Grid girls and other poems
My weekend? Nice of me to ask. Well, it was the weekend of the referendum, the weekend of me uploading some old poems to this blog, and the weekend Dr Randomercam did Grid Girls, with his usual combination of charisma (I don't envy him that, I never had any so we might as well be talking bobsleigh for all the skin I have in the game) and wordplay (something I actually have tried to be good at, but have so far mostly goofed at [but see below], and consequently do envy him: that title is to die for, or at least, to stub your toe on a chest of drawers for, twice). I mention the Grid Girls thing as a convenient segue into something that's been at the back of my mind for a while, viz. beldades, though it's probably more suited to a treatment in Spanish on the other blog, which I might get around to in a few days. But here's the essence of it, for what it's worth. Light up and sit back: this might take about ten paragraphs to get through.
About grid girls, I'm in full agreement with the Doctor. As a liberal, for me the only relevant consideration has to be: "does their presence cause physical harm to anyone? No? Then there is no good reason for governments, or governing bodies, to ban them." (I do realise that the odd égarée feminist might want to meet liberals halfway on this by claiming that perpetuating "sexist stereotypes" indirectly causes physical harm by "promoting" "gender violence", but I don't think anyone sane would buy that in this particular case, for reasons alluded to by the Doctor, which I might get on to myself in a moment.) There's lots more to say, but that's the bottom line.
For non liberals, of course, this is far from being a valid argument. So what if it doesn't cause physical harm to anyone? The point is, those girls are "portraying" or "presenting" a "stereotype" according to which "women" "are viewed" as decorative, as ancillary, as handmaidens or supporters in a sport in which actual participants are mostly men. In fact, you might make a case for their role extending beyond mere decoration all the way to symbolic prize. And while this stereotype may not physically harm anyone, it harms women socially, by encouraging them to settle for merely supportive roles (in motor racing, or in general) rather than those of protagonists, and encouraging men (?) to view women as prizes. It perpetuates outdated gender roles. It's therefore bad, and bad things should be banned. I hope I've done the illiberal argument justice. Let me know if I've missed something out. Now let's restate this in summary form, for clarity, before proceeding.
Premise A: The tradition of grid girls in motor racing supports or perpetuates gender roles.
Premise B: Gender roles are bad.
Premise C: Bad things should be banned.
Conclusion (D): The tradition of grid girls should be banned.
To which my answer would be: yes (or at least a cautious maybe) to A; not necessarily to B; no, absolutely not, to C; hence, no to D (with the observation that in strict logic, D doesn't necessarily follow from A, B and C anyway). Details follow.
First, does the grid girl thing perpetuate a gender role? Well, maybe. I don't follow motor sports, and to be honest, didn't even know what a "grid girl" was until last week, but as far as I can surmise, their function is to attract spectators to the sport, and possibly serve as a competitive stimulus to drivers (at least those drivers who happen to be either straight males or lesbian females). They do this by standing where they are told to stand, looking pretty, displaying a certain amount of cleavage, and sporting winsome personalities. In this respect, they appear to be comparable to the sequinned leotard-clad female "assistants" on seventies game shows (the teasemaids often seen sensually caressing and/or dry-humping lounge suits, fridge freezers and teasmades), or the girls who sidle between cars at red traffic lights here in Ecuador handing out free newspapers or publicity flyers. The common thread here is they have to be female, and they have to look a certain way, and be prepared to make the effort to keep a smile hoisted pretty much permanently (I feel for them. I went through a Christian phase in my early teens, and felt I had to maintain a permanent, rigid grin at all times in order to bear witness to how happy the Bible makes people. The pain was excruciating.) Insofar as males don't get to perform this role (apparently "grid boys" were tried at one point, and proved unpopular), you could say the tradition helps to perpetuate the idea that attractive females are a better marketing ploy than, say, unattractive males. Or to put it another way, that young women who happen to look a certain way will have, in a free market, an extra employment opportunity that young men will not.
And since this idea happens to be anthropologically, commercially and biologically well founded, I don't really see the problem with perpetuating it. Especially since doing so provides employment opportunities that otherwise wouldn't exist. Using pretty women as a marketing draw is classic win-win: the women themselves get jobs (not great jobs, but jobs), the customers get eye candy (if that's what they want: see here, though), and the concern advertised (whether toothpaste, car manufacturers, or an F1 consortium) gets increased revenue, or spectators, or whatever it is they're after. The only losers I can see, other than congenital non-contemplatives, are the men who might wish to work in the same area, and are ruled out for reason of sex. Not that I see many complaining.
Sex, we know, is cruel that way... a bit like age is, come to think of it. The young can do stuff that us oldies can't without getting a slipped disc and a plastic overbite: the employment market recognises this, and punishes our superannuation accordingly. Likewise, humans' sexually dimorphic physique, and our differently wired libidos, ensure certain opportunities will always be available to (some) women that are not available to men: e.g. the opportunity to not be killed in certain forms of armed conflict, or the opportunity to be financially maintained by a spouse, or the opportunity to earn some pocket money by standing around simpering in a sketchy uniform for a few hours. (Before it be objected that I, with my male privilege, would never have been seen dead doing a silly McJob in a poncey uniform, read this.)
Anyway, let's concede that there is something profoundly gender-asymmetrical about grid girls and similar traditions. This would be a problem if gender-asymmetry was a problem, but I don't see why it has to be. The argument (as far as the Doctor's cited TV pundits could stretch it) is that teen girls, encountering these televised sporting spectacles, are "encouraged" to see their future roles as similarly ancillary, supportive or decorative, and adjust their career expectations and social behaviour accordingly. How or why this should be the case is inadequately explained. When Damore released his controversial Google memo, one of the things that drew the most howls from feminists was his claim that women score higher, on aggregate, on "agreeableness", a trait which subsumes such things as trust and compliance. Yet these don't-you-dare-call-them-agreeable women are the very ones who are regarded by feminists as incapable of doing other than trust and comply with the female stereotypes depicted in the media, thus taking agreeableness to absurd, almost Stepfordian extremes - apparently, while some of us may have our little prejudices, it still takes a feminist to view women as passive, manipulable Skinner-rats. Sure, there's a tidy amount of experimental data to show that everyone, men and women, is indeed susceptible to stereotyping under certain conditions; yet (eppur si muove) we also have minds, to think ourselves out of things when we have to. In any case, no such findings warrant the conclusion that people's environments, and the influences and stereotypes that they are exposed to, can or should be teleologically managed in order to secure some ideologically-determined optimal outcome. There are too many awkward questions. Who decides the outcomes? Who decides which are the "good" and the "bad" stereotypes (because we can't just eliminate all stereotypes: the human mind is programmed to build new stereotypes out of the sparsest input, i.e. we're stuck with them, as a semi-conscious heuristic if nothing else)? How many toes can be trodden on in the process, and with what justification? And finally: why, if I was exposed throughout my formative period to the "stereotype" of garbage disposal operatives being exclusively male, did I not inevitably come to view myself as a future dustman, and adjust my expectations, and corblimey trousers, accordingly? why have I spent my life generating garbage, rather than disposing of it?
As for "bad things should be banned", well, no, unless you want to grow up in seventeenth century Salem, Mass. This should be obvious to any thinking person: even so, there's an obvious segue there into the question of civil society vs government I've been wanting to get onto for ages, if only I had the time. Since I don't, let's hop onto the beldades and put this to bed.
A beldad, and I had to check even though the etymology is obvious, is a beauty. I had to check because the standard Spanish word is belleza, which does service both for the abstraction and the concrete female embodiment. Beldad is a "cruel and unusual" word: it's ugly, affected and unnecessary. Yet the university I work in has a whole wall covered in photos of past beldades, arranged by year, all simpering, made-up and expensively coiffed: you can't get to the payments office, or HR or Counselling, without walking past them. This strikes me as very Latin American, and worth a paragraph or two.
Latin America, as is well known, has a surplus of beautiful women, of a type of beauty you rarely find elsewhere. However, neither the "Beauty Contests" that occupy so many media column-inches here, nor the beldades, fall into this category. These are not beautiful women: rather, they are wet and weedy women. They are unnaturally thin, caked in powder, and deliberately dressed to look expensive, fragile, bland and boring. It is also well known that beauty contests are pretty much an exclusively female concern: (straight) men don't watch them, despite the fact that, superficially, they ought to provide exactly the same sort of visual entertainment as the Grid Girls do (make that did). The difference is clear: the physique required of beauty contestants bears the same relation to that of a healthy, attractive woman as the body of a sumo wrestler bears to a healthy, attractive male (only at the opposite end of the BMI scale). In fact, that's it exactly: beauty contests, at least here in Latin America, are the female equivalent of sumo wrestling - even down to the fact you had better be one of two particular nationalities to consistently win prizes.
In spite of this specialised, female oriented angle, and in spite of the devotion they generate and the endless enjoyment they afford to Latin American women, the feminists want to ban them as well (and have succeeded in Argentina, as far as I can recall). But where I really wanted to go with this (and may do another day, time permitting) is whether I, in my imaginary role of Principal of a university such as the one in which I now toil, would put an end to this embarrassing display with a squiggle of the pen. Am I as bad as the feminists in finding a wall plastered with beldades in a university corridor toe-curlingly embarrassing? Well, I'll admit I'd be tempted. After all, what do universities have to do with prancing around in intricate hairdos and silly tiaras? But what saves me is the sumo angle, precisely: the consideration that we are dealing with an arcane tradition, something with a history, and a sociology, and an anthropology behind it, something which provides certain people with a certain alembicated pleasure which, if one does not understand it, marks one as foreign, as uninitiated, as stumbling outsider. And as a matter of not even principle but basic human courtesy, outsiders should not presume to tell insiders how to do their insider things. Even I can see that.
I wish feminists could just get that into their head. Even better if they could get as far as the realization that one of those insider things they are constitutionally incapable of ever getting, is being male. If you don't actually understand it, don't try to improve it: and mentally conflating the misbehaviour of drunken toffs with the gentlemanliness habitually displayed by the proletarian English male - extending, presumably, as far as the Formula 1 crowd - is a sign you actually do not understand what you're presuming to judge. Grokking this would make everything much simpler, besides encouraging the congenitally interfering to actually do their friggin homework first. But I'm not holding my breath.
The poems. I was going to say something about them, but it's nearly midnight, so bugger it. Another day maybe. This writing stuff no one will probably ever read lark gets kind of tiring after a while.
About grid girls, I'm in full agreement with the Doctor. As a liberal, for me the only relevant consideration has to be: "does their presence cause physical harm to anyone? No? Then there is no good reason for governments, or governing bodies, to ban them." (I do realise that the odd égarée feminist might want to meet liberals halfway on this by claiming that perpetuating "sexist stereotypes" indirectly causes physical harm by "promoting" "gender violence", but I don't think anyone sane would buy that in this particular case, for reasons alluded to by the Doctor, which I might get on to myself in a moment.) There's lots more to say, but that's the bottom line.
For non liberals, of course, this is far from being a valid argument. So what if it doesn't cause physical harm to anyone? The point is, those girls are "portraying" or "presenting" a "stereotype" according to which "women" "are viewed" as decorative, as ancillary, as handmaidens or supporters in a sport in which actual participants are mostly men. In fact, you might make a case for their role extending beyond mere decoration all the way to symbolic prize. And while this stereotype may not physically harm anyone, it harms women socially, by encouraging them to settle for merely supportive roles (in motor racing, or in general) rather than those of protagonists, and encouraging men (?) to view women as prizes. It perpetuates outdated gender roles. It's therefore bad, and bad things should be banned. I hope I've done the illiberal argument justice. Let me know if I've missed something out. Now let's restate this in summary form, for clarity, before proceeding.
Premise A: The tradition of grid girls in motor racing supports or perpetuates gender roles.
Premise B: Gender roles are bad.
Premise C: Bad things should be banned.
Conclusion (D): The tradition of grid girls should be banned.
To which my answer would be: yes (or at least a cautious maybe) to A; not necessarily to B; no, absolutely not, to C; hence, no to D (with the observation that in strict logic, D doesn't necessarily follow from A, B and C anyway). Details follow.
First, does the grid girl thing perpetuate a gender role? Well, maybe. I don't follow motor sports, and to be honest, didn't even know what a "grid girl" was until last week, but as far as I can surmise, their function is to attract spectators to the sport, and possibly serve as a competitive stimulus to drivers (at least those drivers who happen to be either straight males or lesbian females). They do this by standing where they are told to stand, looking pretty, displaying a certain amount of cleavage, and sporting winsome personalities. In this respect, they appear to be comparable to the sequinned leotard-clad female "assistants" on seventies game shows (the teasemaids often seen sensually caressing and/or dry-humping lounge suits, fridge freezers and teasmades), or the girls who sidle between cars at red traffic lights here in Ecuador handing out free newspapers or publicity flyers. The common thread here is they have to be female, and they have to look a certain way, and be prepared to make the effort to keep a smile hoisted pretty much permanently (I feel for them. I went through a Christian phase in my early teens, and felt I had to maintain a permanent, rigid grin at all times in order to bear witness to how happy the Bible makes people. The pain was excruciating.) Insofar as males don't get to perform this role (apparently "grid boys" were tried at one point, and proved unpopular), you could say the tradition helps to perpetuate the idea that attractive females are a better marketing ploy than, say, unattractive males. Or to put it another way, that young women who happen to look a certain way will have, in a free market, an extra employment opportunity that young men will not.
And since this idea happens to be anthropologically, commercially and biologically well founded, I don't really see the problem with perpetuating it. Especially since doing so provides employment opportunities that otherwise wouldn't exist. Using pretty women as a marketing draw is classic win-win: the women themselves get jobs (not great jobs, but jobs), the customers get eye candy (if that's what they want: see here, though), and the concern advertised (whether toothpaste, car manufacturers, or an F1 consortium) gets increased revenue, or spectators, or whatever it is they're after. The only losers I can see, other than congenital non-contemplatives, are the men who might wish to work in the same area, and are ruled out for reason of sex. Not that I see many complaining.
Sex, we know, is cruel that way... a bit like age is, come to think of it. The young can do stuff that us oldies can't without getting a slipped disc and a plastic overbite: the employment market recognises this, and punishes our superannuation accordingly. Likewise, humans' sexually dimorphic physique, and our differently wired libidos, ensure certain opportunities will always be available to (some) women that are not available to men: e.g. the opportunity to not be killed in certain forms of armed conflict, or the opportunity to be financially maintained by a spouse, or the opportunity to earn some pocket money by standing around simpering in a sketchy uniform for a few hours. (Before it be objected that I, with my male privilege, would never have been seen dead doing a silly McJob in a poncey uniform, read this.)
Anyway, let's concede that there is something profoundly gender-asymmetrical about grid girls and similar traditions. This would be a problem if gender-asymmetry was a problem, but I don't see why it has to be. The argument (as far as the Doctor's cited TV pundits could stretch it) is that teen girls, encountering these televised sporting spectacles, are "encouraged" to see their future roles as similarly ancillary, supportive or decorative, and adjust their career expectations and social behaviour accordingly. How or why this should be the case is inadequately explained. When Damore released his controversial Google memo, one of the things that drew the most howls from feminists was his claim that women score higher, on aggregate, on "agreeableness", a trait which subsumes such things as trust and compliance. Yet these don't-you-dare-call-them-agreeable women are the very ones who are regarded by feminists as incapable of doing other than trust and comply with the female stereotypes depicted in the media, thus taking agreeableness to absurd, almost Stepfordian extremes - apparently, while some of us may have our little prejudices, it still takes a feminist to view women as passive, manipulable Skinner-rats. Sure, there's a tidy amount of experimental data to show that everyone, men and women, is indeed susceptible to stereotyping under certain conditions; yet (eppur si muove) we also have minds, to think ourselves out of things when we have to. In any case, no such findings warrant the conclusion that people's environments, and the influences and stereotypes that they are exposed to, can or should be teleologically managed in order to secure some ideologically-determined optimal outcome. There are too many awkward questions. Who decides the outcomes? Who decides which are the "good" and the "bad" stereotypes (because we can't just eliminate all stereotypes: the human mind is programmed to build new stereotypes out of the sparsest input, i.e. we're stuck with them, as a semi-conscious heuristic if nothing else)? How many toes can be trodden on in the process, and with what justification? And finally: why, if I was exposed throughout my formative period to the "stereotype" of garbage disposal operatives being exclusively male, did I not inevitably come to view myself as a future dustman, and adjust my expectations, and corblimey trousers, accordingly? why have I spent my life generating garbage, rather than disposing of it?
As for "bad things should be banned", well, no, unless you want to grow up in seventeenth century Salem, Mass. This should be obvious to any thinking person: even so, there's an obvious segue there into the question of civil society vs government I've been wanting to get onto for ages, if only I had the time. Since I don't, let's hop onto the beldades and put this to bed.
A beldad, and I had to check even though the etymology is obvious, is a beauty. I had to check because the standard Spanish word is belleza, which does service both for the abstraction and the concrete female embodiment. Beldad is a "cruel and unusual" word: it's ugly, affected and unnecessary. Yet the university I work in has a whole wall covered in photos of past beldades, arranged by year, all simpering, made-up and expensively coiffed: you can't get to the payments office, or HR or Counselling, without walking past them. This strikes me as very Latin American, and worth a paragraph or two.
Latin America, as is well known, has a surplus of beautiful women, of a type of beauty you rarely find elsewhere. However, neither the "Beauty Contests" that occupy so many media column-inches here, nor the beldades, fall into this category. These are not beautiful women: rather, they are wet and weedy women. They are unnaturally thin, caked in powder, and deliberately dressed to look expensive, fragile, bland and boring. It is also well known that beauty contests are pretty much an exclusively female concern: (straight) men don't watch them, despite the fact that, superficially, they ought to provide exactly the same sort of visual entertainment as the Grid Girls do (make that did). The difference is clear: the physique required of beauty contestants bears the same relation to that of a healthy, attractive woman as the body of a sumo wrestler bears to a healthy, attractive male (only at the opposite end of the BMI scale). In fact, that's it exactly: beauty contests, at least here in Latin America, are the female equivalent of sumo wrestling - even down to the fact you had better be one of two particular nationalities to consistently win prizes.
In spite of this specialised, female oriented angle, and in spite of the devotion they generate and the endless enjoyment they afford to Latin American women, the feminists want to ban them as well (and have succeeded in Argentina, as far as I can recall). But where I really wanted to go with this (and may do another day, time permitting) is whether I, in my imaginary role of Principal of a university such as the one in which I now toil, would put an end to this embarrassing display with a squiggle of the pen. Am I as bad as the feminists in finding a wall plastered with beldades in a university corridor toe-curlingly embarrassing? Well, I'll admit I'd be tempted. After all, what do universities have to do with prancing around in intricate hairdos and silly tiaras? But what saves me is the sumo angle, precisely: the consideration that we are dealing with an arcane tradition, something with a history, and a sociology, and an anthropology behind it, something which provides certain people with a certain alembicated pleasure which, if one does not understand it, marks one as foreign, as uninitiated, as stumbling outsider. And as a matter of not even principle but basic human courtesy, outsiders should not presume to tell insiders how to do their insider things. Even I can see that.
I wish feminists could just get that into their head. Even better if they could get as far as the realization that one of those insider things they are constitutionally incapable of ever getting, is being male. If you don't actually understand it, don't try to improve it: and mentally conflating the misbehaviour of drunken toffs with the gentlemanliness habitually displayed by the proletarian English male - extending, presumably, as far as the Formula 1 crowd - is a sign you actually do not understand what you're presuming to judge. Grokking this would make everything much simpler, besides encouraging the congenitally interfering to actually do their friggin homework first. But I'm not holding my breath.
The poems. I was going to say something about them, but it's nearly midnight, so bugger it. Another day maybe. This writing stuff no one will probably ever read lark gets kind of tiring after a while.
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