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Reebok is promoting its new EasyTone line of shoes for women with a commercial featuring a shapely young lady saying, "Reebok EasyTone shoes not only look fantastic, they'll help make your legs and butt look great too." As the star of the commercial enunciates the word "butt," the camera focuses on her backside. Not everyone finds the commercial amusing.
Sophia Lear of The New Republic calls the ad "appalling" and writes:
It took being assaulted by this ad a few times to pinpoint what makes it so horrifying. The message of the ad seems to be: what women really want is to have a butt so cute that they will be objectified like the woman in the ad. If a man is focusing on, say, the words coming out of your mouth, clearly your butt is not cute enough. Sadly (or predictably) it seems to be working! The sneaker is Reebok's biggest hit in years.
One might think wearing the sneaker would be embarrassing, the equivalent of copping to a less than perfect rear end in public. But, as the recent death of a former Miss Argentina from elective butt augmentation suggests, the stakes are so high--fixing flaws, attaining the perfect body, shedding insecurities--that shame is rarely part of the equation.
I'm not real crazy about the ad, either, but I'd like to focus on a separate objection to it: The shoe promises "better legs and a better butt with every step," suggesting that merely wearing the shoes around every day will magically transform your rear end. However, the New York Times reports that there's no evidence that the shoes provide "meaningful changes in muscle tone or appearance over time."
So that's the real problem: These shoes that are advertised as giving you a better butt actually do nothing of the sort.
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