Published: 28 March 2013
Country: UK
The editor of the magazine Esquire for the UK, Alex Bilmes, has sparked the controversy last week by comparing the women featured in the magazine to the ‘cool cars’ and naming them ‘ornamental’. During an Advertising Week Europe panel discussion in London Bilmes appeared alongside Cosmopolitan U.K. editor Louise Court and offered his view of the women as objects.
Bilmes’ comments have sparked fury among the members of the press and the public, but maybe even bigger astonishment was caused when the Guardian published his comments along with the video from an Advertising Week Europe panel.
The Guardian’s readers complained because the sexist comments have found their way to one of the leading UK newspaper. In the next day edition of the Guardian’s ‘Comments is Free’, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslet, a feminist blogger, asked if Bilme has “escaped from Benny Hill sketch”.
“Bilmes is under no obligation to be interested in these women’s brains, of course, but if he encouraged it a little more in his readers we wouldn’t be seeing such a resurgence of the sexist “lad culture” that, if allowed to germinate unheeded, his daughter’s generation will be battling for years to come”, says Cosslet in the Guardian.
Esquire’s editor said that he is not backing down from his controversial comments, but the real problem is the publicity given to the comments widely recognised as sexist.
