As predicted by yours truly, the Year of the Boob is in full swing. After years of playing second fiddle to the ass, boobs are back — and they’re everywhere. Self-proclaimed “AirPod-shaped” women are flaunting their big naturals, Kim Petras is belting an impassioned ode to her “coconuts” in her newest single, and a collage of naked breasts has crash landed on everyone’s social media feeds thanks to Adidas’s latest ad campaign.
At 9 a.m. on Wednesday, Adidas chose chaos, posting 25 sets of bare tits — that’s 50 tits total, if you’re counting — across the brand’s social media accounts. But why would Adidas present us with a five-by-five bingo board of boobs? To sell sports bras, of course!
While a somewhat surprising move for an athletic apparel company, using boobs to make money is obviously nothing new. The entire Playboy brand was based on the premise that people will pay to see boobs. But Adidas’s boobs aren’t like the other boobs. These aren’t the perfectly round, flawlessly symmetrical, unimpeachably perky breasts we’re used to seeing. These boobs are flawed! These are saggy boobs, asymmetrical boobs, boobs with puffy or enlarged areolae, boobs with tan lines! Small boobs, big boobs, floppy boobs! They are, according to Adidas, breasts “in all shapes and sizes,” which are equally deserving of quality support and comfort from one of the brand’s 43 styles of sports bras.
In short, the message is, “All boobs are beautiful! We support women! Buy our sports bras!” It’s the kind of move that might have felt revolutionary circa 2014 — one that would have been hailed in women’s magazines with breathless headlines like “Adidas’s New Ad Campaign Proves All Boobs Are Beautiful and We. Are. Living. For. It.” — but now just feels kind of hollow and gimmicky.
Whenever brands attempt to advance causes like body positivity or various other social justice movements, the difference between “using a platform for good” and just plain cashing in is always blurry. In showing us a bunch of less-than-conventionally attractive boobs, is Adidas really promoting representation of different body types, or is this, as one Twitter user questioned in the replies, “just another shock ad designed only to generate revenue by using women’s bodies?”
The answer, of course, is probably. But if Adidas’s goal was to generate conversation (and, by extension, sales) it seems they’ve hit their mark. The backlash to the campaign has been mixed but predictable, from the religious/conservative types who are offended by such a vulgar display of body parts best reserved for “husbands and babies,” to those who are offended by having to look at ugly tits, and of course those of us who just think this kind of transparent cash grab in the name of sports bras and body positivity is kind of played out and silly.
Perhaps the most confusing response to the campaign, however, is one that attempts to equate breasts to penises. Among the flurry of replies the tweet has attracted are several asking Adidas when they’re going to start advertising jockstraps by showing us an array of dicks — many in jest, some seemingly in earnest and still others in an apparent attempt to illustrate the vulgarity of showing bare breasts in an advertisement.
I don’t know how else to say this, but breasts are not penises, nor, to my mind, is the cultural conversation surrounding those body parts particularly comparable.
If there’s anything about this campaign that actually is noteworthy and potentially groundbreaking, it’s the challenge Adidas posed to online censorship by posting bare, female-presenting breasts on a social media platform that typically prohibits that kind of content by way of sexist policies. (While Twitter is much more lax in its content guidelines, Instagram and other Facebook-owned products have always been notoriously anti-boobs). The central argument of the “free the nipple” movement is that female-presenting breasts and nipples are not inherently sexual, and should not be sexualized and censored while male-presenting nipples are free to bare themselves to the public (and the internet) at will.
Equating female nipples with a male sex organ effectively ignores this, while reinforcing the idea that breasts are inherently sexual. Yes, I am well aware that penises of a certain size, shape or circumcision status may be subject to unfair derision much like breasts that fall short of societal standards, which may be a fair point of comparison. That’s about where the similarities end, though. Penises have not historically been subjected to the same kind of gendered censorship and unnecessary sexualization as female-presenting nipples. Sure, you can’t post your dick on Instagram, but you can’t post female-presenting genitals on the platform, either. Whether or not genitals should be censored on social media is another argument entirely, but that’s just it: it’s a different body part. It’s not the same thing at all.
Adidas’s display of support for more diverse breast representation may be little more than another faux-progressive cash grab from a brand trying to capitalize on body positivity. Still, the response from men demanding comparable penis representation comes as yet another instance of men putting their dicks where they don’t belong. Personally, I think Adidas’s choice to splash a bunch of titties on the timeline was kind of silly and unnecessary, but I respect their right to do it. I also think it has absolutely nothing to do with penises, so please, just leave your dicks out of this for once.
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