A shopping mall in Liuzhou City in China decided to celebrate on Tuesday International Women’s Day by holding a bra unbuckling contest.
Six women wearing only lingerie and a mask had their backs turned to the audience on the stage. The MC then called eight members of the audience to take turns in unfastening the bras of the six women models, Mashable reported on Friday.
The competitors were both female and male. Probably because the task of unhooking a bra is done daily by a woman, it was not surprise that the winner of the contest was a Chinese woman who did it in 14 seconds, reported China Daily.
However, there was no mention of what prize the winner got. The mall got both praise and criticisms for the contest, although it is worth noting that Guinness World Records has recognized a similar competition as a segment of a CNBC show titled “Lipstick Jungle.”
Chinese businesses, in the past has been criticized for failing to celebrate International Women’s Day in a more meaningful way.
For instance, in 2015, the search engine Baidu had on its homepage a ballerina wearing a pink dress. She morphs into a bride then a mother with a baby on a pushcart that she is pushing. The website seems to indicate that marriage and motherhood are the only paths that a woman could take which goes against the female empowerment message of International Women’s Day.
The United Nations said that March 8 should be spent on reflecting on the progress that women had made, to call for a change and to celebrate the courageous things that female had done as well as how determined ordinary women in performing an extraordinary role in their community’s and country’s histories, noted Daily Mail.