Formula 1 bans "grid girls". Feminism/political correctness gone too far?

[Emperor Arcturus Mengsk]

Male models are also using their looks to earn money, I can't see the problem here.

[bigdaddy1204]

marketing research has started to show that having pretty girls around your product or your show doesn't actually draw in anywhere near as many people as was previously thought.

Well also if a product is genuinely good you shouldn't need to distract people with girls to get a loyal customer base.

Live events are a bit different. Everyone knows women add life, colour and joy to any event they attend.

For centuries, women have attended jousts, tournaments, horse races etc and blessed the participants with tokens of their affection etc. Sometimes the participants would race inspired by a particular lady of the royal court. This is an ancient and lovely romantic tradition.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Of course, in the old days they would have looked more like this

Suggesting the grid girls should all lose their jobs and be forced out of the public space altogether is not very fair or respectful to women.

I think these girls should have been allowed to continue their work, if they wanted to do so. What happened to the concept of "liberal" countries? Now F1 has decided to emulate radical Islamist groups and remove attractive women from public life because they can't handle the entire issue that a man might find a woman attractive.

I find it extreme, draconian but also a worrying example of censorship.

[fkizz]

Polar opposites attract each other. Feminism one of the main driving forces for encouraging endless sexual liberation, is now doing a comeback to bring Puritanism back.

Feminist policies are either some of the most encouraging for loose sex and a huge variety of sexual partners, only to be followed by being very puritan, as if slowly remembering the rules Nuns of monasteries follow. A bizarre mix of ideas who don't mix or negociate with each other, but rather co-exist in total contradiction.

Live events are a bit different. Everyone knows women add life, colour and joy to any event they attend.
For centuries, women have attended jousts, tournaments, horse races etc and blessed the participants with tokens of their affection etc. Sometimes the participants would race inspired by a particular lady of the royal court. This is an ancient and lovely romantic tradition.

Suggesting the grid girls should all lose their jobs and be forced out of the public space altogether is not very fair or respectful to women.

Some bitter cat ladies in ther mid 40s are trying to get their younger aged 20s-30s competition fired.
What does feminism offer to a woman in her late 40s or 50s? They are totally disarmed to compete with the ones in the 20-30 age bracket. Only their influence leverage to drive them out of business works.

[Muizer]

What are your thoughts on this? Are grid girls an outdated symbol of sexism, as some suggest? Or is this move an example of political correctness gone mad, with real women's lives upturned and jobs destroyed, all for the sake of an elitist ideology that proclaims loudly that it is saving women, while destroying their livelihoods? Do these women need to be "saved"?

They're just catching up with the rest of society. It's nothing particularly progressive. There will still be plenty of opportunities for women who wish to degrade themselves, but I don't think it's part of the responsibility of an organization like F1 to promote that. Nor, btw, should those American Stadium sports with their preposterous "cheer leaders".

[mishkin]

Male models are also using their looks to earn money, I can't see the problem here.

The problem is that we live in a society in which women (to a much lesser degree men) has been and are considered primarily a sexual object and are valued mainly for their attractiveness. I say it's a problem because I think this should change. Of course many think that it is perfectly acceptable to just value women based on their sexual attractiveness and not in terms of skills or virtues. Of course many men think that they are only there in relation to them and their appetites.

[Mithradates]

Sexual attractiveness is one of their many skills. Some of them focus on this this skill to advance in life, good for them. Welcome to the real world.

[mishkin]

Sexual attractiveness is one of their many skills. Some of them focus on this this skill to advance in life, good for them. Welcome to the real world.

Again, the problem is not women who want to exploit their sexual attractiveness but society seeing women as sexual objects, underestimated pieces of meat with legs placed in the world to satisfy us (men).

[bigdaddy1204]

I fear this rising puritanism. It is dangerous. The Middle East has seen where this sort of thinking leads. (So has Europe, if we go back a few centuries).

[Gallus]

The problem is that we live in a society in which women (to a much lesser degree men) has been and are considered primarily a sexual object and are valued mainly for their attractiveness.

Umm, no? Where did you get that from? Just because men enjoy the sight of a pretty girl that doesn't mean they see her primarily as a sexual object ffs.

In any case, the title of this thread is misleading. Grid girls are not banned, they will just no longer be employed by one particular company. There's a difference between banning someone and choosing not to employ them.

[Pontifex Maximus]

Again, the problem is not women who want to exploit their sexual attractiveness but society seeing women as sexual objects, underestimated pieces of meat with legs placed in the world to satisfy us (men).

They signed up for it though. It was their job for which they received compensation, it was a voluntary contract. This sort of paternalism is anti-feminism. It sees women as fundamentally incapable of acting in their own best interests, so you want to work the levers of government, social decency, or what have you in order to protect women from men.

[Copperknickers II]

I'm sure the models who are losing their jobs feel empowered. Having "grid girls" sends the wrong message to young women making them think they can only be valued for their appearance, because young women are essentially children without agency who can only imagine themselves as part of a female collective aspiring to be exactly like other women, rather than considering themselves individuals each with their own interests and goals regardless of what other women do.

It's a difficult one though. I wonder how many women would actually want to take a job as male eye-candy if not for the social cachet attached to women who get jobs based on their being good-looking. How many men do you see serving as mascots for sporting events dressed in stereotypically sexualised clothing? Why aren't they equally as common as female cheerleaders/grid girls, if society really has reached a point where we all just choose what we personally want to do, without any influence from our culture's defined gender roles? A lot of women really love being eye-candy, but when you ask them why, they nearly always give an answer which betrays a pathological internalised gender role based on their self-worth necessarily coming from their appearance. I would ask every male forumite reading this to take a second to ask yourself, can you really imagine yourself saying the sentence: 'I chose my job because it makes me feel confident to know that my clients think I'm sexy.'

Don't get me wrong, we've all taken a knock to our confidence at some stage when we realised that we were never going to have the biceps of Arnold Schwarzenegger and no, that massive zit was not going to go away by this afternoon just because you were planning to ask your crush to the prom. And vice versa when you went on the pull in your new designer outfit:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

But the idea of your entire self-worth hingeing on whether or not your work colleagues think you are attractive? In any male human being that would be called body dysmorphia verging on mental disorder. In a woman, apparently, it's considered 'empowerment'.

[Big War Bird]

It’s ok to be young and beautiful.

@ copper

As a startling handsome man, I have no qualms about allowing my charms to work on women in positions to do me favors.

[Himster]

Maybe it's a good thing. The more absurd and arbitrary the edicts of authoritarian ideologies: the stronger the resolve to resist becomes.

However, as this situation (evidently) is continually devolving into one of increasingly polarized echo-chambers: the possibility and desire for anything resembling a peaceful exchange/resolution is being eliminated. When peaceful resolutions are made impossible, violent ones become inevitable.

Another negative aspect is: the will to resist authoritarian ideologues is generally pre-built in the ideologies of other authoritarians (ironically). So we see many of the leading voices of opposition are simply fascistic in nature.

So yeah, overall...... not great. Being ed in the mouth and ass at the same time sounds pretty good, until it actually starts happening. If you move in either direction, you're basically just ing yourself.

[NorseThing]

Boy we are really into the PC or maybe the anti-PC thing today. Two pages of posts about a private company paying people to promote sponsors of their sport product. And even comparisons of private companies being thought of as what do the Taliban do? Is this like bring up Hitler and the Nazis to end the discussion? Note: Godwin's law - Wikipedia

From the opening post link:

'Grid girls' are models used to conduct certain promotional tasks, usually wearing clothing that bears the name of a sponsor. Their duties in F1 included holding umbrellas or driver name-boards on the grid and lining the corridor through which the drivers walk on their way to the podium.

So now the sponsors will need to rejigger their payments a bit and maybe pay the Grid Girls directly. Oh my. What has the world come to? Sad eyes and tears for everyone!

[Gäiten]

Yeah! Ban the beautiful girls from the public.

True sexism that good-looking People do have advantages in real life, it is so discriminating that the first impression you get from the other relies to almost 90% at how do you look.
Change mankind.

BTW hidden porn consume has been increasing ... especially in countries wherein such prudery gets more and more power.

[mishkin]

Do you think that a company (F1 in this case) trying to avoid showing women as a claim (bait) for their sexual attractiveness can contribute to diminish the macho perception / attitude that a large part of society has towards them?

[Sir Adrian]

Why would any healthy and normal society want to diminish the macho perception. Masculine societies are successful societies (Islam in the middle ages, Europe in the 1800s, America in the 1900s, Achaemenid/Sassanid Persia, Macedon, China today). Time and again the perception of masculinity was what kept societies safe and cultures alive. Whereas feminine cultures were taken over in short over by the masculine ones. Observe the repeat rehash of the 4th and 5th century currently happening in western europe - only this time it won't take 2 centuries for the dark ages to come by. It will take you 3 decades.

[mishkin]

We have very different points of view I'm afraid. A healthy society (I am talking about the western society/europe) is not a society in which men in a pack sexually assault women, value them only insofar as they are physically attractive, consider them almost properties of their male partners, people to whom it is ok to mistreat physically and psychologically, etc.

It would be nice if you could explain what you consider a feminized society and what do you consider decline (and how these two things would be related).

[Sir Adrian]

Then why are you trying to build that society? Do you know which country has the most rapes per capita? Sweden. The most feminist country in the world. Do you know which country has the least rapes per capita in Europe? Albania and Bosnia - the most anti-feminist countries you can think of.

Do you know why? Because in a macho society men are not afraid to defend their women/take revenge for slights and women can and will defend themselves. In a feminine society women are taught that they are victims and men are taught that they are evil so the women will not defend themselves because they believe they shouldn't (they're the victims) and the men are too weak to defend the women.

[mishkin]

Then why are you trying to build that society? Do you know which country has the most rapes per capita? Sweden. The most feminist country in the world. Do you know which country has the least rapes per capita in Europe? Albania and Bosnia - the most anti-feminist countries you can think of.

I do not know what you mean by the first question.
In "the most feminist country in the world" (I do not know where you got that data from, but ok) the feminine population is aware that any abuse must and can be (the complaint will have real consequences) reported to the authorities. Unfortunately, the same does not happen in other societies (you mention east europe) where violence against women is something socially more accepted and women feel helpless or even consider normal to be beaten or raped by their partner (i.e.).

Do you know why? Because in a macho society men are not afraid to defend their women/take revenge for slights and women can and will defend themselves. In a feminine society women are taught that they are victims and men are taught that they are evil so the women will not defend themselves because they believe they shouldn't (they're the victims) and the men are too weak to defend the women.

(Regarding decadent societies, I suppose).
I will only say that you do not even realize how retrograde, antediluvian is that society that you defend in which men must defend their women. (Reread a few times the bolded sentence, please).