Gisele Bündchen is known for her sultry body and smouldering looks. She’s the richest supermodel in the world and has everything going good, but she could be in big trouble! Hope underwear recently cast Gisele in a series of advertisements that caused a hue and cry in her hometown, Brazil. Government leaders and feminists deemed these ads sexist. This could be true, but is it the women that should be worrying?
Walk around naked!
The series of ads definitely do what they are meant to do – they show off the collection and make you laugh out loud. One of the ads starts off with Gisele confessing that she just crashed her man’s car. She’s fully clothed in a white shift dress and the screen has a little box with a cross in it on the side, depicting that this isn’t the right way to go about making her confession. She then walks in stripped down to nothing but a pair of red hot panties and a matching bra from Hope. She walks the walk,is extremely seductive and gets a tick sign in the box next to her.
We all do it!
Agreed, this might seem offensive to women who are watching it. Women shouldn’t be shown as purely sex symbols, they are more than that, and a woman clothed should be respected as much as when she is naked. However, when you think about it, don’t we all do this? Walking around in underwear may not be your idea of getting your man to forgive you crashing his car, but every woman has a little trick up her sleeve, that gets her man to let her have her way. In the other two ads she maxes out his credit card and wants her mum to come stay (here’s what could happen to your underwear if his mum came over instead).
Sexism
If you think about what the ad really portrays, it’s the men watching this who should be creating a fuss. Are all men really that easy to manipulate? Does merely shedding your clothes let you have your way? Does wearing sexy lingerie or looking like Gisele give you the right to crash his car (twice, as the ad suggests), or let you get away with blowing up lots of his money? So in reality, its men who are being looked down upon as shallow and easy to manipulate.
According to Sandra Chayo, the company’s director, it would have been a stupid move for them to have planned to mock their target audience – women. The ads were created to be funny, and they are. As for sexism, this may be present in the ad, but is channeled towards men. So if a man decided he was insulted by this series, he should be able to have his say, but it’s doubtful any of them would have anything to complain about. Not when they get to see Gisele half-naked.
Source: Mail Online (September 30, 2011) – Gisele’s racist ad’s spark fury among women in Brazilian government
Watch the video here: