“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
For this year alone (2016), our Turknoy family already flew with Qatar Airways to two destinations and there two return tickets for the family already booked with the airline in the next few months.
This means that we already watched Qatar Airways’s mandatory airline safety video eight times already (English and Arabic versions are different, four times for each return ticket.)
We are dreading the time we have to watch this video again during our next scheduled flights.
When the airlines announced its new creative safety video featuring Barca, we were very excited and proud. In his statement, Qatar Airway’s CEO explained that as the young airline company strives “to stay fresh, relevant and to have fun.” Those are great goals. We love Qatar Airways as our airlines, however, something is just plain wrong and very offensive with one part of the video.
It’s the part that where Gerard Pique, walks out of the airport, women screaming at his good looks and handsome grin making the women turn into a gaggle of breathless fans, only women. There are men at the back of the crowd but they are not shrieking mindlessly. And then several oxygen masks drop down to assist them in a “crazy-fanatic-woman emergency.”
Forgive my eyes, a mother’s eyes rolling to this scene.
Watching this video several times, with our two girls and son, makes them see how trivial Qatar Airways think of women.
“Why are women screaming so hard until they need an oxygen mask, Mommy?”
How do I answer my daughters’ question?
Being a home and world educating family, through travel, we attempt to open our kids’ hearts and minds on how the world think and empower them to be their unique selves, emphasizing to them that gender or race are not defining factors in our personality and our impact to change this world.
Watching how women reacted to a handsome man to the point of needing an oxygen mask suddenly raised a lot of questions about gender equality and current society’s prejudice towards women in general.
Okay, reality check, women do scream a lot when faced with gorgeous and hot celebrity men. Some of us, sometimes. And some men do, too. Some of the women, find screaming too shallow. Some men do, too.
People in general think not with our brains sometime but with adrenaline. People, not just women.
How about this scene instead:
A very intense game with Pique and Messi in it, causing the audience an extreme celebration making them all out of breath, hence the need for the oxygen mask for everyone. Then the queue to teach them how to use the mask in the event of the emergency.
Not only that scene depicts love for the game but does not downgrade women to a bunch of screaming lunatics.
The concept of the video is indeed creative. Creating situations outside the airplane to demonstrate the safety guidelines really require creative thinking. We applaud Qatar Airways for the initiative. Maybe, it just reflects too much of the reality?
Rant over. Ready to watch the video again on our next flights. Well, not really.
Turknoy Travels 100! 