I Know what you’re thinking: “What happened to the sexy tire calendars? I really miss those. You’re in luck. The 2025 Pirelli Calendar is super sexy, with classy nudity/near nudity once again. Until then, the Italian Italian companies have spent years grappling with the #MeToo movement and accusations of pandering to the male gaze through ads featuring clothing.
Annie Leibovitz was involved in taking these photos at one point. There are pictures of Yoko Ono, Serena Williams, Patti Smith, etc…but they’re all wearing clothes, so who cares?
“#MeToo has really forced everyone to pause, which is really nice,” said Ethan James Green, photographer of the 2025 calendar. He added: “When someone contacted me, my initial thought was, ‘What if I’m going to To do Pirelli, I wanted to go back to the sexy classics, like what we think of when we think of Pirelli.”
It turns out Pirelli wanted the same thing. “It’s perfect,” Green said. Perfect sounds good. This is a perfect example of Post #MeToo creep. Looking around, the spread of Post #MeToo is accelerating and has been for some time. As predicted, lingerie company Victoria’s Secret also brought it back to its iconic wings on the runway. There may be a resurgence of interest in sexy movies and TV shows, according to reports. In periodic skirmishes, a male actor (usually an older, established actor) would complain to the intimacy coordinator on the set.
There seems to be a clear push to put #MeToo in the rearview mirror. And, let’s call it my overactive imagination, but, at times, as the #MeToo movement spread, there was a distinct undercurrent of: “Gee, there’s enough computer grandstanding, we’ve all said our Mistakes made – it’s time to move on!
To some extent, this is understandable. Sometimes things do have their season. Sometimes things (people, culture, sexy tire calendars) do move on. Still, before years of valuable sex-safety activities are thrown away haphazardly, let’s clear up a few things. Let’s get something straight before long-overdue, and actually quite mildly reasonable, on-site safeguards and protocols are ridiculed and dismissed.
Perhaps a good place to start is with the definition of #MeToo.
Green misspelled that #MeToo did not force “everyone to take a timeout.” For the victims, this is not like a token moment of silence and then everything can go back to the way it was. #MeToo was and should be an instant order telling men to stop sexually abusing, harassing, and coercing women in the workplace, whether in film and television, in the office, in a hotel room with a Jacuzzi, or anywhere else.
While film producer Harvey Weinstein was one of its first and biggest victims, the #MeToo movement has universal resonance because the stress, anger and worse is not limited to Hollywood . From infuriating to humiliating to terrifying, these are every woman’s experiences with the entrenched culture of sextortion.
It also inevitably surrounds the entertainment industry. After all, this is where “difficult” women see their careers turn into road kill because they won’t sleep with someone, or they won’t take off their clothes, or they object to another sex scene.
With all this going on, who has the most to complain about is the Intimacy Coordinator? Of course, some parts of this new form of moral orchestration do sound interesting (“Put your hands there…don’t make orgasmic faces…are you happy with the speed of his thrusts?”). Relearning how to shoot a sex scene is undoubtedly a chore, but maybe these cheated-on men can consider it a marketable skill on their theater resumes, like horseback riding, swordplay, or speaking fluent Mandarin .
Just as directors and producers can’t find a way to make their art exciting without lots of gratuitous nudity or full-frontal shots, maybe they should consider a future away from the creative industries.
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It’s a truism that “sex sells”, but in fact, sex is also a simple way to spice up a languishing movie, speed up an otherwise dull TV show, and even spice it up a bit. Deep tread tires. On screen, sometimes sex comes from a creative, meaningful, and interesting place; Sometimes it’s a behind-the-scenes “tell” of despair and mediocrity. This is why some sex scenes work and many others don’t. Still, #MeToo was never fundamentally a protest against sexual content per se; #MeToo was a protest against the abuse of power.
That’s the problem with post#MeToo creep’s dishonesty. It’s not that they’re trying to reintroduce sexual content on screens, runways or calendars, it’s that they’re acting as if they’re on a moral crusade, bravely standing up against repression and censorship. Not only are they tired of pretending to care about social issues. Or they haven’t done some calculations and decided that waking up tired is high enough to risk some potential optical issues. No, it’s all about artistic impression, bringing back fun, color and excitement. When all it really does is surreptitiously push the dial back to its original position.
Something must be wrong when looking at the unbridled splendor of the post-#MeToo era. It all looks very familiar. As Post #MeToo comes, at least don’t distort the past and present of #MeToo. This is not pro-censorship, this is pro-women. This is no sacred cow of political correctness – there has been ridicule, disbelief, disparagement and slander from the start. As for the ongoing furore, #MeToo lasted just seven years. This can’t go on for long, can it?
Barbara Allen is a columnist for The Observer
