NASCAR is for rebels, but only men need apply

Did you ever notice the young, usually very pretty women standing in Victory Lane behind the winning driver, smiling and trying not to get sprayed with beer? Of course you did. That’s why they’re there.

There are three Miss Sprint Cups* each year, apparently. Now there’s an opening for one of them, since this week Paige Duke, a 24-year-old veterinary technician from South Carolina, was fired after pictures she’d taken for an old boyfriend surfaced online. This violated her contract's morality clause.

I have to say… I think this is kind of BS. When she was 18 years old, a young woman took pictures to send privately to someone she trusted. First of all, how awful is it that the pictures had been circulating online this whole time? That ex-bf is scum. Second, what on earth do her actions – again, taken in private – SIX YEARS AGO have to do with her ability to represent NASCAR today?

Sure, let’s all hop up on our high horses and sniff about how she shouldn’t have taken the pictures in the first place. I say again – she was 18. It isn’t her fault the pictures got out. (Once again I have to give thanks for the fact that I went through my reckless late teens/early 20s phase before YouTube and camera phones.)

Why fire her? Is it me, or is NASCAR a hell-raisin’, beer-swiggin’ “boys have at it” culture when it wants to be, and a conservative family sport when it suits it? Back to that asterisk up in the second paragraph… I once interviewed a woman whose family had been involved in NASCAR promotions from the beginning (her father was on the original board), and one of the things she told me was that our local track ditched its Miss Bowman Gray promotion decades ago because it just didn’t present the image they wanted.

But NASCAR’s title sponsor still uses young, attractive women to promote the sport at the track and at other events. Ok, they’re wearing firesuits and not bikinis, but what the hell ever. You’re still using a woman’s sexuality to promote a sport that has nothing to do with that sexuality. But when one of those women appears to have had an actual, not fantasy, sex life SIX YEARS AGO, the Sprint folks kick her to the curb.

NASCAR and the sponsors that support it want it both ways. Drivers can get caught speeding on a public road many times over the legal limit. At the track, they can use illegal parts, beat each other up and get their wrists slapped. But one woman with an extremely peripheral role in making the sport happen gets embarrassed by an a-hole ex, through no fault of her own, and she loses her job?

Unless her morality clause covered everything she’d ever done in her entire life, including for several years before her employment, I hope Paige Duke sues the hell out of Sprint.

By the way… a “morality clause” from the entertainment empire that pretends it was founded by people who violated federal laws? I say again… BS.