"Hypothetical" question

[triskellian]

If one had to refer in an academic essay to the article of women's underwear which traditionally covers the bottom, how would one do so? I'm inclined towards 'knickers', but it doesn't sound very serious :-(

Time for a poll...

Poll The naming of pants

Comments

[undyingking]

Why didn't I get to write essays about women's underwear when I was a student?

[triskellian]

I dunno. Maybe you should have done more critical discourse analysis of articles like this?

[undyingking]

FFS! I don't know which is worse, the article or the actuality it depicts.

[triskellian]

I'm going with the actuality being worse, since the article at least has the small redeeming feature of providing a nice barrel, well stocked with fat fish for me to shoot ;-)

[smiorgan]

Fat fish in knickers!

Mmmm, fish.

[undyingking]

Mm, not an approach wise to adopt against an actual Russian bank -- as Barclays are probably about to find out.

[bateleur]

I vote for the article being worse, at least on the evidence presented.

The only problem I have with what the bank's doing here is that I don't see any male employees in their panties badgers (with guns). Other than that it just seems like a harmless publicity stunt.

The article, by constrast, is a kind of "Oh, this is so awful (PS. Check out the hooters on this one!)" which I find really irritating. Can't people just be grown up enough to admit when they'd like to look at some porn?

[onebyone]

The only problem I have with what the bank's doing here is that I don't see any male employees in their badgers

What other problem would there be (apart from maybe "God hates pictures of people in their undies"?)

[undyingking]

How about "Sexually objectifying people in this way demeans the subject, the proponent and the spectator alike"?

Or, more practically, "Those members of staff thus depicted are going to have difficulty getting external clients etc to take them very seriously from now on"?

(If they really are members of staff, rather than models pretending to be, that is.)

[onebyone]

The former sounds to me like a secular synonym for "God hates pictures of people in their undies". I know of the existence of that point of view, but I don't share it. If someone does something which she herself is not ashamed of, then you can call her "demeaned" if and only if you choose to consider her demeaned

[undyingking]

Personally I do feel that the WI people were demeaned too, regardless of whether or not I fancy them. Of course, they may not have felt themselves to have been so, and nor may these Russian women -- nor may people who work as strippers, etc. But in that case, I don't share their view.

I entirely agree that a mixed-sex calendar would have been less problematic in a number of ways. (And probably wouldn't have been covered at all in the UK news, let's face it -- or if so, I bet the female photos would have had more prominence than the male.) However I believe that still would have been sufficiently suggestive of the ingrained lack of respect etc to be considered objectionable.

(BTW I've just noticed the most amusing name of the poll. If triskellian is still reading this thread, ha ha ha, and I can only hope that "yesterday we had daily cleaning".)

[triskellian]

Still reading ;-)

I went to reread before writing this comment because I only remembered the first line. Tomorrow, presumably, will just be "refer to two days ago"...

[undyingking]

"what to do after firing" -- it's not got that bad, has it?