Jan. 15, 2016, 12:50 p.m. -  Nat Brown

#!markdown Thanks for the detailed reply, and sorry for the delay in my response. I'm certainly not put off by the length. I like to learn, and while I've done a couple of ethics classes at university and am familiar with some relevant concepts, I've never studied women and sexism in a formal sense. I appreciate your thoughts because I do think this is an important issue and I want to know perspectives and the issues. I actually have a less straightforward question about a gender issue at Uncle Dave now and I'm curious how that plays out. Anyway, back on point. The main issue (dehumanisation) you bring up at the start is clear to me. I'm not 100% on board with the reasoning for your distinction between business's and individual's rights to do these sorts of things though. If the influence differential is as great a you say, and I'm not sold, then I'd say it is a significant factor. However, I think that reasoning gets blurred when an individual is behaving like that just to market themselves for sponsorship (but if it's sincerely who the are, awesome). And, that distinction almost doesn't exist if a company is sponsoring someone principally for the exposure they get through sexual marketing- there is very little difference in that scenario versus hiring the models for calendar above, aside from the currency they're paid in. I also think there's some really complex issues around the act of hiring women to do these sorts of things, and these haven't come up anywhere here, but I'll leave it at that for now. I'm not familiar with the marketing in snowboarding, but I do snowboard. I hate a good proportion of the culture around sports that have that sort of social cache though. I grew up surfing and always found my disdain for superficiality at odds with my participation. Are you saying that the snowboard industry is down because misogynistic marketing was commonplace? That seems appropriate to me. And, I don't think I'd really care if the MTB industry melted down because of a backlash to shitty marketing. I pay to play though, and I don't have the means to rock the latest an greatest gear, so I don't have that much to lose. In writing that, I'm inferring that you would care based on what you wrote above. Is that why you care about Maxxis's marketing approach? Actually, I might not have been clear in my original question to you. While it was clear that the marketing approach used by Maxxis pissed you off and I generally understood why, to me you were displaying anguish beyond that, as if you don't want Maxxis to suffer in the marketplace. I don't think I'm explaining it quite right. It almost seemed to me like you'd been consulting with them on their marketing and were disappointed with them for making a stupid decision, not just that they were being degrading. Am I making sense? Maybe it's because you're in the industry and do have something to lose, but I suspect there's something I don't understand. If we lived in the free-market capitalist system that we're told we live in, I think this sort of thing would be resolved fairly quickly, say within a generation, because they could choose alternatives. However, there are very small groups that have massively disproportionate influence through mass communication mechanisms that, owing to the psychological issues you mention above, effectively inhibit the freedom required for that system. These groups are mostly governments and large corporations, and they leave the populace in a sea of negative influence that they leverage for their own selfish ends. It takes far too much effort to exist reasonably in this environment. I'm not stupid, I know I sound like I'm a tinfoil hat wearing crackpot, but it seems quite clear to me that humankind has created some huge problems for itself through this mechanism. I hate all of it, sexism included. I fucking hate the greed and selfishness that lie at the core of it all. These fuckers take so much more than people's money.