Empowering Women In Their Underwear

On August 22nd, Time, as well as other online publications later on, picked up on the story of a recent campaign by online underwear company Dear Kate.  The campaign features several women, identified as prominent women in tech coding, doing their jobs while dressed in only some of the underwear on sale by Dear Kate.  Some people have found this ad to be objectionable, with one tech blogger being quoted as saying “Posing in your underwear undermines the message that you aim to be taken seriously as a technologist,”.

The campaign can be found here, and, as someone who often spends parts of his mornings watching online pornography, in my opinion these pictures aren't particularly titulating.  This campaign features women in a staged office situation doing the things that they would do in their jobs.  The difference is that they are doing so in their underwear, and that is where the problem is.  Other than the fact that these were pictures taken by an online underwear company in order to sell underwear online, why are these women in their underwear?  It's not like these women regularly do their jobs wearing only their underwear, so why are they in their underwear?  There doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason for it, other than to garner attention due to the distinct possibility that people will object to it-- wait, that's it!

The point of any promotional campaign is to get attention for the product that you are promotion.  If the product doesn't get attention than the campaign fails.  In that way, this campaign is successful.  I mean, I don't remember ever hearing of Dear Kate before, and I spend a lot of time online looking at women in their underwear.  This campaign has also gotten the attention of people who object to women being objectified, as well and the people who object to people objecting to women being objectified.  This campaign probably got the attention of a lot of people who might be motivated to act with their dollars and support or not support this company.  Now the real question: Did this campaign result in increased sales?  We'll have to see.

A Man's Problem That Only Men Can Solve

I've had a problem with the ad shown above for some time.  It's an ad for Marilyn: Intimate Exposures, a new book about Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe.  In the ad, passersby are encourages to lift up a skirt in order to view a QR code to learn more about the book.  According to reports, this is actually an interactive poster campaign that was put up in various locations around London.  While this is a poster campaign and no real woman was actually intimately exposed, the behavior elicited by this poster campaign is something that should not be encouraged.

I bring this up because of a recent decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.  In a decision handed down on Wednesday, a man's convicted of voyeurism on a city train was overturned.  In the decision, the Justices on Massachusetts's highest judicial authority state:

"A female passenger on a MBTA trolley who is wearing a skirt, dress, or the like covering these parts of her body is not a person who is "partially nude," no matter what is or is not underneath the skirt by way of underwear or other clothing. ...

[B]ecause the MBTA is a public transit system operating in a public place and uses cameras, the two alleged victims here were not in a place and circumstance where they reasonably would or could have had an expectation of privacy."

I have a problem with this case.  Not because the case was overturned, but because of the incident.  Why do some men think that it's allright to invade a woman's privacy to fuel their sexual desires?  While the problem of women secretly having upskirt photos taken of them is rare, it is something that women do often think about when they are in public, whether it's on a bus, in a park, or in the workplace.  There are women who look at men suspecting that any man around them is about to engage in perverted behavior, and that is a problem, a problem that only men can solve.

Some will argue that women need to be less suspicious of men, but the suspicion is not the problem in this situation, it is the behavior.  The behavior by men is what needs to be corrected and only men can correct that behavior.  Men need to stop exhibiting perverted behavior when they are in public and call out correct other men when they are exhibiting perverted behavior.  This is not something that can be corrected overnight, but the process of correcting men's perverted behavior and the suspicion that women have about men needs to start, and the decision handed down by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court can serve as a spark for that change.