Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: d00df00d
Originally Posted By: billt460
F1 grid girls are no different. Or cheerleaders and "ball girls" in MLB, the NFL, or the NBA. Stop acting like F1 is suddenly "above that". This was a stupid decision that accomplishes nothing. And catering to a few over the top feminists does nothing but advance this whole idiotic snowflake mentality. What's next "Safe Spaces" at the track where the fans can go to cry and sip hot cocoa when their favorite driver loses?
Well apparently it's not just a few over-the-top feminists. The sanctioning body seems to think that this move will broaden their appeal more than enough to offset the loss of people who feel the way you do. The way things are going, I can't blame them. We can prognosticate all we want about how not having our petty eye candy is going to hasten the loss of everything we know and love, but in the end it's a pretty straightforward business decision. Believe it or not, the idea that women are people seems to be gaining traction these days.
That seems a bit over-the-top, these aren't women forced into subjugation to be slobbered over by Jabba the Hut, they are generally career models who see this as an opportunity to make money and further that career, as somebody else in this thread touched-on.
Unless you are of the opinion that the entire modelling community, male and female, is somehow turning both sexes into "not people", acknowledging that skin/sex appeal sells isn't selling your gender down the road to slavery, it is, and has historically been, a business decision to appeal to the largest demographic attending these events, which are males.
Attractive men are used for movies and acting, as are attractive women. That these are the people that tend to end up with the most successful careers in that venue is because people generally want to look at others of the opposite sex who are attractive. This isn't an exclusively male trait and claiming that doing so makes males petty purveyors of eye candy, whilst females get a free pass does not further the quest for equality. You cannot shame and mandate something out of one sex that exists in both and claim a moral victory for it. You just end up with more screwed up males who don't understand why they feel guilty for glancing at the female form.
If anything, there should be more scantily clad attractive males at primarily female-attended events to level the field. Ontario passed, years ago, that it was legal for women to go topless. There was a brief period before of protest demanding it, which came with groups of topless women, and a brief period after, celebrating it, also with topless women. Since then, the amount of topless females walking around, save for the pride parade, which also features males similarly exposed, has been basically zero. It was a quest for a right to alleviate the stigma of an exposed breast and while it reached status as acceptable from a legal standpoint, most women don't actually want to walk around with their breasts bared.
IMHO, the appeal of both genders should be celebrated, and neither should be maligned for being attracted to the other. The advancement since the 1950's has been all about freedom of expression, of form, of figure. The right for women and men, and more recently, those that may choose to identify differently, to be proud of who they are. A woman who chooses to dress up in an outfit that complements her figure, one she knows appeals to men, is doing just that.
We should be tearing down barriers that encourage prudish behaviour, not establishing new ones. There seems to be a paradox of Liberalism here, rolling back 70 years of advancement in the name of an agenda that claims to be progressive, yet whose anti-offence policy where everyone is a victim is actually regressive. Chastising people like the 19th century Catholic Church, the stigmas of which we have been trying to get away from since any form of progressive agenda gained traction.
No no, I'm not saying the models weren't being treated like people. I have no idea, but like you I generally assume they are people doing a job like anyone else.
This also has zero to do with showing skin. If people want to voluntarily come to the races buck naked, that's on them.
What's dehumanizing is the implicit insistence on some sort of right to see women showing skin while telling women who are put off by that to pound sand. Evidently there are enough of the latter (and enough male allies) for the FIA to change their tune. All well and good to grouse about that, and if that's all this thread were about, I'd be 100% on board like most straight males. But what people here are saying is, "when women don't want to see their sex objectified in this context, that opinion is absolutely worthless; when I say they SHOULD be objectified, that's completely valid." That's ridiculous.
