The appeal is a sense of fun and excitement…something most don’t get at home. That’s why many trade shows happen in Las Vegas.
Llamas spit. Plus you’d have PETA protesting you.
What’s wrong with facial hair? Beardism must be stopped!
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When I was at E3 a while back there was a booth with some cleavage-sporting ladies in definitely-non-regulation WWII military uniforms promoting the latest First Person Shooter. Every 30 seconds or so some passing meathead would say “I’m ready to enlist!” and the booth bunnies would giggle like it was the wittiest thing they’d ever heard. That’s some serious dedication to their craft.
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So why not hire these guys to talk about your company’s IT solutions? They look like a fun and exciting bunch.
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As Groundman noted, we might as well stop doing business with practically any alcohol, car, or clothing company, as a start. Also, “ethically dubious” is a phrase utterly unknown to the advertising world today.
I hung out with Pat Volkerding (slackware) one time at a trade show (we were talking about rocket motor thrust vector control, installing linux on Vaio laptops, and the proper way to roll a cigarette by hand) and the young women provocatively dressed as BSD daemons who decided to come hang out with us were not only attractive, but also an asset to the conversation. One of them was reasonably knowledgeable about open source software, and all of them were quite charming and interesting. I went and visited their booth later because I liked them.
I am confused about whether I should feel guilty about the fact that this happened, or because I enjoyed it. I will say that I’d definitely repeat the experience if given the opportunity.
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Same. Well, I’m younger, I think I look ok, and I have learned to handle social situations - but half-naked pretty young women hanging around is still a source of anxiety, somewhere between “what am I supposed to do with myself now” and “how will people judge me for this”.
And yes, I did change “people” to “women” - I’m not attracted to women, but for whatever reason I still find half-naked men socially easier (which kind of feels like cheating).
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Good, because the article (though said CEOs might be different) doesn’t judge women because they are sexy. They are judging the companies for objectifying women. Now, in a perfect world, you’d know that whatever look someone chose they chose because they just liked it. But in the imperfect crappy kyriarchic world we’re living in, you can pretty much assume that the woman wearing only two thin strips of duct tape with words “Gigadeath Inc.” on them is more than likely doing so only because she couldn’t find a job that wouldn’t involve that. Even though with two and a half billion women there’s probably one somewhere who really likes wearing duct tape with words “Gigadeath Inc.” on them.
So, judging the company is completely justified. As for the women, they can be anything between billionaire daughters recently disinherited for criminal ignorance and nucleonics PhDs, and we know nothing about which case they are, but whatever the case is, it’s more likely than not that they’d rather wear something else, elsewhere, eating Pad Thai.
EDIT: Though, horrible cynical person I am, I suspect that the reason was actually people judging women for their appearance, and not any sort of social awareness. But that’s just my misanthropy speaking.
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The booth babe at Comic-Con a few years back dressed up as Rose McGowan in Planet Terror with a machine gun leg–and this model actually had a missing leg and was using a machine gun as a prosthetic limb–deserves to be in the booth babe hall of fame.
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I’d prefer more diversity in age, body type, and ethnicity, but I like the way your brain works.
Wow that sounds so awesome I had to look it up. The part where you scroll down is pretending, but the part at the top appears to be an actual amputee cosplaying the part of “Cherry Darling” at Comic Con 2007.
“Why isn’t it enough to say that booth babes are sexist as hell and often make women uncomfortable? Why do we have to justify criticisms with “and they don’t work to attract men”? “You should do the right thing because it will help your bottom line” may be a convincing line of argument to corporate entities, but we shouldn’t think of it as the be-all and end-all of discussion.”
Because just saying that booth babes are sexist as hell and made show attendees uncomfortable clearly was not working. Demonstrably was not working. If something is Demonstrably Not Working, then to keep doing that and somehow expect different results is a recipe for disenchantment.
I agree with you, I think it’s rubbish that a But Wat About Teh Menz??!! has to be pulled out in order for the author to convince his marketing and sales departments that, no, really, T&A is inappropriate as a tool for getting customers (not to mention just plain inappropriate in a business setting other than adult entertainment). But, at the end of the day, if that’s what works, then it works, and the issue is resolved. Sucks, but it fixes the problem, and by getting rid of the garden variety display of sexualised women as a stand-in for actual knowledge of the product, it does make things incrementally better for women. That’s a victory and I will take it.
FWIW I am a professional woman who is at best annoyed with booth cheesecake and booth beefcake (which is rarer, but not totally unknown) and at worst it will guarantee that I will not patronise or recommend a business, full stop. If the only way you can think of to market your multi-million dollar product is T&A, then either your product sucks so bad that you can’t market it on its own merits, OR your sales and marketing departments are beyond lazy, which does not make me confident in the overall management of your company.
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If a company could make gobs of money by tearing babies out of enslaved women used as prostitutes and feeding them into a furnace, they would. The only thing keeping companies “moral” is law and consumer preference. You could get rid of car regulation and lawsuits and cars might become less safe, but they probably wouldn’t all be death traps. This isn’t because companies have a moral qualm about murdering people through action or inaction, but because lots of people prefer safer cars, and so if you get a reputation for selling death traps, people stop buying and you make less money. My point is that you are wasting your time if you are expecting morality out of a company. They are neither moral or immoral. They are just dully amoral machines that maximize value and will just as happily burn enslaved children for fuel as they will donate to local homeless shelters for a PR boost that results in higher sales.
That is why this matters. If we are not going to regulate it, we need to use consumer preference to make things less sexist. The way to use consumer preference is to convince the consumers that this shit is sexist and off putting, and then prove to companies that they have misjudged consumer preference. If you proved to them that the heads of freshly killed orphans would double sales and improve company moral, and if it was legal, we wouldn’t need orphanages and convention centers would look like a city just sacked by Genghis Khan… well, we might still need orphanages, but they would charge a fair market rate for each live child.
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OK, what about sexy cosplay? Is that morally different? I guess the point is that booth babes don’t bring in business, but the morality remains ambiguous.
Absolutely it is different.
Sexy cosplay: the person who is cosplaying is doing that on purpose, for her or his own reasons, in a situation where if it is not totally appropriate, then it isn’t totally inappropriate either. If those reasons include wanting people to see body parts, then so be it. I assume of course that we are talking about adults here, not kids.
Booth babes: some business has decided that the best way to make money is to use deliberately sexually objectified people (usually women, but sometimes men) for advertising their products/services, in a context and situation where sexuality is otherwise not appropriate.
In other words, yes, there’s a big difference between an individual wanting to dress a particular way, and a business using sexual objectification to make money.
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I’m not entirely sure what your point is.
Are you saying that objectification of women is the norm, and we should just ignore it?
It seems you just spouted a couple of sentences of nihilism without making a point.
As some one who works in the advertising world, I’ll tell you first hand that the people in marketing departments are constantly trying to push this angle, and I shoot them down at every available chance.
There’s a time and a place for making a product appear sexy, specifically if it’s a sexy product. In all other cases, as I said before, it’s lazy, immature and unethical. We as clients, advertisers and consumers should call out the people responsible for it, and explain why it’s a financially, artistically and ethically stupid practice.
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It reflects poorly on you. If I see a company has hired untrained-in-the-products models to stand around their booth in clingy costumes, I have little faith in their products. If they bring and train their female employees (“attractive” or “not”), I don’t see the problem as long as they don’t stick them in garb.
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No, because “babes” aren’t trained to answer any questions I’d have.
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If you’re using booth babes as a cheap attempt to gain someone’s attention, it’s not sexist for people to ignore you. It’s good business sense. Sex sells, but it isn’t serious.
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I would like to download Mr. Far Right’s hard drive. Or … something like that.
