Turning the Other Cheek?

Welcome to the opening salvos of the great pants war. To wit, while we were MIA, Dockers apparently took it upon itself to reconstruct society’s trek toward gender equality with its new ad campaign for men’s slim-fit, “soft” khakis. Such the bad plan. Dubbed “Wear the Pants”, the campaign comes with its own Man-ifesto (I don’t make this stuff up. That’s what they call it. And watch for the high-rent ads on Super-Bowl Sunday.) You can see the ad on your left. They also have a Facebook page, where folks can post their ruminations on the true definition of a man. Anyhow, the copy reads as follows:

Once upon a time, men wore the pants, and wore them well. Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone. Men took charge because that’s what they did. But somewhere along the way, the world decided it no longer needed men. Disco by disco, latte by foamy non-fat latte, men were stripped of their khakis and left stranded on the road between boyhood and androgyny. But today, there are questions our genderless society has no answers for. The world sits idly by as cities crumble, children misbehave and those little old ladies remain on one side of the street. For the first time since bad guys, we need heroes. We need grown-ups. We need men to put down the plastic fork, step away from the salad bar and untie the world from the tracks of complacency. It’s time to get your hands dirty. It’s time to answer the call of manhood. It’s time to wear the pants.

Clearly, some copywriters were jonesing for a Mad Men fix and thought they could dabble in a little mid-century irony to sell some pants. Not exactly, writes the SF Chronicle’s stylewriter, Aaron Britt:

Arch? Stirring? Silly? And more importantly, did you balk when you registered that this throw-down has come not from some edgy line of denim or gauche leather emporium, but from none other than the world’s most peaked, pathetic pants: chinos. And it’s not just any chinos calling you a sissy. It’s Dockers.

But really, I’m a little bit flummoxed. Offended, even. Deconstruct the Man-ifesto and you find that the whole campaign is just not funny. In fact, it smells more than a little bit sexist in its sub-rosa rant against the women’s movement and the way in which some of those not-really-witty one-liners play into the worst fears of paranoid neanderthals: Does gender parity mean gender-less? If women succeed in stepping up, does that turn guys into girly-men (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s phrase, not mine)? With no men to wear the pants, do small children run wild and old ladies get run over?

Left unsaid, of course, is who is wearing the pants. Those emasculating women? And what, for the love of god, have they have done to the workplace?

Now, for years, ads directed toward women have preyed upon their need to be more, well, feminine: Wear this! Wax that! Paint those! And so you can argue that it’s no more than turnabout to sell pants by preying on men’s need to be more traditionally masculine. But see, here’s the difference: Does masculinity have to equate to keeping women in the kitchen? It’s clear where the women are in the scary Dockers scenario: Wearing their menfolks’ khakis, of course, which is why everything else has gone to hell. As Jami Bernard wrote on Walletpop:

Just because the Docker ads are tongue in cheek does not mean they’re not sexist. It’s one thing to encourage men to man up, another to tell them to “wear the pants” — an expression that taps directly into the old question: “Who wears the pants in this family?” There are only two possible answers: the man of the house, or the woman who has been stealing his thunder. “Wear the pants” is a call to arms, even when used jokingly, that says the only way to be a man is to put women in their place…

The real joke, of course, is that the pants in question, writes Broadsheet’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, is “the brand that made everybody’s asses look fat in the ’90s..” Whether or not we girls (or, for that matter, our guys) are wearing the pants — I doubt they’re gonna be Dockers.