddenly wakes up in a world designed for the new majority, people with disabilities. Another short film, entitled “Love Is All You Need,” takes place in a world where homosexuality is the norm, and heterosexuality is looked down upon as “weird” and “unnatural.”
There are many issues in our society that are sometimes difficult for us to wrap our heads around—not because we never experience them, but because we experience them every day. They are normal to us, so we don’t even second guess them. And the purpose of media like “Talk” and “Love Is All You Need” is to try to point out just how wrong our society is. It forces able-bodied people to imagine, not what it would be like to be disabled, but what it would be like to live with the stigma of disability. It forces heterosexual people to imagine what it would be like if they couldn’t safely take their partners home to meet their parents, or hold hands with them in public.
And, maybe, the intent behind the #NOTDRESSINGMEN campaign is not to create a new norm, but rather, to force us to question the old one, to make us realize that the over-sexualizing and objectification of women is wrong by forcing us to see it from a new perspective. And while I said that there was plenty of evidence in the photographs to suggest the other intention, there is also plenty of evidence to suggest this as well. The photographs, after all, are overly sexual, and overly objectifying, even going so far as to intentionally remove the man’s face from the images, as though to completely remove his identity and force the viewer to look at him only as an object—a body without a soul.
Now, what the company’s actual intent was is difficult to decipher. They have not made any attempt to comment either way, although Suistudio has confessed to intending controversy. Besides that, I suppose that the viewer can merely take what they want from the campaign: are they frightening images of a new sort of objectification, or an isolated incident intending only to make us question our past and present?
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Author: Ciara Hall
Image: Instagram/Suitsupply
Editor: Travis May
Copy Editor: Callie Rushton
Social Editor: Waylon Lewis
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