I started seeing this commercial on Hulu (I think it was Hulu, at least. That’s the main place I see commercials ever, these days) and thought it was worth discussing in terms of positive aspects and negative aspects.

Positive Aspects:

This is the first commercial for women’s clothing that I’ve seen that show cases women from multiple ethnicities AND multiple body types. Usually, you might see a commercial that had both white women and black women in it, but generally not any with both these and Hispanic women or Latinas or Asian women. And if you do, usually they are all slender and fairly tall. This add blows that out of the water and definitely gets points from me on that. It’s also positive toward all the body types featured.

Negative Aspects:

Here’s the part of the ad that really got my attention, and not in a good way: “You’re a woman, so dress like a woman.”

I’m a woman. The clothes in this commercial, however, are not my style. At all. I spend most of the year living in jeans and t-shirts. The rest is usually spent in button-up shirts, vests, blazers (let’s not get into how many variations of the classic, mens-wear-looking black blazer I own), Victorian menswear-esque things, and…year. My wardrobe all comes the women’s department in stores (except my tie collection; most of those came from the “mens” section of thriftstores), but it’s mostly as close to menswear in look as you can get.

“Dress like a woman” as presented in the ad says to me, “dress like a femme woman, because that’s the only way to dress ‘like a woman’.” It bothers me, because to me, it’s saying there’s only one way of being a woman. This is wrong. There as many ways of being a woman as there are being human. I have the same gut/kneejerk reaction to this as I have when told to “sit like a lady”: sprawl more.

So this is my internet-sprawling, even if few people see it.