Airplane safety: The musical?
The Philippines' largest airline, Cebu Pacific, has trained its flight attendants to dance to Lady Gaga while demonstrating safety procedures. Harmless fun or a cheap sexist stunt?
The video: Flight attendants for Filipino airline Cebu Pacific are delivering the standard pre-flight safety presentation with a controversial twist — indicating exits and oxygen-mask utility while performing a choreographed dance to Lady Gaga's "Let's Dance." (See video captured by an agog passenger, below.) "Cebu Pacific has always been known as a fun airline," said an airline marketing executive in a statement. "We wanted to get the message across to our customers that flight safety doesn't have to be boring."
The reaction: "Just when we thought Jet Blue's nutty Steven Slater (and his inflatable slide to unemployment) had this year's Funniest Flight Attendant award," says PopEater, we get this gem. Sorry, this dance routine is "negative and sexist," says the Flight Attendants and Stewards Association of the Philippines. Meanwhile, the country's women's rights group Gabriela has condemned it as a "cheap promotional gimmick" that "reverses the hard-won recognition that Filipino women have achieved after decades of fighting." Despite the routine's unexpected, "sweet" quality, says Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon, "there's something infantilizing about an airline assuming — apparently correctly — that it literally needs to bring out the dancing girls for passengers to pay attention... must everything be taken with a spoonful of sugar?" See for yourself:
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