Your Resident Humorless Feminist Strikes Again

Shaker Darrow sent me the link to this post by David Sirota at Open Left in which he posts what he calls Delta Airlines' "sizzling new safety video," featuring
real-life flight attendant Katherine Lee, otherwise known as the "Deltalina." As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted, she is "a fetching redhead who scolds against lighting up with a saucy wave of her finger."

Lee is definitely hot, and the video accentuates her hotness by creating an enticing kind of come hither feeling, likely from the repeated extreme close-ups that makes it seem like she's about to lick your face through the camera, and from the talk of inserting tips into things near laps.
Sirota says he feels "a wee bit dirty admitting" that he finds himself
glued to the monitor when the safety video comes on—and I don't think I'm surprising anyone (or upsetting my wife) by admitting that my attention is not motivated by some deep desire to hear the same boring safety info I've heard over and over and over again.
And once he's sufficiently explained exactly why and how he leers at the woman in the video, he wants to know: "Is sex appeal OK if it's being employed in pursuit of a good/necessary cause? Or is the use of sex appeal automatically demeaning to women/misogynistic and therefore wrong?"

(This is one of the leading lights of the progressive movement, folks. Remember this post next time someone asks you if feminism/womanism is still necessary.)

I'm not even going to bother answering his questions, because they're intellectually dishonest questions in the first place. Sirota has already admitted he doesn't watch the video to learn anything from it, so his question about its employ "in pursuit of a good/necessary cause" is contingent on imagining that there are sufficient numbers of first-time fliers who won't watch a safety video unless it offers a pornified flight attendant for their consumption.

No rational, honest person could believe that to be the case.

Thus, his questions are mendacious bullshit from the get-go, nothing more than a truly contemptible bid to get a pat on the head for being progressive enough to consider whether the video is appropriate, even as he struggles mightily with his conflicted feelings about "sex appeal as flypaper" for a good cause. What horseshit.

And what transparently privileged horseshit at that.

You see, it never even occurs to Sirota, as he carefully weighs misogyny against the Greater Good of passenger safety, that a female passenger might not be transfixed by the exploitative video, but, in fact, might turn away from it with disgust. That the possibility of the video being a disincentive to female passengers, and hence an impediment to their safety, is never given the merest consideration exposes this exercise for exactly what it is—another thinly-veiled wankfest for fauxgressive men trying to justify their enjoyment of objectified women.

Or maybe Sirota just doesn't give a shit if feminist passengers don't know where the exits are. Nobody likes a critic.

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