from the 'offensively bad idea' department

[coraa]

Wow.

"EA has a new way to annoy its own models: give out prizes for Comic Con attendees who commit acts of lust with their booth babes. Also, if you win, you get to take the lady out to dinner! This is going to end well for everyone involved."

What the hell? I mean, I've been annoyed by booth babes before, mostly because I think that it really reinforces the idea that it's only men who are their audience -- and also because the degree of objectification makes me squidgy -- but that sounds downright innocent compared to 'Commit random acts of lust with our models, take pictures of it, repeat, and you might win a sinful night with two beautiful women!' (And yeah, the 'acts of lust' and 'sinful night' wordings are right out of their ad. I'm not extrapolating anything.)

Because, you know, it's a great idea to literally reward stalking and groping with a date with a beautiful woman! That's a message we want to spread. And also, do these booth babes wear big signs or something? Is there some protection to keep non-EA-employee attractive women from being 'mistaken' for booth babes and, well, 'act of lust'-ed?

Argh.

EA, I love The Sims, but this is Not On.

EDIT: jmpava pointed out that these are the same geniuses who thought it was a good idea to promote their game (the same game, so probably the same Marketing/PR group) by staging a fake Christian protest. Which doesn't make it any less offensive, but geez, the stupidity....

Comments

[triath.livejournal.com]

That's not ok.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I consider myself a geeky sf/f fan, but it's things like this that make me feel a) that I not only don't belong, I am to some extent not wanted, and b) that it might actually be unsafe for me.

I've known for a long time that there was a lot of toleration of bad behavior in the community, but seeing it actively encouraged is... really disheartening.

(I guess I'll stick with my anime cons, which average more women than men. They have problems, they have definite problems, but at least... yeah.)

[triath.livejournal.com]

I think you should respond by doing acts of hate* to the booth managers and take photos of it. See if you win a prize!

* Of course a knee in the crotch comes to mind, but I would seriously encourage non-damaging acts, for real.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ha! You know, if I was there, I totally would. Since the game this is 'promoting' is based on Dante's Inferno/the Seven Deadly Sins, I bet I could do something creative with one of the other Seven Deadlies!

[erinpie.livejournal.com]

Hey! Bloodlust is still lust, right? ;)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

:D :D :D

[canis-ridens.livejournal.com]

Wrath works, right?

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

That is a great idea! At Con if it were staged just right it would turn the tables very nicely on EA, especially since the ad reads "a booth babe or one of us". I have this marvelous mental image of some Red Sonja-esque looking "booth babe" running at them with a pretend ax, and then slinging one of the wimpy guys over her shoulder and marching off with him, whiling going on about feeding the sexist, puny little man to her dragon or something.

Oh or worse! Getting a few Sailor Moon crew to ask anybody and everybody in their most innocent voices what exactly would they need to do to sin. Man, I would dearly love to see EA get what it deserves for this: made fun of and lots of bad PR. Tempting...very tempting. But this is why I don't go to this nonsense event anymore!

[cindy-pon.livejournal.com]

i went for the first time this
year as i had a panel. (my first as well!)
it was insane and totally overwhelming.

i was in costume today (yes, i did!)
and i had many fanboys and girls ask for
fotos and they were all very nice and polite.
so at least that's a good thing.

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

That sounds horribly wrong on so many levels...

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Okay, one possible upside. The ad promises that the person who molests the booth babes the most gets to spend "a SIN full night" with them afterwards. So, aggravated assault and/or murder qualifies as a sin, right? Perhaps the "lucky" "winner" will get rewarded with some two on one (baseball bat) action :)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I like the way you think!

I keep thinking that maybe I should introduce the EA booth to the other six deadly sins. Like Wrath. Or Greed. Or maybe Gluttony -- perhaps those booth babes would like to go, fully dressed and unmolested, and eat five pizzas and three beers with me?

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

That would qualify as a "Sin full" night. However they're unfortunately specific about the particular sin you need to commit in order to win in the first place. However to continue in the nit-picky vein, it doesn't actually specify the acts of lust have to be committed with/on the booth babes, just that you need to be with them in the photo. Technically speaking you could have someone take a picture of you making out with jmpava in front of one of the booth babes and that would fit their requirements. I'm not sure how likely they it is that they would judge a picture that didn't actually involve the booth babes the winner though =P

[coraa.livejournal.com]

That's true! I could commit tonsil-hockey with jmpava in front of a bemused booth babe, and then take them on a 'sinful' night of Envy and Gluttony without a speck of Lust. ;)

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's just... what were they thinking?

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

Well clearly the _only_ think they were thinking was that they would get a lot of attention from horny guys... in fact they seem to be suffering from the same single minded (or perhaps half brained?) focus that they presumably have in common with their apparent target audience =P

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ha. S'true. And given how "intelligently" they've run their other Dante's Inferno campaigns ("Hey, guys, we've offended Christians and people who don't like being lied to already, why don't we go offend women too?"), I think somebody needs to be, uh, reprimanded at EA marketing. :P

[paperclippy.livejournal.com]

That is really disgusting.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my first response -- before I'd even thought through all the implications -- was 'euuurgh.' Definitely not the response from someone you want buying your games. (And I have, in the past, given quite a lot of money to EA -- I bought not only both The Sims 1 and 2, but a whole hell of a lot of expansions. This will be on my mind when I consider The Sims 3, for sure.)

[paperclippy.livejournal.com]

So after seeing your post I looked up "booth babe" on wikipedia, and found out that booth babes were effectively banned from E3 (by a dress code) after they were harrassed too much.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Good for E3, I must say. I don't recall seeing booth babes at Anime Expo, either -- attractive members of both genders, yes, usually fully dressed, sometimes in costume but generally not too revealing. There probably were some, but they tend to be less obvious at anime cons, because so much of the clientele is female that it doesn't make sense. (Even the big booth that was selling imported hentai visual novels had a full-clothed jpop singer out front to draw the crowds, not a bikini girl.)

I know that some of my friends don't agree on this topic, but I think that booth babes are a real problem. For one thing, they are a strong message of 'we are catering to boys, boys, boys,' which is offputting to female fans. (And yeah, lesbians and bisexual girls exist, but most lesbians and bisexual girls that I know do not go for pneumatic women in thongs so much, so I'm pretty confident in saying the booth babes are for straight men.) For another thing, they promote objectification in a way that I find creepy. For yet another thing, it's insulting: are guys really that stupid that they'll look at a booth they otherwise wouldn't be interested in because it has chesty women wearing not a lot? But for a fourth, as with the E3 restrictions... I think it's really problematic to pay people to give the appearance of sexual availablility. It leads to harassment, stalking, groping, etc. It's just not fair to the women. And it leads to really bad expectations: that attractive women are there for your pleasure, that their purpose is to be your eye candy, that I think extends from the stall where the booth babe is employed and out into the convention at large. Every year, post-Comic Con, there's a lot of complaints from women that they were stalked, groped, and otherwise harassed, and I think that raising the expectation that that's the way women at a con are to be treated is irresponsible. (I say this as someone who was aggressively hit on at an sf/f con when I was fifteen. It was frightening.)

...long winded Cora is long winded!

[rb13.livejournal.com]

Many people are angry about the contest for this very reason, pointing out that the Con Anti-Harassment Project, which was started partially in response to sexual harassment at Comic-Con, shows that this is a big problem and that this contest encourages it. A "booth babe" spoke out against this contest, saying that it encourages the stalking and harassing behaviours that already exist in fandom cons. Her comment and a link round up are here (http://whilenotfinished.theirisnetwork.org/2009/07/24/eafail-link-roundup/).

A lot of the conversation is happening on Twitter, in real-time. Twitter is the main medium through which entries to the contest are submitted, so many people are speaking out there. Search for: #lust, #EAFail, and @danteteam (the development team of the game).

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link. That's really interesting. (And yeesh, I hadn't even realized that they meant 'any booth babes at the show,' not just 'any EA booth babe'. I just... I have no words.)

[donaithnen.livejournal.com]

I know they were banned at E3 for awhile, but i'm not sure if that's still the case after the attempt to resurrect E3 from the dead this year.

[avani.livejournal.com]

They are back.

[yagathai.livejournal.com]

That's definitely unwise. I don't know for sure if I'd qualify it as offensive, but it sure is dumb as hell.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, entirely apart from the question of whether it's offensive, it's just -- it's stupid. There are so many ways it could go wrong. What the hell?

[ceph.livejournal.com]

Isn't that, er, illegal? Even if they could find any women willing to do it, I would think it would run afoul of sexual harassment laws, "adult entertainment" regulations, or both.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Well. Technically, the contest rules say that what you need to do with a booth babe to be eligible is 'get your picture taken with them,' so maybe they're hoping that's sufficiently CYA that they can said, "Well, we didn't tell to you grab her breast we just implied it." And there's no promises that the 'sinful night' includes sex. Just... lots and lots and lots of implications.

I imagine they're trying to eat their cake and have it too.

EDIT: Also, let's be honest here, I'm guessing that eighteen-year-old girls hired by EA are unlikely to complain if they might lose their jobs, even if legally they're entitled to. Chances of a lawsuit seem much more likely to come from random female con-attendee who was mistaken (or "mistaken") for a booth babe and grabbed. It's sickening, but true -- there are enough attractive young women that they're kinda expendable, and they can dump the ones who raise issues. See also: sexual harassment in the modeling industry.

[ceph.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I think "commit acts of lust" definitely crosses a line, so far as terminology goes. I agree about the models, but there's an interesting legal question--if a company essentially puts out a press release saying "we are instituting a policy to encourage sexual harassment of our employees", do you have to wait for an employee to complain before you can prosecute the employer?

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting. It seems like you could raise a 'hostile environment' suit even if you weren't one of the targeted babes, but I don't know the legal details enough to know whether that would fly.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

As it turns out, a) Their actual contest has them saying to take a picture/commit an 'act of lust' with any booth babe at the show, not just EA booth babes, so there's no way they could have contractually covered their asses with regards to 'adult entertainment' stuff, and b) they're now backtracking hardcore and saying that while they said 'act of lust,' they really just meant 'take a picture,' and we're all overreacting if we think that horny, lonely, socially-inept con fanboys are going to interpret their 'act of lust' as meaning, you know, 'act of lust.' But they're not rescinding the contest.

Actually, given the wording, I think their chances of lawsuit are drastically greater than I originally thought. There's no way the booth babes at, say, the Tower Records booth are going to feel pressured not to sue EA for encouraging boys to stalk and grope them.

[linley.livejournal.com]

Wow. Who runs EA's marketing department? And why haven't they been fired yet? That is just wrong.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

It just seems so likely to backfire, even apart from the issue of being offensive as hell. I don't even know.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

"and a CHEST full of BOOTY"

Groan.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ha. You know, I'd missed that little "pun." *facepalm*

[maggiedacatt.livejournal.com]

I think the sad little cherry on this sundae of fail is to consider how incredibly *awkward* that winning date is likely to be. What nerdy guy will know what to do/say on a date with two hot women (probably surrounded by cameras, etc)?

[coraa.livejournal.com]

No kidding! Two girls with whom they have nothing in common, where their expectations have been raised, and where the trip is attended by 'chaperones' in the form of EA employees? That's going to be totally hot fun, oh yes. *facepalm*

[rowr.livejournal.com]

haha yeah their marketing dept is a little.. uh.. off sometimes.
See below:
http://kotaku.com/5207521/update-ea-ships-illegal-weapons-to-press-wants-them-back

[coraa.livejournal.com]

...

Wow.

Does anyone in their marketing department think? Ever?

[canis-ridens.livejournal.com]

I wonder how effective it would be to find out who came up with this campaign, post their info online with the story, and promise Internet fame to anyone who commits an act of lust on them and posts it to Youtube? Or, how about a hollabacknyc-style site targeted at cons?

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Ha.

[cindy-pon.livejournal.com]

i'm speechless. i'm glad
i walked right past EA.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it definitely seems like something to skip, at this point.

[canis-ridens.livejournal.com]

... And the Twitterverse is attacking. In addition to the usual round of rage, some of the gay gamers are taking pictures with consenting "booth bears" and sending the pics to EA.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Go Twitterverse!

And I really like the 'booth bears' idea. (Because yeah, the whole thing is totally heteronormative on top of being a bad idea as regards women's safety.)

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Actually, what's gut-churning is that it is, in it's own sick, sad-- but social!(Thank you Bender)-- way genius. Tasteless. Oh yeah! But stupid? Sadly, no. Ya know all those comic book titles you blow by? Others don't (and, of course, the innuendo was intended-- it's me!). Aspects of so many covers would not be so inflated if it didn't sell. T&A is a HUGE (deliberate choice of words? Well, duh!) part of the con. The episode of Entourage featuring Comic Con is perfect. I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Comics are tawdry. Always have been. Is it right? I'm not fielding that one. But I wish Donna Barr would, I bet it would be hysterical!...because pink is tacky.

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

And by "genius" look at all the free publicity. And,unless someone makes a really colossal stink! All EA will have to do is apologize, since I doubt anyone is really going to boycott their games over this.