Is Victoria's Secret's ad less racy than Lane Bryant's because of the size of the models?

More: Vote: Is Lane Bryant’s add too much for the “family hour”?

A curvaceous brunette tries on a trousseau’s worth of colorful lingerie, checks her BlackBerry ("Meet Dan for lunch"), then heads out the door wearing nothing but a red bra and panties, a black trench coat and a wicked smile.

It could easily be a clip from Desperate Housewives, but the Eva Mendes lookalike is a plus-size model, and the scene is an ad for Lane Bryant lingerie.

And that’s when the spandex hit the fan at two television networks.

ABC deemed the ad too racy for viewers of Dancing with the Stars, and Fox demanded several re-edits before finally airing the commercial during the closing minutes of American Idol last week.

Which would’ve been fine, one of the creators of the Lane Bryant ad said, except for the double standard.

"When you say cleavage is OK for a Victoria’s Secret model but not a Lane Bryant model, then it’s not a standards issue, it’s a discrimination issue," said Michael Goldberg, chief marketing officer of Fort Lauderdale’s Zimmerman Advertising. "The amount of skin relative to the garment is the same on both commercials. It’s just you have a bigger woman."

Discrimination against bigger women? Business as usual, said loyal Lane Bryant shopper Maria Flores of Lake Worth, who saw nothing wrong with the ad.

"There’s people on the beach and at the grocery store with less than she had on," said Flores. "They were trying to show a confident woman that was more the norm in the world. She was pretty. She had a nice shape. She just wasn’t a size 0 with all the bones sticking out."

The typical lingerie model is indeed a size 0 or 2, but the average American woman wears a size 14. Lane Bryant model Ashley Graham is a size 16.

"When we see something different, even if it’s really the norm, it jumps out at us," said Johanna Kandel, executive director of the West Palm Beach-based Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness. "And we’re very, very quick to disregard images like that as not good enough."

Any TV ad for plus-size attire is an anomaly, says Lesley Kinzel, a Pembroke Pines native who writes the Fatshionista blog.

"Generally, plus-size fashion isn’t considered fashion at all," she said in a telephone interview. "It’s all about hiding or covering a body. It’s not about standing out or being stylish."

But for Kinzel, what stood out in the ad was the model’s behavior.

"The Victoria’s Secret ads are racy, but in a way that we expect and are familiar with. The women are portrayed in a purely decorative way. They just sort of stand and writhe seductively," she said. "The Lane Bryant ad is actually telling a story in which a woman is going out to meet her paramour in her underwear with a trench coat over it. …

"That is sort of shocking, or even threatening, on some level to our established understanding of what crosses the line into trampy. It forces us to confront our ideas about what is acceptable behavior for women."

And to confront entrenched ideas about standards of beauty, said Zimmerman Advertising’s Goldberg. Lane Bryant has "spent basically 100 years dressing women and their decision to actually undress a plus-size woman is pretty courageous in this society."

The ad has gotten more than 2.5 million views on YouTube and found unlikely supporters, including Jay Leno .

"You can imagine what they could do with a Lane Bryant skit," said Goldberg, "but they were on our side."