A smartphone company has pulled a promotional event meant to honor their "beautiful" female customers after presumably realizing how sexist the whole ordeal was.
Earlier today, tech startup OnePlus attempted to hold a contest for their lady consumers. A now-deleted post on the OnePlus forum explained:
As we close in on the 200K mark for the number of registered forum users, OnePlus wants to give a shout out to the few but beautiful female fans in our community with our Ladies First contest.
In true gentlemen fashion and because chivalry is not dead, we are giving the lovely ladies of OnePlus a chance to skip the invite line and introduce themselves to us.
The contest consisted of having women draw the OnePlus logo on a piece of paper or part of their body, taking a selfie, and posting it to the contest thread. The top 50 most-liked women were to receive the coveted invite and a T-Shirt. Because if there's one thing ladies love, IT'S FREE FUCKING T-SHIRTS OMG WILL SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE THIS LADY RIGHT HERE A T-SHIRT I AM LITERALLY DROOLING THREAD RIGHT NOW.
"Ladies, no nudity please," the post added.
But the post has since been pulled. And administrator "Carl," who initially posted the contest has since posted an explanation and apology, writing:
Women make up half the world, and we want to help them be more involved in tech. We understand that our contest was in bad taste, and have therefore pulled it. All participants will be contacted for prizes.
We apologize and we will course correct for the future. At the same time, we would love to hear your feedback on how we can better get women involved in tech.
The Ladies First contest was clearly an ill-conceived idea in the first place, but it was a very smart move to pull that shit down.
Image via AndroidCentral.