After Gizmodo's article on the scary experiences booth babes have had at gaming conventions, Autostraddle.com decided to take a deeper look at the mistreatment that many booth babes recieve during game shows, the degrading (and sometimes outright scary) way attendees treat them, and why it's never ok to treat a person disrespectfully regardless of their job or how they are dressed. (Yep, sadly, it seems some people need to be reminded of that.)

Anyone who’s ever done promotional modeling, waited tables or really even just delivered cocktails to other humans can relate to much of the material of these confessions. What’s most shocking is the commenters defending chauvinistic treatment as appropriate in said conditions. Look, unless you are literally paying the lady specifically to engage in sexual rapport with you (i.e. a call girl, an exotic dancer giving a lap dance), which perhaps accounts for .0005% of male-female interactions, you are not to assume said sexual rapport is a part of that girl’s job description no matter what she’s wearing (it’s worth mentioning that crossing pre-set boundaries with sex workers — like from agreed-upon flirting to not-in-the-job-description getting handsy — is another epidemic in which some men often seem unable to respect the limitations of the woman’s job description. Stop it!).
Point blank; it’s NEVER OK to treat another person disrespectfully. Is that complicated?

On the other hand, a commenter on a 'Do You Come With The Car' blog does make an interesting point about how "there was a time when most of the [booth] women were strictly eye candy and not product spokespeople." More from an Auto Show Girl:

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"Also, because we’re not dumb, we know that one of the reasons we’re there is exactly because we’re attractive and direct your attention to whatever we’re standing next to. I don’t object to being a sex symbol. I object to objectification. When you ask me, even in jest, 'Do you come with the car?', do you know what you are implying? Let me fill you in: that I am nothing more than an accessory to be bought, like 20-inch rims or a stereo upgrade. It’s not cute, it’s degrading."

At Gizmodo (91% male readership), the reporters took a uber-awesome approach to their “Booth Babes Confessions” series at the Consumer Electronics Show. They have a video over there and an interview with a Suicide Girl geek working a product booth who even admits how socially awkward she is w/r/t networking amid a story of networking-gone-wrong, which makes our hearts throb for her. The article relates:

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"A booth babe’s job is to lure convention attendees into her booths, to do a product demonstration or to pass people off to a coworker. That’s fine. But when misunderstandings occur — or attendees forget they’re interacting with living, breathing human beings — some attendees turn into jerks, pressing intimidatingly close and crossing boundaries... there wasn’t a single woman we spoke to that didn’t have at least one icky experience."

[They also remember last year's debacle when EA even offered rewards to men who snapped photos of themselves "committing acts of lust" with the girls working Comic-Con.]

Miss Razz via autostraddle.com »