Photo courtesy Sexism Matters.

A group of concerned Bethesda citizens want an Equinox gym to take down a billboard that shows a woman in what they call a “degrading sexual position.”

The ad, part of a campaign shot by controversial photographer Terry Richardson, shows a woman on all fours on a pool table holding a pool cue. The group, which is calling itself Sexism Matters, created a Change.org petition last week, asking the gym to remove the billboard from above the Taylor Gourmet outpost on Bethesda Row:

Our daughters and sons walk by the billboard outside Equinox Gym every day. They see a woman in a degrading sexual position, being “celebrated” for her hypersexualized and supposed dexterity, with a pool cue and balls. This is somehow meant to advertise for a fitness facility.

Our children shouldn’t be subjected to this. Our female friends and family shouldn’t be viewed like this, nor forced to conform to it. Our male partners and colleagues shouldn’t be boxed in to thinking this is normal. This is the kind of not-so-subtle sexism that infects our culture, and degrades an entire gender.

On its new site, Sexism Matters makes it clear that the billboard is just the beginning of its quest to explore “solutions to the epidemic of sexism, rampant to our daily lives.”

The Equinox ad campaign was previously called “pornography plastered on public property” in the New York Post by contributor Naomi Schaefer Riley, while BlissTree called it “highly sexist.”

While the billboard may be offending some Bethesda residents for the first time, it’s in-line with Equinox’s general advertising tone. In an interview last August, Bianca Kosoy, Equinox’s executive creative director and the woman behind the campaign, told the New York Times, “I think fitness is a fraud. That’s why I try to make it look like fashion.”

This extends to the gym’s site. When a page can’t be found, for example, an image of a woman who looks like she just bumped her head (in a very sexy way) pops up next to the text, “You caught us in a very compromising position.”

An email and message left with Equinox’s public relations director Nicole Moke has not been returned.