Auto shows have been a constant in my life. Because my dad owns a “shop”, the flashy cars, the beer sprays, the rivalry between different car shops, these have all become normal to me.
In the 90s and early 2000s, car accessories shops, or simply “shops”, would offer to pimp up the rides of drag racers, professional racers, and car enthusiasts. In car shows, each shop have a car entry and competes for awards like “Best in Paint”, “Best in Audio”, or “Best Booth”.
My dad used to have this mindset that these awards were for the chump shops that couldn’t be the best. To him only one award mattered, and that was “Best in Show”. This was the one award that once displayed on top of your car, hoards of people would swing by your booth just to look at it and maybe have a picture of themselves at the front seat.
Whenever my dad won Best in Show, the other nominees would pour drinks on him and the crowd would go wild. Car shows used to be fun as a kid. But then you grow up and see the dark side of it.
The car industry is a boy’s game. From the shop owners to the visitors, they were all men. The only women who were there were their girlfriends, wives, and daughters who had to be there.
And, the models. Almost every booth had one. My dad only hired a model once because my mom got mad when she found out how much they charged. Models were these women who had skin as white as snow, outfits that were too tight and heels that they had to stand in for an entire day. I never knew what to feel about them. When I was younger, my mom told me not to look at them and I just went with it because if a woman had her cleavage out, then my parents always told us not to look.
Last Saturday, my dad told me to work at our booth and sell air fresheners. These days, auto shows aren’t about the awards anymore; they’re about the money. My dad didn’t even have an entry this year, just a booth full of mags, Recaro chairs, coil-overs, and HDMIs.
After the fall of the Fast & Furious franchise plus the ban of drag racing, business has been slow for car shops. But one thing stayed the same, and that was the models. Now, even the booths selling firetrucks and e-bikes had models. Across our booth, there was another booth selling dash cams and I’d watch their model when nobody was visiting our booth. The thing I noticed about their booth was that there was always a group of people, no, a group of men there at all times. Sometimes, it was just a bunch of guys taking selfies with the model and high-fiving each other afterwards, and then there were the ones who brought big cameras. The model would pose accordingly but I don’t think it even mattered. Most of the guys just zoomed in on her chest.
It gets really cold the longer you stay in the auto show and I took a few breathers myself just to calibrate my body temp, but the dashcam model just stayed put. She willingly took pictures with everyone who asked. She held up a signage and danced to the music whenever she was free. And me being the person I am, felt pity for her.
This woman has a mind and soul of her own, yet here she is, being objectified by men who probably don’t even have cars for the dashcams she’s advertising. I wanted to help her in some way, maybe have that moment where I empower her and tell her she’s better than this.
But then I didn’t. Why? I don’t know exactly. Maybe because I was busy selling air fresheners. And maybe I knew deep inside that this is her job and it would be mean of me to tell her to quit it.
Maybe she knows that I look at her with this expression of pity and sees disgust, because I’m not the first person to look at her that way. We both knew that having models at auto shows will only get stronger because they need the men, who don’t buy anything, to fill up the room.
I think I’m part of the problem here. It’s been ingrained in me that these models are not “good women”. They were used as marketing tools and photo props. I thought that by pitying them, I am looking at them respectfully but I know now that I am not. I still think of them beneath me. I think that I can use my feminism and empowerment to help these poor girls out of their misery. I use them to fuel my feminist fantasies. I’m no different than the creeps who zoom in only on the parts they want to see. I should just stick to selling my air fresheners.
Story by Clarisse Andrea Ong
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