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I woke up to a thread by Tiffany about some of the driving forces behind this movement. As part of the thread she showed us all this advert which is clearly implying that the man in the advert is a woman. Very much in line with the kind of assertions we see made everyday.
I thought I’d do some digging about this.First I went&looked up the company Blush where their website talks about the importance of a woman focused brand and a company that is all about the wellbeing of women. Contradictory given the advert,right?
I looked into this a bit more. The company who designed the ad is called DDB. They were founded 70 years ago in NY. They aren’t small fry e.g they have been cited as one of the leading creative agencies in the world by the Gunn Report. This is their blurb 
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They’re also responsible for the John Lewis Christmas ads (sorry to be the bearer of bad news).The “every woman” ad was put up in Berlin in 2017. A lot of news articles that covered the ad explicitly called the subject male or man &it only lasted a day or so before it was pulled
5 days later,Blush themselves turned up to put up some graffiti, in the space where the advert had been,and to rail against what they saw as censorship. In it,they called the male model a man. Pictures of that, and a paragraph translated from a Spanish news article about events:
What’s a bit contradictory in that seems obvious. Why have a caption that suggests he’s a woman if you know he’s a man? Why not just celebrate gender nonconformity without implying our bearded friend is one of the girls? Isn’t this a sort of sleight of hand going on?
An article from a site discussing advertising (riveting!) which quotes Blush bigwig Claudia Kleinert suggests they were intentionally supporting “gender diversity”. That’s great except that when you imply he’s a woman on the billboard you do nothing of the sort.
Despite their buzzwords&bamboozling it’s hard to understand this ad without viewing it as yet another attempt to “widen the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman” (as Alex Drummond once put it). It reads less about gender nonconformity,more about disregard for the female sex
The implication, too, that if a man becomes a woman, or “feels” even in part like one, he must become a sexualised object for mass consumption doesn’t say much about the conception of woman as a category in this brave new future either, really.
Back to Blush for a moment. So,are they a mould breaking company with women’s best interests at heart who maybe got this one wrong? I’m going to say no. Here are 2 prior ads they did, without DDB. As we can see, none of it is designed to make the male gaze blink for even a second
Not challenging the patriarchy is a pretty consistent component of the current gender movement.Instead,it disregards women’s boundaries,makes us accept stereotypes of women as being who we are&helps uphold the status quo of women’s subjugation while claiming to be revolutionary
