CNBC’s “Deal or No Deal,." which returned for a new season on Wednesday after a nearly 10-year hiatus, and features 26 female models in matching high heels and short, skintight dresses. It’s a formula that helped make “Deal." a prime-time hit when it debuted on NBC in 2005.

That was 13 years ago. But in 2018, as the culture continues to grapple with the way women have been disregarded and sometimes abused by Hollywood and its machers, “Deal." and shows like it raise an awkward question: Is this a convention whose time is up?

Yes, Professor, that’s because THESE women are being appreciated for how they look, and for no other reason, because they aren’t doing a job that couldn’t be handled by a well-trained ape. So what? “Deal of No Deal” is moronic, but there is nothing whatsoever unethical, sexist or “tone deaf,” now or ever, about employing attractive people in an entertainment context as “eye candy,”  meaning “employing attractive people to be attractive.”

Attractive women are attractive. People like to look at them. People would rather look at them than look at average, typical people they can see every day on the street, or by looking in the  mirror. Is there anything wrong with enhancing a stupefyingly repetitive and boring game show with beautiful women? There is not. Nor is there anything wrong with women who are gorgeous while having no other areas in which they excel making a living based entirely on that one asset.

Check these pages, and you will see that Ethics Alarms has frequently condemned the use of physical appearance as a primary criteria for jobs where appearance is incidental or irrelevant. The Fox Blondes drive me nuts. You cannot tell me that there are not older, smarter, plainer, fatter women (or men) who are  capable of sharper analysis and more trenchant commentary than the typical interchangeable “Fox and Friends” babe who has to sit between Steve Doocey and Brian Kilmeads,  neither of whom would ever be mistaken for Cary Grant. This isn’t just lookism, it’s stupid lookism, where emphasizing youth, beauty and sex appeal interferes with the alleged job at hand. The airlines were finally forced to stop catering to flying businessmen’s sexual fantasies by using the same qualifications as Playboy Clubs for hiring flight attendants. Good. So were department stores. “Weather girls” were gradually replaced in many markets with female meteorologists who actually know what they are pointing to, even if they didn’t look great in a cocktail dress. That’s progress.

Decreeing that there is something amiss when models, actresses, and people who stand around holding suitcases are hired with their pulchritude in mind isn’t progress. It’s political grandstanding and a power grab: “Let’s see if we can force “Deal or No Deal” off the air to prove how influential we are! Let’s see if we can force them to fire those young women and replace them with fat, middle-aged people with bad skin and rotten posture!”

The Times article harkens back to the bad old days when Bob Barker called his models on “The Price is Right”  “Barker’s Beauties.." Yes, that was demeaning and sexist, and obviously so. (My dad retched at it 40 years ago.) Howie Mandel, the host of “Deal,” calls the suitcase-holders “ladies” en masse (What else? “Women”? “Female units”?) and by name individually. (They call him “Howie.”) The Horror. Says another professor who deserves to be unemployed, Elana Levine, a professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,