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"   Photo: Pantene  A Pantene Philippines ad has been tearing up the lady Internet for the past few days. It is called &amp;quot;Labels Against Women,&amp;quot; and it depicts a series of businessmen and women who are doing the same things, but the women are judged for them. For example, a man talking emphatically at a podium is &amp;quot;persuasive&amp;quot;; a woman doing the same is &amp;quot;pushy.&amp;quot; The commercial ends with the exhortation, &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t Let Labels Hold You Back\u2026Be Strong and Shine.&amp;quot; While many commentators\u2014including working woman supreme leader Sheryl Sandberg\u2014think the Pantene ad is remarkable (on Facebook, Sandberg awarded it the &amp;quot;Lean In Prize of the day&amp;quot;), others are not so pleased. Over at Time, Jessica Roy complains that the Pantene ad is co-opting feminism to sell shampoo, and it&amp;#039;s just a &amp;quot;a clever way for the same old companies to make money off of women.&amp;quot; The Washington Post&amp;#039;s Alexandra Petri calls using feminism to sell beauty products &amp;quot;mildly disingenuous, to say the least.&amp;quot; Slate&amp;#039;s Katy Waldman doesn&amp;#039;t have a problem with using feminism to move product per se, but she says the Pantene ad specifically is &amp;quot;irksome&amp;quot; because it&amp;#039;s equating &amp;quot;challenging sexism with buying a product\u2014and a beauty product, at that.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t think the Pantene ad is quite so sinister or complicated. Firstly, I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s really equating challenging sexism with buying a product; no one is watching that ad and thinking, If I just buy Pantene, workplace sexism will be a thing of the past! My shiny, shiny hair will conquer it! Sure, it&amp;#039;s associating an explicitly feminist message with the Pantene brand, but that should be a cause for celebration among feminists: If a company thinks a feminist message will sell product, that means feminism is mainstream and popular again. Secondly, the Pantene ad is for shampoo\u2014not for foot binding cloths or girdles or weight loss pills or some other product that is vaguely anti-woman. Pretty much everyone needs shampoo, even dudes. Sure, the models in the Pantene ad are slender and gorgeous and damn their hair IS shiny, but just because Pantene has feminist ad copy doesn&amp;#039;t mean they are going to cast a perfect variety of body-positive actors. That is asking a lot from one ad. There are so many ads out there that do make women feel inadequate and less than powerful, so in that context the Pantene ad is a ray of light. Yes, women who are extremely well-versed in academic feminism are going to think it&amp;#039;s pretty cheesy that a shampoo ad is hocking egalitarian values. But if this ad can reach people who aren&amp;#039;t so knowledgeable about feminist tenets and make them think about double standards at their work place, isn&amp;#039;t that a net positive?      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/hair/news/a18799/sheryl-sandberg-pantene-ad/>