Schweppes + Ogilvy Brazil collaborated to make a “smart dress” that was furnished with sensors that registers pressure from contact. This is to show how often in an evening a woman gets inappropriately touched.
Three Women, Luisa, Tatiana and Juliana, were invited to wear the same dress to a nightclub in São Paulo and were followed by a camera. An interaction was sent to a platform via WIFI that transformed it into data each time they were touched without consent. The data is even so shocking: In only 4 hours, 3 women were touched without consent a total of 157 times. To go with the data given by the women in the dresses, we see a warm map video demonstrating where these women were being touched: for the most part the lower back, arms, and backside.
This total number is very shocking, which is decisively the point. It seeks to urge men to rethink their conduct and approach women in ways that are respectful while also showing just how widespread sexual assault is. To drive that point home, the video shows a ton of men making dismissive remarks about sexual assault before entering the club. One man implies that women were inviting harassment simply by being at a club on a Saturday night and that they’re “just complaining about everything.”
It’s still to some degree sexist to suggest that men are so right-mind-driven that they need to see hard data on sexual assault to register it as genuine. The thing with this smart dress is that men shouldn’t need to see hard data, women’s harassment unfold on camera, to wrap their minds around the full degree of the issue. The weight ought not to be on women to prove to men that sexual assault is inbuilt in their day to day lives. It should be on both women and men to listen and offer comfort to each other’s stories and believe them. Although men experience sexual harassment at much lower rates than women, male sexual assault is still very real.
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