Honest question, I have not been at CES.
The number of female booth babes was in the hundreds each year.
No attractive people who are not experts allowed at your booth. You can only profit off of the approved set of genetic lottery traits.
Unbanning sex toys was a big step forward, but creating morality bylaws will inevitably result in, eg, women engineers (like me) being potentially harrassed for showing "unacceptable" skin.
We have been here many times before. Rules that mandate appearance requirements for women in the name of protecting women in general inevitably hurt some women in particular, and create a schism between women who can make money with their noodles and women who make money with, ahem, various other assets.
Banning making money by being attractive amounts to yet another wealth transfer away from vulnerable, often marginalized, women.
I stand with sex workers, and booth babes are just that.
Booth babes are not sex workers. They are generally actresses or models. The fact that people think they are sex workers is one of the reasons for banning them.
Of course, people should have every right to work in this way. But just because I don't judge a woman for being a stripper doesn't mean I wouldn't judge my employer for hiring one. It's unprofessional.
Of course, there's a whole continuum here - you could argue that a flouncy woman whose job is to turn over tiles on a game show (wordlessly, naturally) is also a sex worker. Rule of thumb - could an ugly woman get the job? If not, it's sex work.
Sex work is not a continuum. Sex work involves (a) sex or (b) deliberate titillation, which is what strippers do by removing their clothes and miming sexual acts. Booth babes and Vanna White do neither. To claim that they are even remotely similar to sex workers is, quite frankly, insulting to women because you're suggesting quite loudly that the mere act of performing activities in tight clothing constitutes sex work.
Comments like yours likening booth babes to strippers and sex workers is precisely why they are now banned from CES. Because too many people assume they are sex workers and not actresses/models who are just doing a marketing gig.
Their goal is to bring attention to their employer’s product by titillating passers-by.
That's the whole reason they are called “booth babes” and they are selected for their ability to succeed in that modality of attention-getting.
They don't generally wear revealing clothing and act provocatively just out of personal preference unconnected to their specific job duties.
They usually are (which is fairly specifically indicated by the label “babe” for the job) by common definitions of sex work (which include labor whose role is indirect, including visual, sexual stimulation as well as that involving direct sexual contact.)
> They are generally actresses or models.
Both acting and modeling overlap with sex work rather than excluding it.
Words mean things.
What you are uncomfortable with is adjacency, and it points to internal work you need to do.
Booth babes are not about sex positivity. Their presence does not correlate with sex positivity, and the people and industries that hire them are not sex positive industries.
Only the degree has changed.
It hasn't happened. Or, if there exists a counter-example, it very unambiguously hasn't happened at a scale that would imply equality.
So no. Since it's clearly a sexist practice, getting rid of it is more equal than leaving it.
The point of a tech conference is to enjoy exciting new tech and network with people in the industry. Having your sex appeal cast in stark relief to a bunch of models is not part of that.
I can see the history as proceeding like this: finance (and similar industries) used to have a Mad Men style sexist office culture. Then PC rules and HR regulations moved in to make the office a neutral ground. Then the power brokers moved the serious networking old boys' club to the 'after dark' part.
I can't say the goal of this was to exclude women from power all along, but that's the effect of it.
It's not a clear-cut win/loss either way on the whole, sure. But there's no way you can argue that it's not a sexist practice as it exists right now. What you do with that info is always a tradeoff, and I suspect we're on different sides.
... that's a fairly unfortunate context to misuse "literally" in.
(insightful comment though)