It seems the owner of the Washington Capitals has a blog and he's taken note of my ice girls advocacy. I know purists hate it but, eh, hockey purists should probably move to Canada.
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Ice Girls Momentum Building
28 Dec 2007 11:16 am
Comments (13)
I might be wrong, but I think you misplaced your "eh". Oy.
Ice girls are fine by me, I guess. It's not like the NBA when the dancing girls are on every five seconds, like it was "David Stern's Scandals of 2007".
He was probably just using you to increase his google ranking :P
From the washington post:
A key was using celebrity names that Web surfers would link to. According to Leonsis, there are three major factors in Google's algorithm: The more popular a Web page is, the higher it ranks. The more a Web page is linked to other Web sites, such as other blogs, the higher it ranks. More recent entries also boost rankings.
Anything that causes a sport to become more like the NBA or NFL is, by definition, a very bad thing.
Trying to become like the NBA is why hockey has such problems. Emulating a dying sport is not a good idea.
I'm not sure why people on his site are so opposed. Maybe they're different in other cities, but in Chicago, the ice girls pretty much skate out in skimpy outfits during TV time outs and clean up the "snow" on the ice. They don't get in anyone's way. They don't detract from the action because they're out there when nothing is going on. It's perfect.
The Columbus Blue Jackets' equivalent of what you seek is a small cadre of (Mountain) "Dew Girls."
Politically incorrect though it may be, they are known by one and all instead as the "Soda Sluts."
just what we need! MOre objectification of women!
I'm with Kathleen. It's interesting to me that, when I was young, a self-styled progressive would have considered advocating more displays of skimpily-clad "girls" to be slightly less acceptable than telling jokes about "thick lips and sneakers." But that ethos has reversed 180 degrees. It's interesting that the whole women's movement thing didn't work out.
My comment was not advocacy, but a description of an unfortunate reality. I'm also in agreement with Kathleen. And your comment, y81, echoes what others have been saying recently, that sexism, overt as well as covert, is making a comeback, if it ever left us. All I have to do is think of Tweety and I know that is true.
Mr. Matt is very much in the wink-wink category here, or what I call a "cigar" progressive.
Human males like half-naked human females.
Get used to it. It's been around for thousands of years.
It may be stupid to infuse sports with it - but, hey, human stupidity has been around for even longer.
Besides, sports is a BUSINESS - and anything that jacks up ratings and brings in more money is what business is about.
Want to talk about "booth babes" at the trade shows next?
How about pointless female faces in ads for industrial equipment and computers?
How about "race queens"? The Japanese have practically made an industry out of that.
If it's "progressive" to denounce all that, you're really all on the losing side here. Big time.
The bottom line is: Matt really needs to surf more porn, so we don't have to read this stuff on his blog. We come here for the politics and foreign policy, not his taste in music, sports or broads.
Make a deal with you, Matt. Stop posting music you like, sports team ratings, and the odd feminist crap, and I'll stop mentioning Andrea Corr, Angelina Jolie and ninjas.
Deal?
Richard Steven Hack, I am much too old and jaded to have a side. I'm just bemused by young people like Yglesias who are so self-righteous about their various causes, like changing United States foreign policy so it isn't an imperialist venture concerned primarily with economic benefit to Americans, and so ignorant of the causes about which my generation was self-righteous, like not treating women as sex objects.
Being 58 myself, I can agree with your bemusement.
Matt is clearly not wise enough yet to be pontificating on much.
But then, neither were we when we did the same thing in our 20's. And you know we did.
The problem with the notion of not treating women as "sex objects" is that it's a highly abstract notion. When one gets down to the nitty-gritty of whether women should get equal pay for equal work, it gets easier to deal with the facts. That's where I can go along with feminist concepts.
But what's a "sex object"? Nobody knows. It's whatever some feminist doesn't like in terms of some specific behavior that offends HER.
Worse, a lot of people - including women - LIKE being treated as "sex objects". Browse the porn on the Internet. Not all of those girls are doing this stuff with smiles on their faces just because they're being paid with money or drugs. They LIKE being treated as "sex goddesses" even if it's only in their own minds.
The facts of human sexuality are rather deeper and murkier than feminism for the most part has been willing to admit, caught up in the political/economic causes that are involved.
Take the notion that rape is a violent crime that has nothing to do with sex. I know of only one case where a District Attorney publicly dismissed that concept as nonsense. It's practically embedded in feminist theory.
Except it's wrong in many, possibly even most, cases of rape. Sex and violence are intricately linked in the human psyche. Read Georges Bataille on the subject.
There are no "sex objects" - only the profoundly complex and wide range of human sexual behavior.
Which ought not to be legislated based on theories from one side of the aisle that are based on someone's personal psychology.
I pointed out that most of the uses of females in business advertising is "pointless". That's what irritates me most about a lot of this stuff. It's pointless. As far as I know, it really doesn't sell a lot of product at the end of the day. It may attract attention, sure. If I see an ad in a computer mag with a really hot babe, I'll look at the babe. Rarely do I look at the product unless I NEED that product. So why bother?
Because advertising is as incompetent a profession as most professions not compelled to follow some sort of engineering or scientific requirements.
In short, it's mostly bullshit.
Now, having "booth babes" is one thing, and "race queens" could be seen as another. Booth babes really don't serve any purpose but to get potential clients within range of a sales person. I doubt that works much. Race queens on the other hand are more about entertainment associated with the hawking of products. I'm not sure the two situations are the same.
And Internet porn has nothing to do with either of those - other than the obvious fact that it's mostly provided for money making purposes. Even site like Superiorpics.com, which I frequent, where pics of babes are posted from the readers, are run for the ad revenue - although no doubt the operators are fans as well.
The problem I have with Playboy and other men's mags is that most of the centerfolds, at least in the earlier days, tended to be gorgeous but dumb as rocks. Not to mention two-dimensional. Even going to video didn't help much - they're still two-dimensional since they don't talk much.
Give me a smart, articulate, but still ravishing female like Ivanka Trump any day over those others.
Trump models and poses in men's mags and is also a top executive. Is she a "sex object"?
There's a female lawyer in Texas who explicitly argues that women should use their sex appeal in business as much as they can, as long as they're still taken seriously in their profession. Is she wrong?
The bottom line to me has always been not whether you treat a woman as a "sex object", the question is whether you treat her ONLY as a "sex object."
And even there, if the woman is beautiful but dumb as a box of rocks - Paris Hilton is the archetype here - does that imply that you shouldn't want to screw her?
For a long time, I figured I could never tolerate Paris' personality long enough to actually screw her. But I eventually had to decide that, yes, she's pretty damn hot. (Which doesn't mean she screws worth a damn, but then, it's up to the man to decide that in action, right? You get as good as you give.)
So even a "sex object" treated as a "sex object" doesn't have to be damaged by that, at least not on an individual level. It depends on how far you carry the - again, abstract - notion of "sex object."
To me, a "sex object" is a "trophy wife" or maybe the prostitute in the movie "Hit Man" who's bought by some politician on the white slave market for $300 ("American", she says.) That's a pure "sex object", no doubt.
Is Catherine Zeta-Jones a "trophy wife" or "sex object" to Michael Douglas? Who knows? She doesn't seem to think so, but who knows?
But I agree that men who dismiss women as having no value except as sex partners are not very smart themselves, and therefore not very valuable to any woman with half a brain.
Still, there are a lot of women with half a brain who marry those men for their money.
So the issue is not all one-sided.
Which was my point.
Comments closed January 11, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Because *everything's* better with a lil t&a.
Posted by sherifffruitfly | December 28, 2007 11:41 AM