Your actual workout won’t be much like this: An Equinox billboard outside the gym at 895 Broadway. (William C Lopez/New York Post)
There’s a new woman waiting on the Metro North platform in New Rochelle, and she’s rather underdressed. Every time I need to catch a train — whether I’m with my husband or my 6-year-old daughter or my 4-year-old son — there she is. Wearing a skin-tight dress hiked up to you-know-where, she’s crawling across a pool table, legs spread apart, holding a pool cue and looking intently for a place to stick it.
She’s part of a campaign by Equinox gym to make exercise sexy. You may have seen other photos around the city, like the man hovering over another barely clad woman: He’s between her legs and has a video camera pointed at her.
There are others, with women and men bent in all sorts of positions that we’ll all presumably be able to mimic once we start exercising with the lovely trainers at Equinox. “Flex Appeal,” “Dominance,” “Stamina,” read the captions.
But the jokes are secondary. This is, for all intents and purposes, pornography plastered on public property.
And it’s not subtle either. The pool table, I’m told, is a staple of the genre. And what do you think the video camera is doing there?
For the past two weeks, we’ve debated the teen-pregnancy ads in the subway. Are they shaming young women into not having sex, or just into having abortions? Are they racist or sexist? Will they be be effective? Before that, we debated the so-called “jihad” ads. Are they offensive to Muslims, or telling the truth about a particular ideology? Or both?
Yet these Equinox ads have barely elicited a peep of protest, except for a few critics who complained on the gym’s Facebook page that the models are too thin. Talk about missing the point.
At least Equinox fully acknowledges the goal. A spokesman told Women’s Wear Daily last year that photographer “Terry [Richardson’s] signature style inherently dials up the sex factor — each shot is like foreplay.”
Regarding an ad titled “Rejuvenation,” in which a woman’s bare legs are draped over a man’s as she lies prone on a couch, “The idea behind this shot was that the couple was recuperating after sex, so I had to keep reminding Terry that we were going for a ‘post-coital’ feel. He just started yelling, ‘Post-coital! Post-coital!’ with every pop of the flash!”
Know the old saw? “You can’t define porn, but you’ll know it when you see it.” Well, how about a new standard? “Pornography happens when the photographer yells ‘Post-Coital! Post-Coital!’ while taking the shots.”
Why don’t we complain? There has been a “dulling of the senses,” says Mark Regnerus, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “Premarital Sex in America.” He explains, “Thanks to the ubiquity of pornography, an image that might have raised objections 15 years ago no longer does because everybody knows its tame comparatively speaking.”
Plus, he notes, Equinox is really only marketing in major metro areas like New York City where the target demographic is young single adults. “This doesn’t play in Peoria, but it will play in parts of Manhattan where the expectations for male-female relationships are largely sexual in nature.”
These images won’t shock their intended audience, whose mentality, says Regnerus, is “The body is for sex. Duh.”
Kay Hymowitz, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, says she expects some kind of backlash against these ads. “Equinox went too far and I think they’ll hear about it.” Religious people won’t like it, “but neither will feminists — or parents.”
What to say when your kindergartner asks what that lady is doing on that pool table and why she has a funny look on her face? Hymowitz (who raised her three grown children in Brooklyn) advises, “Just say, ‘She sure looks silly,’ and then change the subject.”
As for the teens standing next to us on the train platform, Regnerus says that “one ad or one bit of a movie is not going to affect them for life.” But, “If this is a constant flow of this kind of sexual imagery, then girls learn what they’re for and boys learn what girls are for too.”