stimulated to appreciate IT

I’m writing all this down tonight because tomorrow I have to finish this document. My friend clair told me about this beauty contest for IT professionals. Yes, they actually thought of such a thing. Apparently they have 2 categories, one for professionals aged 25-35 and one for the undergraduates. More details on the Digital Pinay can be found here.
Clair and some of her friends were really outraged at the idea. I just told her that I noticed that the newest tech magazines in the Philippines ( I saw two of them:T3 and something else I don’t remember ), always had sexy scantily clad women on the cover holding these tiny gadgets which you can barely see.
I’m not against sexy women posing on the cover. I like reading FHM too and a lot of women’s magazines do that as well. I just didn’t want to see those kinds of pictures on a technology magazine.
I told neal about it and he said something like “it’s ok because that’s their marketing strategy to make the magazines sell”. It was probably then that I realized exactly why it bothered me.
It bothered me that they use women to sell gadgets and technology because that meant only men were interested in purchasing magazines about technology and gadgets.
Suddenly it seemed to me that they aren’t even bothering to attract women who are also interested in using high tech gadgets.
That may be because either one, they think the number of women who are interested in technology is too small or two, women who love gadgets are lesbians.
The story does not end there. My friend emailed some people and their point of view was published in an internet article. She told me about it the next day and as I read it, I laughed because my friend quoted me.
She told the reporter about my magazine insight hehehe.

"I am offended by this competition because it seems
to me that the organizers are looking for a trophy to show around. This contest
seems to feed the culture of machismo that we seem to have in our country. If
this kind of thing goes on, we would just perpetuate the idea that women are
objects of beauty to behold. I was talking on YM [Yahoo Messenger] with one of
my friends and she said this: ‘It’s weird. In America they sell the tech mags
without girl pics but here? There’s always this half-naked girl in front with
the techie stuff that is so small it covers barely 10 percent of the cover.’ So
you see, there is this already a current problem with the perception of women in
the country as it is. We don’t need another beauty pageant to make things
worse," Ching told INQ7.net.

moral of the story: be careful what you say in YM :)
Anyway I do hope they realize that there are women could also be interested in their magazine articles. I know that though engineering is still considered a "man's course" female individuals are proving their capabilities in the field and even doing better than their male counterparts.