When I first saw that infamous Peloton ad, I didn’t think much of it. I thought it was slightly corny, sure, but I didn’t think anything else about it. I scrolled on.
And then I started seeing the comments pop up around it. Quote tweets that featured the ad talking about how “this ad has me screaming.” People would pile on talking about how much they hate the ad and how horrible it is.
“Okay,” I thought. “A bit of an overreaction, but this is Twitter. This is where people come to overreact for the attention.”
The funny thing is, despite all the hate that was being poured out toward this ad, no one seemed to be able to nail down exactly what was bad about it. Even at one point, I tweeted out an admission that I had zero ideas about what was wrong with it, and the responses I got to that tweet weren’t very enlightening.
If you haven’t seen it, here it is.
To give you a rundown, a husband gets his wife a Peloton as a gift and the wife vlogs her progress from just starting out to making a dedicated workout schedule. It highlights moments where she’s doing so well that even the coaches call her out specifically during an exercise live-stream.
https://youtu.be/pShKu2icEYw
Then the articles started coming out about it, and at that point, I knew that we as a species were about to take this outrage nonsense to a whole new level.
Katie Way of Vice wrote on the ad that still doesn’t exactly highlight what was so horrible about it:
To anyone who hasn’t seen a commercial for the wildly expensive subscription home-exercise bike, the horror imbued in the scene above may feel obvious or overwrought. To that I say: Watch the clip, and tell me this shit isn’t wildly sinister. Her grim motivation that pushes her to drag herself out of bed combined with exclaiming at the camera how blatantly, inexplicably nervous the Peloton makes her paint a bleak portrait of a woman in the thrall of a machine designed to erode her spirit as it sculpts her quads.
As Daily Wire highlighted, the actor who played the husband in the commercial was held up as a major villain who is now scared for his career and social life:
The conversation became so hot that the actor who played the husband lamented how his face somehow became synonymous with sexism.
“People turned down a pretty dark path and it turned into a nasty thing,” the actor told “Good Morning America.” “My image is being associated with sexism, with the patriarchy, with abuse, with these words that I am seeing people write about me – that’s not who I am.”
“I currently sit here hoping that I’ll be able to continue auditioning for commercials without any taint, and that if my students happen to find the commercial and recognize me, they won’t think about me any different than they already know me,” he told Psychology Today. “If recognized on the street, what will people’s first opinions be of me?”
It was only thanks to this interview that I really only learned why some people are mad about the Peloton commercial. A man gifts an already fit woman an exercise machine and somehow that’s a bad thing? When is getting fit a sexist thing? Are men not supposed to encourage his family members to engage in an active lifestyle without it being called sexist now? That’s ridiculous. Everyone should be more active. We as a society are so damn sedentary nowadays, and Peloton comes out with a device that allows you to be active without walking too far away from your wifi and people are mad because they made a corny commercial about it?
But I don’t think that’s why everyone is mad. That’s just the SJW’s reason for anger and they’re mad about everything.
Do you know what I think the real reason for the anger toward the Peloton commercial is? I’m not going to make any friends with this answer, but after watching people struggle to define what pisses them off about it, I think I found the answer.
It’s because everyone else is mad about it.
It may have started with a tweet here and there on Twitter that you thought was funny, and maybe even retweeted, but as the tweets gained traction, the primitive part of our brain that really invests in our inherent pack mentality began to really consider the idea that this thing was bad and that it would be best if you hated it too. Next thing you know the mention of the ad was making people bristle and lash out about it. They were unable to define why they hated it, but they knew they hated it nonetheless.
If anything, Peloton is a study in human nature. All things considered, the ad is relatively harmless but our society is now ready to consider it the latest piece of Nazi propaganda, and put anyone involved with it, including the ACTORS into a really tough position.
Not our finest hour.
