Ryanair are at it again with their strip-off charity calendar

[MrsStomp]

I don't know who has seen this www.ryanair.com/en/calendar but GGGRRRRRRRR - it has really got my goat. I think they've been doing it for a few years now. Here's some more of the coverage: www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3912561/Fly-Ryan-bare.html

The charity Debra are accepting proceeds from the calendar - obviously with being a 'charity calendar' it makes it all 'good fun'.

The first thing you see at the moment when you go onto Ryanair's website is a lot of women (cabin crew!!!) in bra and pants. It is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Here's the link for Ryanair's complaints section frd.ie/complaints/?language=en - well, you never know. Plus Debra's list of contacts in the UK: www.debra.org.uk/contact-debra.html

I'm sorry to seem petty but I resent the implication that I would make up figures.
A link to the metropolitan police figures has been used in a previous thread (don't ask me to find it I can't be bothered)
The statistics I used have been quoted by Object!, the Fawcett society and a site proclaiming itself to be the 'Union of Sex Workers' (who pointed out that it was only a 30% rise in rapes) amongst others.
Admittedly these all have their own angle, but I have found the guardian to be good at it's fact-checking.

This new layout is bloody awful. The bits you want to be bigger aren't, and everything else is annoyingly huge.

Re: The International Union of Sex Workers - one of the very few 'unions' to include pimps employers in its leading members.

Re: readers who are not feminists - this is the feminism section, so it kind of goes with the territory to find a few feminists on it.

'impressed'is possibly the wrong word but i clearly set it aside from an 'accomplishment'which it clearly isnt.
we are all attracted to beautiful people it maybe one of the worsed side of human nature but it's true , charities make sure they get a photo of a starving pretty little kid to get people to donate , because the ugly one pushes less buttons.
so i'm just being honest , not trying to make out that i'm above the flesh.

I'm not quite sure what I think of that line of argument.

I mean, I'm sure you are quite right that charities do that sometimes, but I'm not sure why pity for a starving child is being discussed alongside whatever emotions a calendar of half-naked adult women might be calling to mind? I may be being really stupid, I just don't really follow.

Unless what you're saying is that it's ok to market anything, no matter how good or bad, so long as you use a pretty face to do it?

If so, no, I can't agree.

I don't think that acknowledging that all of us are more attracted to good looking people but that from a moral POV, we recognise that good looking people are not more worthy of our pity, support, help, blah di blah, is trying to pretend that we're above the flesh, or whatever.

But tbh I'm not really sure how all that fits in with the Ryanair are a bunch of sexist wankers theme of this thread.

"we are all attracted to beautiful people".

People yes. Men like to see attractive, women like to see attractive men. That's not in dispute. Yet what we see all the time is attractive naked women. There's no balance. Men are taught to objectify women. Women are taught to objectify themselves. So who's the winner there?

Quite.

Where is the constant diet of buff young men with fabulous abs, making other men feel inadequate and bad about themselves? Where is the continual message to men, that they aren't slim enough, aren't muscly enough, aren't tall enough, don't have enough hair, don't have pert enough arses, are too hairy, are not hairy enough, have got rubbish legs, aren't sexy enough? Where are the messages to the 51% of people with vaginas, saying that if you buy this car, the oiled young man draped across the bonnet and his ilk will find you sexually attractive?

Hang on I"ll go and find some

Ah yes, here we are

"Where is the constant diet of buff young men with fabulous abs, making other men feel inadequate and bad about themselves? Where is the continual message to men, that they aren't slim enough, aren't muscly enough, aren't tall enough, don't have enough hair, don't have pert enough arses, are too hairy, are not hairy enough, have got rubbish legs, aren't sexy enough?"

'Men's Health' type mags? Movies? Adverts? It's not just a woman's problem, though it is far more ferocious towards women.

But men's health isn't aimed at women. It's aimed at men. And it's aimed at a very small, upmarket niche of men.

Those images aren't surrounding us everywhere.

Whereas the ones of women, are.

That is both terrifying and amusing in about equal measure!

ER, I love those! One of my favourite posts shows just how ridiculous some objectifying cliche poses are - I was laughing out loud by the end.

"though it is far more ferocious towards women"

You might want to add a few more "far"s onto that sentence.

"But men's health isn't aimed at women. It's aimed at men."

Because no magazines aimed at women have ever promoted an unrealistic body image?

What are you getting at eccles? Isn't everyone say that magazines aimed at women do promote unhealthy body images?

It's just that there aren't a lot of magazines in my local newsagent on the top shelf with naked men pumped full of silicon and botox and trussed up, that are intended for me to wank over. There isn't a big market for men being objectified for straight women.

No, men aren't continually being presented as wank-fodder.

There's no male equivalent of Page 3, absolutely. But I just think we're blinkering ourselves if we pretend that men aren't under pressure to conform to a body type. The same avenues through which women face that pressure (TV, movies, music, etc), men do too. Though not to the same extent.

Not to anywhere near the same extent.

Very few men go and get penis enlargement, testicle re-alignment, buttock implants, lipsuction, back, crack'n'sack, botox...

Yet many women do.

If you sat down for one evening in front of ITV and did an audit of the number of ads which showed women as sex objects and men as sex objects, I'll bet women wildly outnumber men. And if you analyse where men are being shown as normal people, versus women being shown as normal people (as opposed to sex objects), I bet you'd find that men wildly outnumber women.

One day I mgiht do that. But I'd have to sit through the whole of ITV.

Will make it a Sunday, Downton Abbey...

LOL when I say many women do, I don't mean testicle re alignment obv.

Just the female equivalents of all those and more.

I wasn't pretending that eccles.

It does make me sigh a bit that we can't ever get through a thread without someone insisting we analyze how something that affects a vast majority of women also affects a small minority of men. Can we not just acknowledge that yes, some men are affected to some degree, and move on?

Not being snarky (I hope), just don't see how it adds to the discussion really.

LRD, I know, it's bloody tiring is what it is.

Men are nowhere near as under pressure to conform to a body type as women are.

If you analyse the body images of men presented on TV and in films, mags etc. the variety compared to women, is startling.

I mean FGS Bruce Willis. He's still being allowed to make films. Even though he has totally and completely lost all his looks and just looks like a mean old mean man now.

Whereas his beautiful ex wife, Demi Moore, who still looks stunning, probably can't get parts any more because she's considered too old. Ignore the fact that she looks 30 years younger and 30 times better looking than her ex who is still being presented to us as someone women should want to look at.

That's just a random example off the top of my head I bet I could think of loads. I just need to go and watch some TV first, don't watch any apart from Merlin and Downton Abbey atm.

I don't think women's ideas of what's attractive in a man are anything like as stereotyped as the image of 'attractive women' presented to men. In a way we're lucky we get to do more working it out for ourselves.

LRD, I wasn't saying you were pretending anything, I was referring to ER's post earlier which wondered where all the male-objectifying media was (I wish these were threaded sometimes!).

Maybe I'm taking this the wrong way, but I feel a little bit like you're accusing me of "what about the menz?" tactics. I've repeatedly stated that it is not as big a problem for men as it is for women. That said, I disagree that it only affects a small minority of men; everyone is affected by the body images being pushed today.

I'm also not thrilled about the 'tiring' comments - this assumes that there is a correct application of feminist ideology to this issue that does not include any discussion of the impact on men, and that branches in the discussion to this effect need to be ignored, shut down, or otherwise 'overcome' to get back on track. I'm ever so sorry if you find my attempts at discussion 'tiring', I'll try much harder to shape my opinions into something more entertaining, shall I? I think it adds to the discussion because (my version of) feminism is about breaking down gender roles for the benefit of both genders. I do realise that's a personal interpretation though, and may not be/probably isn't shared by other posters.

Hmmm, re-reading that, I get rather too heated towards you in the last paragraph, LRD. Sorry about that (long week).