[pct-l] ULA and Anna

[Eric Lee]

Matt wrote:
>
To all offended parties write an email to ULA inform them that you are too
prudish to be alive in the current century!
>

I'd like to clarify what this is really about.  The person who originally
started this thread did not say, "I'm offended because ULA tricked me into
seeing part of a breast!"  I don't think anyone has said anything along
those lines.  I'm sure that all of us here are adults and have either a
healthy appreciation for the female form or at least indifference.  What
*we* see isn't the issue.  The issue was stated clearly by the original
poster: "It offends me because it dismisses and disregards the independence
and empowerment and badassery of ALL who hike the trail."

This is a familiar theme to me because we're having a lot of conversations
about this in my field of software engineering.  Recently there's been this
phenomenon called "brogrammers" where young male programmers try to promote
a frat-boy-style atmosphere in their work environments.  This leads to
head-scratching things like guys inserting pictures of topless women into
the slide decks for their presentations at technical conferences, "just to
make sure everyone's still awake."  Doing something like that is
unprofessional and offensive; not because "OMG someone made me see a boobie"
but because it implies a profound disregard for and lack of respect of women
peers who are sitting right there in the audience.  You can't turn the
female body into the punchline of your tasteless joke (and by association,
all women into sex objects) and then turn around and claim that you value,
respect, and appreciate the contributions that your female peers are trying
to make.  It's clear to everyone what's really going on.

A lot of these guys protest, "But I didn't mean to offend anyone!  It's just
a joke!  It's funny!"  I'd like to tell them the same thing I tell my kids:
it doesn't matter that you "didn't mean" to hurt your sibling with that
stick you're waving around - the only fact that matters is that your sibling
got hurt.  It happened and you're responsible for the damage.  It doesn't
matter that men "don't mean" to devalue women when they make stupid jokes -
it still happens.  Look, when I was a kid, Polish jokes were funny too . . .
as long as you weren't Polish.

So, to bring it back around to the topic at hand - ULA put together a
gratuitous joke at the expense of women.  By doing that, they broadly imply
that they think the vast majority of their customer base is male and that
they don't take any female customers very seriously, i.e. that very few
women are credible long-distance backpackers.  I grant that that's probably
not what they *meant* to say, but that's what in fact they communicated.
It's not about whether we saw certain body parts or not; it's about the
disenfranchisement of women hikers.

So in summary, there's a huge fundamental difference between, say, coming
across a nude swimmer at a hot spring and the video that ULA posted.  One is
just normal life (yes, women have breasts, get over it) and the other is a
cruel joke.

Eric