Sexy Ferraris

Evidently Alexandra Burke, winner of ITV’s X-factor singing contest in 2008, turned up at London’s G-A-Y nightclub on Wednesday night in a sleek red Ferrari. According to a report in the Daily Mail:

“The 22-year-old singer looked stunning in a tiny gold minidress and metallic heels as she then posed daintily on the bonnet of the sports car for the throng of waiting photographers.”

This performance might confuse green commentators since, as James Woudhuysen has pointed out to me, they often portray fast cars as a way for men to enhance their sex appeal.

David King, a former government chief scientist, told the Daily Telegraph in 2007 that:

“young women think it is sexy to see men driving Ferraris. That is the area where a culture change is needed”

Tim Jackson, who I am debating next month, said in an RSA lecture in 2005 that:

“we use consumer goods to advertise ourselves to our competitors, to the opposite sex … what is it with young men and fast cars”?

Even if this hypothesis is true so what? If young men, or for that matter women, want to use Ferraris to try to enhance their sex appeal what is wrong with that?

The objection seems rather prudish. Then again, coming from greens it is only to be expected.