Sexism and the ISC West Party Girls

http://ipvm.com/report/sexism_domewizard_girls

by jhonovich • 13 years ago

4 14 13 years ago

claudius4• 13 years ago

Could someone please explain to me how this is sexist?

sp3324• 13 years ago

It's using women as passive objects instead of as participants in the show. Women and men have different roles in the show. The men are taken seriously and the women are not. That's why it's sexist.

claudius4• 13 years ago

So it would be fine if the scarcely dressed participants in the show were of the same gender as the main characters?

Furthermore, I don’t think that the ‘passive objects’ were chosen based on gender, but rather on appeal to the assumed audience, possibly complementing the main presenters as to offer likeable elements to every member of the audience.

Or are you saying that the visitors of this show are sexist because they only like women (assuming that this is true)?

fuuuuuuuuuuu• 13 years ago

Would it remove the problem to have men in revealing clothes, too?

mnicole2• 13 years ago

The definition of sexist: ".. prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex. Sexist attitudes may stem from traditional stereotypes of gender roles, and may include the belief that a person of one sex is intrinsically superior to a person of the other."

PAX eliminated booth babes for a couple of reasons: they detracted from the primary objective of the event, they made other women actually working at booths look like they were just there for show - causing men to walk past them (prominent female blogger Violet Blue actually managed to publicly humiliate a woman at an app conference because she was doing a 'bad job' at being a "babe") and they did little to sell the product they were there to promote.

As a female attendee for three years before they instated the rule, the ones I saw were always awkwardly walking around or fiddling with controllers to avoid talking to people. It also made me feel that if I ever wanted to get into game development, this is how my company felt best represented all of my hard work.

It's just all-around bad taste to have female centerpieces at a male-heavy event.

claudius4• 13 years ago

Bad taste and inefficient, sure, but sexist? I don’t see any prejudice or discrimination here on the part of the presenter, apart from possibly discriminating men for not considering them as ‘booth boys’.

My point is really that it is absolutely trivial to shout ‘sexism/sexist’ every time something isn’t the way people would want it to be and one can possibly create a link to women, but overusing the designation won’t help equalising genders and judging people independently of their X and Y chromosomes – much the same way that claims of ‘racism’ whenever a black person is involved don’t help the cause against racism either.

Sexism and the ISC West Party Girls

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