#f1 crit

(If you're out of the loop: spinoff tiktok account that Sky made to "appeal to" (condescend to) young women fans. A summary and some the absurdly cringe and sexist posts they made upon launch can be found here and here)

And comments on the remaining posts are UNIVERSALLY negative and/or mocking the account. I literally scrolled all four remaining posts and could not find one positive comment.

(screenshot in white is from Marissa Kumari's video covering the whole thing)

the reason why so many fandom women want to put down the women that are in the drivers' orbits is because their loyalty is to the men and not to themselves or other women in these situations.

this need to lash out in defense of a person, the man, who already has power over their situation and who they are friends with reeks of an internal fascism that needs to be addressed.

these people are not your friends, and you contribute to other women's oppression and your own oppression by continuing to try and put this false morality on what they post and how they interact with the object of your attention by harassing them in order to protect the man.

in forcing these women to conform to this arbitrary standard by slut-shaming them for nothing, berating them for interacting with their own friends, and belittling their lives, fans become foot soldiers of patriarchy with a progressive smokescreen. no one is helped by getting mad at a woman for a being human being.

And for this season with their new driver that they told us -also very vocally- was gonna be an amazing improvement; like, they were very confident, but why??? because they really put work in the 2nd car and even change the race engenieer HBird for Woody (who was making improvements in Checo's races)... and all that for having those results?? Perhaps they thought LL was gonna be in the first 10 possitions, but not this!

Why would they want to expose themselves to public ridicule? The answer? They didn't expect LL to underperform this much.

Last year, the press was mocking Checo's remarks about the car disparity and saying very awful things about him and his family (others masking their racism as criticism), so why would RB want to give him the reason or making him a martyr to the point that there are lots of TTs, twitters, -and even here- lots of posts in Tumblr saying "Perhaps we owe Checo an apology"? IMO, they gave LL all the support so Checo would look worse and they would come out with clean hands... that's why the emergency reunion rummors are so strong.

The "Chestappen" stuff that Red Bull admin made last year was already a little weird, as was official brands making "Charlos" memes... but now Mercedes and F1's official pages are saying that George is going to "propose" to Max, that George and Max are Kimi's divorced parents, etc. And I know that we as fans may be desensitized to this because these are the same jokes that we make on our own fan pages, but it's just... high key gross to me at least that brands are trying to farm engagement and blur the line between fan and brand with this style of content.

IMO, we really do not want teams to embolden tin hatters and proofers that probably exist in the fandom, and we don't want shipping and rpf to escape containment from fan spaces. And I'd guess that teams probably do not care about whether this kind of stuff makes drivers uncomfortable if it gets enough engagement. Like, at this rate it's only a matter of time before we see teams openly egging on shippers or having a Hockey BookTok-like situation where fans start harassing athletes with their own weird sexual headcanons.

MFs will go full oui-oui baguette to pronounce "Sharl Leclair" semi right but will call Zhou Guanyu "Zoo" or some shit, even though "Zhou" is literally one syllable and pronounced like "Joe." Also, most Thais have nicknames they generally go by: Bhirombhakdi's is "Jem" and Inthraphuvasak's is "Tern." And "Ugochukwu" honestly looks pretty phonetic, at least to English speakers. Come on, y'all.

Anyway, I think women of all interests and gender expressions should like F1, and I don't doubt that these ladies know Wheel! I just want to be a fan and a woman without the pressure to be hot. What if I just want to watch the race in sweats and like Tumblr shitposts, not buy Rhode lip balm or whatever. What then.

If you center female drivers and team staff, they will share their own stories of adversity as women in a sexist industry, or their presence will at least draw unwanted attention to the fact that there are so few women in their field. Also, if you show women drivers and staff, all the anti woke trolls will jump out screaming about how these women are unqualified diversity hires, evidence of how their beloved sport has fallen prey to the evil feminist mob. (There's plenty of evidence that people in the industry think this about women as well, not just fans.) Women aren't supposed to have real jobs, silly! Women are supposed to be sitting pretty on the sidelines and clapping enthusiastically when their guy makes it across the finish line.

Dr. Judy Liao, a professor of sports sociology, theorizes that the WAG resurgence is fueled by backlash to women's sports, which center women outside of the dainty, white, straight ideal. By highlighting WAGs, F1 can cater to a female audience, while also not upsetting gender norms.

“WAGs really kind of offer the mainstream media this really good material to say, ‘We support gender equality because we’re showing women in sport. But it’s not the women who are actually playing the sports.”