Alright, this thread spread off into a million different tangents and directions and I don't have the time or the energy to quote every single post I wanted to reply to. So feel free to ridicule fifteen minutes of uninterrupted rambling from the deepest regions of my heart-soaked gin. And try not to take this **** too seriously, either. I don't. I just like to explain myself.
I would be more than happy to respect a paddock babe for her intellect or her character if she demonstrated either of them when she's on my television screen. Or even demonstrated that she posesses either of them in the first place. Not everyone does. I work, as anyone who frequents the IndyCar threads here knows, in an automotive plant building car parts. I work alongside quite a few capable and forceful women who have been putting in fearsome workloads to support their families for in some cases twice as long as I've been alive. Women who routinely make me feel like a cupcake and ashamed to have ever complained about anything at all. Some of them have been putting in 50+ hour work weeks since the God damn 70s. But I also work with a battalion of empty-headed dipshits who would have risen to run the entire company years ago if they put as much effort into producing quality components for Chevrolet Camaros as they did into painting their faces and stuffing themselves into push-up bras and low-rider jeans. I've worked under female bosses who could go toe-to-toe with the best man you could ever put in charge of tedious manual labor: I've also worked under clueless broads so backwards that far from wondering how they got their job and their salary, I've been inclined to wonder that if they were presidentette of the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, whether the iceberg would have sunk instead.
It's sort of like how some of the men I work and have worked with are dependable brothers in arms fighting the same fight I do every week, and how some of them are lazy schmucks I wouldn't cross the street to piss on if they were on fire. Many of these women have gained my respect until the day I die by offering me a ride home after work, which sounds like nothing typed out here but is actually a big deal when you are 54 hours into the work week, your feet are bubble-wrapped with blisters and you begin to consider seriously diving headlong off of a bridge, because at least then with your verterbrae turned into sugar you won't feel your aching body anymore. Clocking out at midnight and taking the bus home, I get in around five minutes shy of 2 in the morning. With a ride home, as maybe a dozen women (and a dozen more men) have generously given me in the two years I've worked where I do, I'm often showered and snug as a bug in a rug by 12:30. Sparing me this gigantic pain in the ass (which amounts to ten hours not spent standing at bus stops and an extra $20 in my pocket if I scrounge a ride every night of the week) is not something I take lightly. Owing a great deal to women, I respect their skills and abilities. Whenever skills and abilities are demonstrated, generosity being the ability I admire most in anyone. And on those occasions when a woman has given me a ride home, never for a second have I questioned her ability to drive a car or thought of her as a piece of meat when she reaches over to shift from 4th to 5th. Nor do I chuckle arrogantly to myself in my own head at the thought of a woman driving a manual transmission. I still look down her shirt when she does, though.
I'm not picking on the girls: I'd be willing to bet there is more integrity in a grid girl's left titty than in the entire F1 paddock put together - A hideous rat's nest of filthy businessmen, governed by a senile dwarf who should have been in prison 30 years ago, overlooking an eternal parade of spoiled children while they conduct their go-kart soap opera across the globe and spend the billions of dollars they collectively accumulate in the eternal search for an extra thousandth of a second sliced off their lap time of last year on that tedious pursuit rather than on anything remotely beneficial to human beings. All the while, goofy old bobbleheads so removed from any kind of honest speech they can't spit on the ground without it first going through their PR department whilst simultaneously cannoning empty threat after empty threat to leave the sport should they be forced to share their blood money with smaller teams to develop their own wind spit tunnel facilities splutter on in their press releases about how the sport is advancing green technology, bringing countries together through its competition, and whatever other fairytale horseshit they dream up every weekend, using this sport (to the extent ten team owners lounging around a Monaco hotel room comparing the size of their bank accounts can be considered a sport) to further political goals when it increases the size of their wallets, and shamefully declaring that F1 isn't about politics whenever it's considerable influence and spotlight could be used to help the people of a country they go to.
But the cars go fast, and the girls look cute, so I'll watch every weekend like I have since Montreal 1996. Cute girls giggling and smiling at the camera is about as honest as it gets in a typical grand prix weekend. At least the girls don't change the rules every weekend.
The only thing I'd like to see more than all those grid girls naked is any proof whatsoever, at all, that these girls don't want to be there. That there is a gun to their head. Or even an elastic band to their head. Or that pretty girls, which the world tends to bend over backwards to accomodate, aren't free to wear baggy jeans and a dirty old sweater, sit alone at home on race weekend pouring over college textbooks while cashiering at Walmart from 8-5 and then going to night school from 7-2. And repeat, for year after year after year, like five hundred million plain Janes and honorable cutie pies laboring under the delusion that it's evil to notice that pretty things are pretty are doing as we speak. But grid girls aren't there to show off their brains. Kinda like how female professors and scientists aren't there to show off their asses. And how circus clowns aren't there to read poetry, and how poets aren't there to clown around. And how F1 drivers aren't there to pepper your weekend with interesting quotes and soundbytes. Which is why the never do that. We can ban grid girls and blow ourselves for being progressive all we want, but I think a world in which everyone above the age of 7 has a smart phone capable of downloading a gig of porn in six minutes is a world where you get to see far too many tits to be worried about grid girls and their effects on the moral sanctity of our sport. When the kids who fell off the short bus to make a career at FOM cut away from a last-lap pass for 1st to show some enchanting collaboration of mascara and eyeliner biting her nails and clutching her headset in the pits and the on-screen graphic says "Nobel Laureate in Chemistry" and not "Valterri Bottas' girlfriend", I'll be the first one to eat my words.
And when that awkward post-race walk, following a driver in sweaty and pissed overalls up the flight of stairs from parc ferme to podium, shows me an attractive young lady our race winner is blundering past lifting up her revealing mini-dress to show a dissertation of her new mathematical theorem, I'll be the first to congratulate her on being much more clever than I am and I will of course regret ever having been so shallow as to think that a beautiful young woman is a beautiful young woman. It will pair nicely with other threads that won't happen, such as those detailing the incredible careers of women like Michele Mouton or Shirley Muldowney. If only starting a discussion on how awesome Simona de Silvestro or Ana Beatriz are could create as much passion as people have for calling you sexist for pointing out that Carmen Jorda is terrible, or that Susie Wolff is kinda ****, or that Danica Patrick probably shouldn't be the darling of the American racing world bringing a top-10 car home 32nd every weekend. But don't worry: the aliens will land and Robert Merhi will win the WDC before the billions and billions of men on this planet will magically shut off the billions and billions of years of biological compulsion to enjoy pretty girls all to placate some dumbass, berserk imperative of deleting in our brains How Things Work to satisfy a more comfortable How I Want to Feel About Things
Edited by Andrew Hope, 30 May 2015 - 18:24.
I think it's very hard to deny the female body is more beautiful.
