How individual men view women tends to be highly dependent on the way in which they were brought up, and how they've then lived their lives. My undertaking of a degree in teaching (a profession where women make up at least half of the workforce) certainly helped in the development of my positive perspective on sexual equality; studying sociology for four years entrenched that view. In fact I don't think that I have ever understood how any thinking person could believe women inferior to men - it's been my conviction for most of my adult life that Western society would have been far more advanced if we had not for so many years belittled half of our human resource. But, despite long-standing anti-discrimination legislation, there are certainly many men who believe that women are an entirely separate -and always inferior - race.
And in the area of automotives, that belief seems more prominent than is typical of society in general.
You find almost entirely just men working with cars, men who are totally immersed in the company of other men. As in any solitary group, entrenched attitudes develop. Women are expected to know nothing of cars, and sometimes - tragically - are prepared to adopt that role. Listen to a mechanic describing a car problem to a woman, then listen to the same mechanic explaining that problem to a man. Despite the fact that the woman may have a degree in automotive engineering - and the man may be a hairdresser - the expectation of knowledge from one and ignorance from the other is striking.
I think that part of that sexual inequality also shines through in another automotive area - decorative bodies. Perhaps in ten or twenty or thirty years' time people will look with extreme mirth at what are current photos of car races - why on earth are there scantily clad women parading in pit lane? I mean, why are they there? Just the other day when I was photographing a car race, I was severely remonstrated with for wearing shorts and sandals near the racecars. "Inappropriate clothing," I was (rightly) told. "There's fuel around here....." That a few hours before - in exactly the same environment - there were women clad in nothing but Lycra bathing suits, high heel sandals and umbrellas, was overlooked.
In recent years the covers of car magazines have shown an upsurge in the use of pictures of women wearing little. A socially retrogressive approach that we all thought was consigned to the same garbage bin as "The Woman's Perspective" in new car tests (yes, they really did once have sections like that), semi-nude female models draped over cars have again started to dominate some magazines.
I find it perplexing - and, in another way, quite understandable. Modified car magazines are always in cut-throat competition; anything that attracts a potential reader's eye when the magazine is stacked cheek-by-jowl with a hundred other titles on a newsstand is worth literally tens of thousands of dollars per month. And I, just like millions of other men, will certainly look a second time at a cover featuring a length of leg or curve of breast. But - surely - there are far better dedicated magazines that cover the topic of naked (and semi-naked) women? I mean, if I want to look at flesh, I don't buy a car magazine. And if I want to buy a car magazine, what relevance is the flesh?
AutoSpeed has never draped women over cars. I consider such pictures as anachronistic, out of step with the times, somewhat degrading, and irrelevant to the topic at hand - which is cars. And even more than in the other media, by God if you want to see attractive women wearing little, the Web's the place to see them! It's not for nothing that any measure of Web traffic and site popularity shows pornography as the most popular pursuit of those on-line...
Given this background, an incident unfolded the other day that left me somewhat bemused, taken aback, and a little unsure of quite what to do. Dep Ed Michael Knowling had arranged an AutoSpeed photo shoot of a couple of cars from a particular workshop. We were to meet the owners and the workshop proprietor at the location, which was the carpark to a local boat ramp. Most car shoots are done towards dusk, so the meeting was arranged for 4.30pm this cold, autumn afternoon. As usual, Michael was doing the words of the story, and I the pics.
When I arrived at the location carpark I saw two Mazda RX7's, a triple rotor Cosmo - and in one of the cars, a young women I quickly figured was naked. Well, in the 12 degree C conditions she was wearing a strapless, short dress - and with that initial through-the-windscreen inspection, I thought the dress wasn't there at all. A very rapid return inspection revealed the presence of the abbreviated black cloth, and my intensely male interest subsided somewhat. But I did wonder what she was doing wearing only that....
I wasn't left to wonder long. Part way through the shoot of the first car, the car's owner approached me and said that Maxine (that wasn't her name, but it will do here) was happy to be photographed with the car. I was peering through the Nikon, too engrossed in trying to conceal the scratches on the paintwork, make the most of the sunlight that kept ducking behind clouds, and exclude the carpark railing from the background to do much other than say, "Er, thanks. But we normally don't do that."
I photographed the second car and was just changing the film when the workshop prop approached me directly and quietly asked if I could - as a favour to him - take some pics of the girl with the car. I pointed out that the photos wouldn't appear in the article, and he was fine about that. But he still wanted the pics done; a promise had obviously been made. I'd already been asked if copies of all the pics could be given to the owners of the cars - it's AutoSpeed's standard practice that we do that wherever possible - and the fact that the photos would be made available was one apparent input into the pressure being applied.
So here I was, in the position of doing one of those silly flesh-on-car shoots to which I have a complete and utter philosophical objection.
"Ho, ho, ho - but didn't ya just check out her legs and tits, man?" I can hear the crowd bellowing.
Well, not really. Maybe it's a subconscious thing, but I figure if a woman's happy showing you what she's got, she's probably already done that to an awful lot of other men before it's your turn.... So I took the minimum of shots I possibly could (two), then started to pack up my gear. But no, she was off in another car changing her clothes for the next lot of photos.... Aaaagh! I actually thought this dress looked better on her than the last, but what the hell was I doing here anyway?
After the next couple of pics she wanted to change her clothes again - but I'd had enough. If I wanna become that kind of photographer, I'll stop editing a car magazine and go into it full-time.
In fact, when I think about it, I already have done that type of photography! When I was a college student, I got a job as a restaurant photographer. This entailed my visiting a prescribed list of restaurants. I would then wander around the tables, pestering all those people having an enjoyable, private, night out as to whether they wanted a photo taken. Of course most didn't, but being pretty desperate for the cash (commission made up most of the pay) I'd keep on pushing. When the heavy sales approach was successful, I'd step back, press the shutter release and then squeeze them for the cash. (I'd gone for the job because it said 'Photographer Required'. It was only later that I realised that a trained gorilla could have done the photography side of things.)
Anyway, the restaurants on the list were an eclectic lot. One was Chinese, one a pizza bar - and one what was then called a nightclub. In this club the waitresses - they probably did as much waiting as I did photography - were pretty well nude. The usually very drunk all-male patrons would use a twenty or fifty dollar bill to inveigle the waitresses to sit on their laps - and what better time to have a visiting photographer take a pic? It was tawdry, I though demeaning to the women, and made me feel as if I was witnessing - in fact, being part of - a less than edifying process. The women lost their smiling faces whenever the men weren't looking; one didn't know for which sex to feel more pity.
As you can guess, I didn't stay long in that job...
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