This is an opinion article by one of our staff writers, and the opinions expressed here do not represent the views of the newspaper in general or of the leadership team. 

Recently, a seemingly innocent advertisement by the exercise machine company, Peloton, has sparked outrage and disgust from “woke” liberals and reporters.  The ad, titled “The gift that gives back,” is only thirty-one seconds long and features a young, attractive woman receiving a Peloton bike from her husband for the holidays. She thanks her husband and proceeds to record herself exercising on the bike for the rest of the year. Next Christmas, she shows her husband the video montage she took. How could such a short and straightforward ad about a bike cause any outrage, you might ask? According to dull reporters and frenzied liberals, the answer is that the ad is blatantly sexist, and highlights spousal abuse. 

Writers for both the Washington Post and Vice have slammed the video, claiming the ad is, “a dystopian fitness inspo hellscape,” and how “The Peloton Ad Woman Is Absolutely Not OK.” The Washington Post likened the woman to a possessed character in the horror movie Get Out, stating that the ad was downright dystopian. These claims are unquestionably illegitimate. Irrational articles about how a bike ad is a patriarchal dystopian future seem more like a desperate cry for attention than reliable and truthful reporting. 

  Typically society would see right through these bare-bones conspiracy theories; however, thousands of Twitter users swiftly flocked to the defense of the Peloton ad woman, suggesting that the Peloton woman’s husband was an abusive spouse who forced her to exercise on a $2,245 bike, simply because he wanted her to become even skinnier. Users even went as far as to liken the ad to a Black Mirror episode, with the husband being a controlling and sadistic villain who relishes using an expensive, state of the art Peloton bike to torture his wife. Ignorant tweeters also tweeted opinions like, “Absolutely 100% chance that the husband in the Peloton ad is abusive,” and, “Is anyone else getting, ‘I’m afraid of my husband’ vibes from the woman in the peloton commercial?!” Soon after, Peloton shares plummeted by nine percent.

  Let’s be entirely clear; there is absolutely nothing wrong with the ad. It was a simple marketing video about an already attractive and fit woman, benefitting from an exercise bike her loving husband gifted her. It wasn’t about spousal abuse or sexism, and no one was forcing her to use the expensive machine; it was literally just about an exercise bike. We live in a society where farfetched ideas and paranoid extremes are treated with the utmost seriousness. Woke reporters and individuals have managed to turn a conventional bike ad into a matter of sexism and vituperative husbands. We must stop trying to find faults where there are none and focus on real issues that actually matter. Encouraging outrage for non-existing examples of sexism and abuse detracts from the gravity of actual occurrences and deepens the already prominent divide in society. Finding these fake problems is a pathetic ploy for attention, and until woke liberals can eliminate their incessant need for so-called social justice, real issues will continue to get worse.

Sources:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kjbw/peloton-commercial-holiday-advertisement?utm_source=vicetwitterus

https://nypost.com/2019/12/03/why-everyone-is-criticizing-the-new-peloton-bike-christmas-commercial/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/03/this-peloton-ad-is-dystopian-fitness-inspo-hellscape/