I've wanted to write an open letter to Victoria's Secret for years, but never quite found the right time, place, or medium. I figured it was high time a heterosexual man lambasted them for their unabashed use of underweight models, their pedophilia-laced ad campaigns, and their general parasitic relationship with the personal insecurities of the women to whom they sell.
My urge to write peaked around the time of that hullabaloo surrounding certain television channels banning a Lane Bryant underwear commercial a few years back (because the model featured in it had real breasts and didn't starve herself - shhhh!) but again I never quite found the time. Well, there's no time like the present, and though I have not watched tv literally in months (and therefore have not seen much of any commercials) this little rant somehow popped back into my head. So here it is. Enjoy it.
An Open Letter to Victoria's Secret
Dear V.S.,
It's time we had a little talk, man-to-whatever you are or represent. You see, what you do is wrong, and you need to start changing your ways. By all means, keep selling lacy underwear, holding fashion shows, and producing television commercials; that's all beside the point. What you need to change is how you go about all of it. If you want to keep making and selling women's underwear, start using women to market them. And be nice about it while you're at it.
From what I see in your advertising, you have two target audiences: men to whom your models and product are meant to be attractive, and women who would like to be as appealing to men as the women in your commercials are and whom you would have believe could be so appealing by wearing your products. Now that sounds like a win-win. So what's the problem? The models you employ to market your products are not always real women. At best they are grown women who are abnormally underweight, at worst they are underaged girls or women whose faces and bodies possess child-like characteristics.
What does this all mean? Well, it means that at best you are marketing eating disorders and the bodies they create, and that at worst you are using pedophilia as part of your marketing plan. Either way, it's not pretty, and each part of the problem needs to be addressed in turn.
The Skinniness
Everyone has different tastes. Some men do like slender women, some prefer curvy, some like petite women, others go for the tall and lanky. That's not a problem, in fact it's a great thing. The issue is that your marketing would have us all believe that women with the average height of a man, the waistline of an early adolescent, and a torso flaunting more ribs than a Southern barbeque in summertime are the norm and should be expected. Not only is there little to no diversity in the body types of your models, but in fact those models you do employ are all far outside the norm. The result? The entire image and feel of your brand attempts to normalize the irregular and unrealistic, and it thereby shuns and marginalizes the true beauty inherent to the natural and diverse body of women in the real world.
About three years ago, Lane Bryant put together an ad for tv which featured a woman in lingerie. Sounds like one of your ads, doesn't it? What was different, though, was that this woman didn't look like she was molded out of plastic or was in need of UN food relief. In spite of that - no, in fact because of that - she was absolutely gorgeous. Here's the ad. Go ahead, watch. It's not long.
Now try to wipe up your drool. Seriously. I am sure your company and your admen especially think of you as the number one in marketing lingerie. Numerically that may be true, but that is not to say you have nothing to learn from this ad. You see, if you were a heterosexual man - and by this I mean a man who likes women and not pubescent girls - you would be secretly praying to whatever or whoever you believe in that you were Dan in that video clip. You'd be thinking Dan was one lucky S.O.B. And you'd be right. Friggin Dan.
You know what is great about this ad too? It features a beautiful woman in lingerie, without making the women watching the ad feel bad about their weight or their age. And the model featured in it is neither fat nor old!! How come your guys didn't think of that? Call me crazy, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that you all like playing to insecurities. I think you even might have made your own market out of it, and damn if you haven't kept on cornering it.
The Girlyness
While preference in body types is a matter of taste, underage girls - and women who are hired specifically because they bear a striking resemblance to underage girls - are not and should not be a matter of taste. Pedophilia is more or less illegal, though your company insists on using elements of it throughout your campaigns. At first it was the policy - and do not tell me it was not a company policy - of hiring young women whose faces would have fooled the most discerning eye into believing the women were in fact children. That was bad enough: marketing lingerie and bikinis with a child-like face above them. And then you came out with your PINK brand.
PINK to me is perhaps the scariest thing in mainstream branding in all of America. The unabashed melding of adolescent/scholastic and sexy/seductive themes is truly horrifying. Do you remember that Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell from around ten or so years ago? I didn't see it either, but I remember the premise: she goes inside the mind of a psycho killer. Well, that's kind of how I would feel being inside one of your PINK stores: that I had delved into the mind of a pedophile. The girly, childish casual attire interdispersed with adult underwear and provocative "athletic" wear. The whole thing really is the perfect hypersexualization of a little girl's childhood bedroom.
I need a damn shower just having written that.
In all seriousness, this is a problem. Even if you were to shut down your whole PINK line tomorrow - which I know you won't - the simple use of children or women who are intentionally chosen because of child-like features is wrong. Why? No lengthly explanation required here. It is wrong because underneath it all, what you are selling is sex, and children and/or imitations of children have no role to play in any such sale.
In conclusion, try being a little more inclusive in your brand - except for the little girl crap. That just needs to go. Feature women from different backgrounds and of different shapes and sizes. Who knows?! You may even sell some of your products!
Now I am not saying that you need to de-sexualize your brand. That's what people love, and I genuinely believe that while nine times out of ten women just need some underwear to throw on before getting dressed in the morning just like men, some women actually want to buy lingerie on occasion. Sell it to them! But don't include in the deal baggage about weight and size and age. Nobody needs that.
I am also not saying that you need to only feature thicker or even overweight models. Far from it. I do not think unhealthy weight on either end of the spectrum is something to be encouraged, and I do not believe any of us should do anything to make women who are naturally thin feel bad about themselves. There is, however, a vastly diverse, amazingly beautiful and healthy medium from which to choose the representatives of your brand, and it is high time you start doing just that: making your brand more representative. Not only could you whip up literally countless new ad campaigns to go along with the shift in company policy, but you might actually do something good for the world while turning a profit. After all, isn't that the dream?
Anyhoo, I sincerely hope you found this letter to be informative and helpful, though I would be just as happy if it ticked you off and you never wrote back. I am amused in such ways. So yeah, I look forward to never hearing a reply from you, and have a great time shooting pictures of skeletons with baby faces and angel wings!
Sincerely,
A Heterosexual Man
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