The recent controversy over Jimmy Choo’s advertisement that critics are calling tone-deaf has me wondering who indeed is above reproach here. No doubt, such ads are incredibly demeaning to women and in the age when powerful men are being exposed as Emperors with, well, no clothes, this ad is in incredibly poor taste, but in our rush to brandish our liberal credentials are we missing something just as large as sexism?
Folks, come on. In a world in which billions of people live on $1 a day and in a US in which scores of millions of people are, yes, hungry isn’t the fact that these shoes cost up to a good MONTHLY wage for a hard-working American itself a travesty ? Isn’t advertising luxury goods tone-deaf to the hungry, poor, uninsured, beleaguered, and benighted brothers and sisters who live amongst us? Why is this tone-deafness passable and uncommented upon?
We are realizing—far, far too late— that it’s disgusting and immoral to subject women to the range of insults and crimes that appear to be so common, should we also not realize that it’s disgusting and immoral to subject the poor to constant indignities and violence as well?
The “#MeToo” movement is great; it would be so much more powerful if it includes not only victims of sexual predation but also of class predation. This is not to diminish the unique effect of sexual crimes but to create a net of solidarity in which one-issuism doesn’t affect our ability to understand the broader dimensions of Power.
Romi Mahajan is an independent writer