The juxtaposition has been described as "grossly, grossly offensive".
The retailer was blasted for its "vomit-inducing" shopfront in Nottingham, which included a menswear showcase of "outfits to impress".
M&S said its festive windows were routinely updated and any changes would not be due to the backlash.
It also told the BBC it would not be altering its nationwide ad campaign.
The commercials follow the theme of "must-haves" for men and women and feature model David Gandy doing the washing up.
Gandy has responded to the backlash by tweeting that men who want any "must have fancy knickers" can find them at M&S.
Criticism of the window display grew when a photo was posted in a Facebook group called Feminist Friends Nottingham.
Fran Bailey asked: "Ok, M&S Nottingham, have we really not learned anything in the last 35 years? Or am I alone in finding this, their major window display, completely vomit inducing?"
Comment: Typical of feminism - complaining over trivialities in a completely euphemistic fashion (vomit inducing?). Should M&S just sell women's underwear without advertising it? Or perhaps they should stop selling the products altogether.
© Siân SteansImage caption A campaigner altered the window so that it read "full human rights" instead of "knickers".
Another window display at the same Nottingham store is aimed at women and suggests they, too, must have "outfits to impress".
M&S said in a statement its stores had various combinations of Christmas window displays, but the same two displays would appear next to one another at some other branches.
The statement added: "We've highlighted one combination in our windows, which are part of a wider campaign that features a large variety of must-have Christmas moments, from David Gandy washing up in an M&S suit through to families snuggling up in our matching PJs."
In days of yore, women used to scream at testosterone-rich male 'sex objects' like Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Marc Bolan, whomever else. These days, caught in a drought of aforesaid chemical, they scream at shop windows instead.
Let boys be boys and girls be girls. You don't have to do too much of a paraphrase on Boris Mouravieff to come up with something along the lines of.. men-and-women-were-built-physically-to-worship-each-other-as-opposites-so-let-their-music-be-abundant-in-I-love-you-baybee-isms, as a reasonably decent working M.O. as per so-called 'sexual politics'.
The negative part of female sexuality is restriction, constriction, suffocation, and a negatively feminised society is going to abound with the kind of hysteria that reflects that: censhorship, bans, prohibitions of one sort or another.
Whilst having a face value ideological driver, much of this kind of thing is probably just the result of a surfeit of oestrogen and a dearth of testosterone in the human jungle.
The endocrinal system is a system of bridges between the physical, sexual, emotional, intellectual, spiritual. If that gets messed up, it's pretty much horses for courses that everything else is gonna get messed up too.
Come back Arthur Fonzarelli all is forgiven.