Controversy has been brewing ever since the Consumer Electronics Expo took place earlier this month in Las Vegas. As visitors to the expo went from booth to booth, they found themselves interacting with “booth babes’, attractive women hired to showcase their products, and formally called promotional or trade show models. This is not a recent phenomenon, but this year they have been receiving ample coverage over the past few weeks, partially in part due to controversy over Apple accessory manufacturer Hyper’s semi-nude, body painted models.
All this has really boiled down to one criticism: the use of “booth babes” is degrading to women, in general and specifically pertaining to the women modelling. Critics would overwhelmingly like to see booth babes either toned down or removed altogether.
First, let me say there is a massive double standard in pointing out that “because tech doesn’t involve sex, there shouldn’t be booth babes”; it is arbitrarily singling out one industry. The same could be said about the use of sex appeal in fast food, animal rights and (warning: this one is really racy) toilet paper. Nothing at all to do with sex, yet there they are.
Personally, I don’t think sex should explicitly be used as a selling point. I think it cheapens something that should remain valuable, and over exposes something that should be private.
However, I also disagree with the idea that booth babes should be banned or looked down on. I think it is ethically sound to say that if a woman signs up to model at a show, as long as she clearly understands her job and is not forced into a situation, she should be free to model how she chooses. It is fallacious to try and say these models are degrading to women in general, since they can only represent themselves and their employers. I am not responsible for these women, and my views are not theirs, so what I or anyone else thinks is meaningless. Their companies should be free to market as they wish, and these women should only be held accountable to their own standards.
This is quite the marketing dilemma. Perhaps we could wonder if this trade show were NOT in Vegas, how much more of a big deal this would be. I understand how this can be seen as “degrading” to women. But I guess one could propose, in a sense, that almost the entire city of Vegas has components of it that are degrading to women. So we must consider the context of where the “incident” occurred.
But as you said Kieran, at the end of the day, the women signed up for the job!