I blame religious conservatives more than I would feminists for this. sex positive feminists do not have a problem with scantily clad/objectified jobs as long as it's consensual...
As someone who could be painted a religious conservative, I have to disagree with this comment. Some of the photos of these women on the grid are downright tasteful, and the ones that might be considered risque are still more appropriate than most female recording artists' music videos these days. I don't think the issue is religious puritan thinking, or some bent of it. F1's response doesn't colour it a decision made to appease a religious group. I'm not quite sure where your drawing your conclusion from here.
I don't normally weigh in on this, but given the response from the actual grid girls, I've been thinking about this decision a bit. In my opinion, I think this may be the result of a... strange breed of tall poppy syndrome, one that's been creeping beneath the feminist movement, but usually kept in check by actual feminists pushing for positive gender equality. What I see here are women who aren't happy that this avenue of employment, or perhaps this level of public admiration, if I can use that expression here, isn't available to all women, based on their physical appearance. They fall short of the standards, so they push to have the standards removed, under the guise of feminism; if they fail to meet a certain physical standard, the issue must be the standard. I disagree with this. Positive body image is one thing. Restricting all marketing, PR displays, models, etc., to literally being just average looking people is something else, has little to do with gender equality, in my opinion. I make the distinction between grid girls, grid boys, etc., from something like Booth Babes that used to crowd the floors at E3, in that the Booth Babes' presence was almost grotesquely and exclusively sexualised, in a bit to attract people to their booths. The grid girls, while still aiming to present an attractive face for their brand, are not sexualised in the same way - well, perhaps not anymore. That change is the result of real, positive feminism, and something you can see in the positive response from those women themselves. They're still effectively used for marketing material, but for me, it's in the same way that advertisers hire good looking people to act in their advertisements, not in the same way as having girls in string bikinis bouncing up and down holding copies of "Daikatana".
