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Adidas’ Corporate-Sponsored Public Nudity Harms Children And Destroys Sex

Adidas
Image Creditwarrenski / Flickr

Adidas debuted a new advertising campaign Wednesday featuring explicit images of headless women with their breasts exposed.

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Adidas debuted a new advertising campaign Wednesday featuring (warning: explicit link) explicit images of multiple headless women with their breasts exposed.

“We believe women’s breasts in all shapes and sizes deserve support and comfort,” the company wrote to explain the campaign is meant to showcase its wide range of bra styles “so everyone can find the right fit for them.”

Not a single product the campaign claims to advertise is on display in the images (explicit link) going up on public billboards. The apparel’s absence leaves the PR portraits subject to inappropriate viewership, flashing nudity in the face of undeveloped minds.

The issue with the ad campaign stems far beyond messages of body positivity with images of visibly overweight women featured on the billboard. Fitness brands can and should produce clothes to fit a wide range of body types to encourage active lifestyles. Failure to do so is a failure to meet the needs of a nation in a baseline health crisis (although neither should brands promote complacency). How enterprises go about promoting their products, however, ought to be a concern of higher priority.

Adidas defended its public exposure to adolescents by claiming “it’s important to normalize the human body and help inspire future generations to feel confident and unashamed.”

Adidas also sells jock straps. Should the company put up billboards featuring a bunch of penises too? That’s not a suggestion. It’s an illustration of the campaign’s absurdity. Penises are natural too.

But it’s not just children the promotion will hurt. The ads mark an acceleration of public nudity’s acceptance born out of the digital age that is degrading sex.

Camille Pagila, a pro-sex pop-culture academic, explains in the Hollywood Reporter how excess nudity, bolstered by Instagram, has hurt women and devalued biological desires.

“The current surplus of exposed flesh in the public realm has led to a devaluation of women and, paradoxically, to sexual ennui. A sense of appropriateness and social context has been lost,” Pagila wrote. “If women want respect in society, they must do their part to raise their own value. Stop throwing it away on empty display.”

Excess nudity has erased the beauty in modesty, desensitizing sexual desires of a public to whom the naked body has lost its fascination. There’s a distinct difference between being a prude and acknowledging the pendulum has swung too far.