Kylie Rancor
In a massive change for the brand, Victoria’s Secret announced yesterday that they will no longer sell lingerie with the help of its iconic Angels—and for some reason, conservatives are absolutely losing their minds over it.
Victoria’s Secret has come under fire in recent years for its failure to be inclusive, a criticism that’s actually quite practical when you consider they are selling lingerie to women who want to know what it will look like on their actual body types rather than just on supermodels, who often fit very narrow criteria.
On Wednesday, the company announced it would be replacing the Angels with what The New York Times describes as “an effort to redefine the version of ‘sexy’ that Victoria’s Secret represents (and sells) to the masses.’”
Victoria’s Secret will now be selling products the same way so many other companies do, by enlisting the help of celebrity ambassadors of a variety of body shapes and aesthetics.
Megan Rapinoe and Priyanka Chopra are the biggest names joining the first seven women chosen to represent the brand, alongside 17-year-old skier Eileen Gu, biracial plus-size model Paloma Elsesser, transgender model Valentina Sampaio, photographer Amanda de Cadenet, and model Adut Akech.
To many, this represents a welcome change—an attempt to sell bras and underwear to the women who are wearing them rather than presenting them solely as a sexy treat to be enjoyed by the men in their lives.
One would think conservatives—who still constantly claim to be all about family values and protecting the children from sexual imagery, despite repeated evidence to the contrary—would be thrilled that Victoria’s Secret is toning down the sexuality linked so deeply to its products and advertising. After all, they often complain about as much, and have gotten collectively fired up about the brand in the past.
But inclusivity is the true bogeyman for these folks, who are also fairly desperate for everyone in the world to maintain traditional gender roles, which positioning everything a woman wears as something to be ogled by men does, I guess.
So instead, they took to Twitter to complain about how advertising lingerie with seven women is destroying femininity just because not all of them fit what Americans pictured as sexy models like 50 years ago.
There are plenty of reasons to criticize Victoria’s Secret — like its former CEO’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein that these same folks never seemed particularly concerned about — but a number of people are celebrating the company’s decision to stop catering exclusively to men jerking off to their catalogues in the bathroom at work and the women who feel obligated to love them. Or at the very least, they’re enjoying the heck out of the absurd performative backlash going on.
Of course, conservative outrage on the internet only lasts as long as the folks at Fox News can milk it for views, so as soon as the next overreaction to Dr. Seuss or Pepe Le Pew comes along, no one will even remember this brand shift happened in the first place, and all these people can get back to freaking out about something else that does not effect them in literally any way whatsoever.