Business & Tech

Equinox Gym Billboard: Sexy or Sexist?

A group of mothers started a petition to ask Bethesda's Equinox gym to take down its "sexist" billboard advertisement featuring a woman crawling across a pool table.

On a downtown Bethesda billboard, a stick-thin woman crawls across a pool table, her hand barely touching a pool cue. She’s wearing stiletto heels and a tight, short dress. 

An advertisement for an escort service, perhaps? Maybe for a pool hall?

No—it’s an advertisement for Equinox, a high-end gym in Bethesda, and a group of local mothers have banded together to ask Equinox to remove the billboard, which, they say, is sexist and demeaning to women. 

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“It’s one of these mom power things,” said Pam Holland, one of the women behind Sexism Matters, which has started a petition on Change.org to ask for the removal of the billboard.

“Our daughters and sons walk by the billboard outside Equinox Gym every day. They see a woman in a degrading sexual position, being ‘celebrated’ for her hypersexualized and supposed dexterity, with a pool cue and balls. This is somehow meant to advertise for a fitness facility,” Sexism Matters posted on its petition site.

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The women behind the petition didn’t all know one another before joining forces on this issue—the Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School Parent Teacher Student Association's (B-CC PTSA) Wellness Committee email list helped them join together.

Some of them still haven’t met face-to-face yet, but their petition—which began circulating about a week ago—had almost 400 signatures by Wednesday afternoon.

The billboard is above the Taylor Gourmet sandwich shop on Woodmont Avenue, at the northwest corner of Woodmont and Elm Street. (The gym entrance is around the corner at 4905 Elm St.)

Holland says that her high-school daughter sees the billboard on her way to and from school, and finds it insulting.

Mary Atwater, one of the supporters of the petition, had the same reaction when she “saw the sign last month out of the corner of my eye. My mind went to all the teens I have seen who try to be what the covers of advertisements say they ‘should’ be.”

“The sign is sexist. Women and girls are not toys or play things. I called the gym to respectfully ask them to take the sign down. They gave me the impression that I didn't understand what their marketing campaign was all about,” Atwater said.

Atwater responded, “you don't know Bethesda moms,” and began contacting Bethesda moms—and dads, too.

The management of Equinox (a chain of gyms headquartered in New York City), told the group that the billboard is not meant to offend, Holland told Patch. The billboards have been posted in other parts of the country as well.

The billboard in Bethesda features one of a series of photos commissioned by Equinox and done by fashion photographer Terry Richardson, whose "signature style inherently dials up the sex factor," an Equinox spokesperson told Women’s Wear Daily, the New York Post reported

(Patch contacted Equinox’s Bethesda office for a comment on Monday afternoon, but had not heard back from the gym as of noon on Wednesday.)

But the photo-as-art reasoning isn’t going to cut it for these parents.

“I don’t think this community is going to back down on this,” Holland said.

“Who wants their kids to think what this picture implies? This is our town. We are not who Equinox thinks we are,” Atwater said.

Do you think this billboard is sexist? Tell us in the comments.

Editor's note: This post has been corrected to note that Mary Atwater is a supporter of the petition, and not the founder of Sexism Matters.


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