Moi, crossing the line?
No, I erased it
I don’t know how my obsession with April Fools started. I never cared about it until I realized we could make people laugh by pretending something outlandish was real, and in doing so, make a point that on its own would be relatively tiresome.
At Coalition, we got so good at it, we aim to win April Fools every year. I fully recognize how ridiculous it is that we take great pride in dominating the holiday.
There was the time we sold to Broman LLC, which was subsequently published in trade reports. You all cried when you realized the women's only ski resort we opened could no longer live on your bucket list. For $69.69 you could hire us as personal shoppers to mitigate the dude soup at outdoor shops. And when we launched a men's line, half the population felt seen.
This year's April Fool’s joke was simpler in form. It was designed as an internal email to approve nude top sheets (joke), inspired by our OnlyFans (not a joke but laughing all the way to the bank).
I received a handful of emails warning me that an internal email had been sent out. Those people would tell you if you had toilet paper on the bottom of your shoe or food in your teeth. Many contributed to the search term “Coalition OnlyFans leak,” which ranked at the top of our Google search results the first week of April. Penty of you got the joke, and that felt like a big win.
No one will be surprised to learn a few women sent me curt messages.
"It was just, well, boringly lame. Oh look, naked women, gee we haven't seen that about 5 billion times before. But what I really dislike is the fact that you guys have an OnlyFans page. I wasn't aware of that until I received the joke email. Seriously, OnlyFans? I want to see women, of all types, doing really incredible shit. Hawking your tits for money is not incredible. It's not empowering, it's not a slap in the face to the patriarchy, it's just what women have been doing forever. Yawn. Let's bust out of that mold and see women on skis and boards doing amazing things on and off the slopes."
If they had responded when I asked for their number to have a real conversation, I would have said this to them: We know naked women are provocative and divisive. That's why we offered up our own bodies: To get us to think about why we feel the way we do about women owning and celebrating their sexuality.
When you take something men have done TO women for millennia and flip it into something that women do FOR themselves, you engage in radical change. You upset the patriarchy.
Men have extracted our beauty and sensuality and have made riches off objectifying women. Not in this case. We control everything, start to finish.
What we are doing with our OnlyFans transcends the male gaze and is firmly rooted in the female gaze. We are reclaiming our bodies, our narrative, and our power.
We're making our own rules. We are not beholden to outdated social norms that make us feel small. We are embracing the parts of ourselves that have been shamed into silence. We feel a certain level of lightness about the things that make others—and perhaps at one time themselves—uncomfortable. That is freeing. We are erasing the line that society drew in the sand, the line that has done nothing but keep us behind it.
I'm not suggesting that for women to be bold and beautiful they need to start an OnlyFans or take their clothing off in the public sphere. They do not. What, how, and why women share their bodies is a personal choice, and we all deserve to make that for ourselves.
I would, however, like for us to move beyond the trite and frankly outdated conversations about nudity and women's sexuality. If we really wanted to do something to support women, we would talk about whose bodies are safe and acceptable and whose aren't. I know when I share nude photos of myself the worst thing that will happen is someone will think I'm a dumb slut and they won't buy a pair of my skis. Other women—trans women, fat women, women of color—risk doxing and death, simply because they don't have a body that fits into the very narrow perimeters of what's considered beautiful.
The joke’s on you if you believe what we do at Coalition is flippant and foolish. You don't have to like it; we know some days it's harder than others to have someone hold up a mirror you don’t want to look in.