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20120113

ces booth babes


Women and "booth babes" at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2012: this features a few options on using women as advertisement.  I was shocked that the women legitimately in the field weren't more upset by it.  I would have given them a few stinging quotes for the record.

Some highlights I transcribed...

CEA CEO: "Sometimes it is a little old school, but it does work.  People are naturally want to go to what they consider pretty.  So your effort to try and get a story based on booth babes which is decreasing rather rapidly in [?]industry and say that somehow sexism and balancing[?], it's cute but it's frankly irrelevant in my view."  A) A man with a talent for speaking, to be sure.  B) Irrelevant?  What a jerk.  I mean, to tell a reporter that their story isn't worth telling is mean all by itself, but things like this are important.  This IS sexism.

Models 1&2: "Specifically for CES, I don't think that having hired models working at a booth deters women because it's not like a car show or something where you would dress really scantily clad" [cuts to booth babe with 6 inches of bare midriff] "We're still, you know, in business attire..." [cuts to woman in pictured above] "...pretty much covered up and I don't think it's so over-the-top that women feel like they can't approach us, either.  It's not extremely obvious that we're hired models..." [cuts to woman in mock shower in essentially a towel, except with a revealing slit down the whole thing] "...as it would be at a car show or something like that where there's girls..." [cuts to a pair of girls in yard-wide ostrich feather headpieces] "...laying on the hood of a car."

Models 3&4: "We've worked many different types of shows, a lot of them are technology-type conventions.  There's women that are into it, just I don't know any really *laughs* that choose, you know, the tech world, so to say, over shopping or cooking or something like that...or taking care of kids or whatever."  Wow.  Just...wow.

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