Sex, Robots, and Booze.

Part 2. What is it with alcohol commercials and sexy robots these days? Svedka vodka, it turns out, has a highly interactive website that introduces you to their scantily-clad robotic spokeswoman (her friends call her svedka_grl, and she's "the future of adult entertainment," a phrase I can't imagine some marketing exec writing without a smirk). Let's get this out of the way, because I could complain about these specific ads forever: svedka_grl has almost literally no waist, perpetually perked breasts, wears lipstick (gives those cold metallic lips a nice purple pout), and is apparently unable to be in a position that doesn't simultaneously show off her die-cast ass and breasts while allowing her to bat her freakishly-eyelashed eyes. She also spouts inanities like "Svedka salutes L.A., home of the first drive-through plastic surgery window" and "I go both ways: straight up, or on the rocks."

Now, with that out of my system, let's talk a little bit about these sexbot spokespeople, because apart from their popularity among postpubescent pocket miners, they represent a really interesting trend in alcohol advertising. Let's look at the sex component. Sex has been used in advertisement since its inception in the 1920s (advertisement's, not sex's). It attracts attention and creates an association between some of the best feelings somebody can have and the product advertised.

The robot bit is about the allure of complete control. A robot is an automaton, a programmable object. Give it the right input and it will give you the desired output. We know the output: svedka_grl doesn't function outside sex. What, then, is the input? Well, vodka. And that's the crux of the svedka and heineken ads' danger: they imply not only that giving a woman alcohol makes her an object of ultimate sexual control, but that that's the purpose of their product.

Mukasey appointed as attorney general.

Read about it here.

This commercial is disgusting.

I don't know where to start. Let's start with "women as non-humans," an enormous problem in advertisement. They are literally objectified, like those creepy-as-hell dolls everyone was blogging about a little while back. And they dispense beer out of their unnaturally thin torsos. And they replicate, as if to prove their non-individuality. Take a look at the comment thread on YouTube if you feel like vomiting.

UPDATE: AAAAHHH!!! You can paste your face on their bodies. ew. ew. ew.

In other breaking news, women like pink.

Why doesn't anyone seem to think through their assumptions when doing research on gender differences? Proceedings of the Royal Society just did a study on women, men, and shopping. Like most studies that deal with gender, the science seems shoddy and the reporting (in this case, The Economist) is worse.

Here's the study:

[Yale Psychologist Joshua New] recruited 41 women and 45 men and led each of them individually on a merry dance around the chosen market. In the course of this peregrination, each participant visited six of the 90 food stalls in the market. At each of those stalls, participants were given a piece of food to eat. They were asked their preference for the taste of the food, how often they ate that food in normal life, how attractive they found the stall and how often they had made purchases from that stall in the past. After visiting all six stalls, they were taken to the centre of the market and asked to point toward those stalls, one at a time, using an arrow on a dial. In addition, they were asked to rate their own sense of direction.

And here's what they found:

On average, women were 9° more accurate than men at pointing to each stall—a significant deviation if you have to walk some distance to get to a place. This was not because those women had more experience of visiting the market than the men had. Nor did the women rate themselves as having a better sense of direction—indeed the men rated their own navigating skills more highly....Among both the British and the Chinese, women preferred reddish hues such as pink to greenish-blue ones. Among men it was the other way round.

Now, this is all very interesting, but then you get to the conclusions:

Dr New suggests that these results show women are better than men at the particular task of relocating sources of food. That contrasts with the idea that men are better at navigation in general. In other words, women's minds are specialised for their ancestral task of gathering the sort of food that cannot run away....Moreover, though anatomical sex is binary, mental “gender” is more pliable. To see how masculine or feminine the brains of their participants were, Dr Hurlbert and Dr Ling used what is known as the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which asks about personality traits more often associated with one sex than the other. This showed that the more feminine a brain was, regardless of the body it inhabited, the more it liked red and pink.
All this suggests a biological, rather than a cultural, explanation for colour preference. And Dr Hurlbert and Dr Ling have produced one. They suggest that their result may be connected with the fact that the colour of many fruits is at the red end of the spectrum. An evolved preference for red, pink and allied shades—particularly in contrast with green—could thus bring advantage to those who gather such things. And if they can also remember which tree (or stall) to go and visit next time, then so much the better.

Lets start with the test Hurlbert and Ling used. Their test points to which individuals identify more with culturally constructed gender traits, right? Because all their test associates gender with is certain common traits that appear in a given gender. Is it really a surprise, then, that they found that individuals who identify with female-associated traits, identify with a specific female-associated trait, pink? The Bem Sex Role Inventory is descriptive, not prescriptive. Here's wikipedia:

In 1971, [Dr. Bem] created the Bem Sex Role Inventory to measure how well you fit into your traditional gender role by characterizing your personality as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated. She believed that through gender-schematic processing, a person spontaneously sorts attributes and behaviors into masculine and feminine categories. Therefore, an individual processes information and regulate their behavior based on whatever definitions of femininity and masculinity their culture provides.

So it's not really surprising that a test designed to measure traditional gender roles produced traditionally-gendered results.

But that's not even the beginning of the problems with the "biological proof" conclusion. Let's also ignore for a second that the article makes the error of assuming that anatomical sex is binary. This experiment does nothing to control for the decades of social conditioning these women had to a) be good at shopping and b) like pink. Women (and, probably, "effeminate" men) simply have more practice at shopping than men (and, probably, "masculine" women) have. And they have been dressed in pink and red since birth, where little boys get blue and green. Why, then, is this all assumed to be based on a history of women gathering? My guess is that New et al went looking for a prehistoric answer and found one, but that doesn't make their control problems less grave (and having someone "rate themselves" as a control for their sense of direction is almost laughable).

Why do sloppy experiments with specious conclusions get press? Hearing about biological roots to our gender assumptions is interesting—it certainly caught my eye. Our daily lives are constantly inflected with gendered expectations, and it's hardly surprising we want to know those expectations' source. But it would be awfully nice to get that information from better hands.

Then again, you could live in Japan

Apparently it's workplace gender discrimination week (read: slow news week) at the New York Times, because right on the heels of the much blogged-about report on gender pay (dis)parity in large cities, comes a report about Japan's glass ceiling. It turns out that only 10.1% of managerial jobs in Japan are held by women, who make up almost 50% of the workforce. The biggest culprit? The same thing that is making young, urban, American women lose their brief pay edge after age 25: motherhood. Being a working mother is even more difficult in Japan, because a fifteen-hour workday is relatively commonplace for those who are interested in getting ahead. No wonder Japan's birthrate has plummeted--it's difficult enough for a pregnant woman to work eight hours, let alone fifteen. The result is that Japanese women have literally to choose between a job and a family.

Now, that's not to downplay the role of outright discrimination. That exists, although it's been illegal since 1985. The piece of legislation doesn't actually provide a means for the government to punish companies who break it, other than putting them on a "naughty list" at the Department of Labor. Which the Department of Labor hasn't even done. The result is a situation like that of one women, described in the article:

Takako Ariishi, 36, experienced an extreme version of these roles when she grew up as the only child of the president of Daiya Seiki, a small manufacturer owned by her family that supplies gauges to Nissan.

At first, her disappointed father cut her hair like a boy’s and forbade her to play with dolls. When she had her first son 10 years ago, he fired her from the company and anointed the infant grandson as his successor.

Still, Ms. Ariishi took over as president three years ago after her father died. She says she is the only woman in a group of some 160 heads of Nissan suppliers. The first time she attended the group’s twice-annual meetings, she says she was asked to wait in a room with secretaries.

“I still have to prove all the time that a woman can be president,” says Ms. Ariishi, a trained engineer who wears a blue unisex factory worker’s uniform in her office.

Things are changing, the article notes, albeit very slowly. Apparently, Japanese society is realizing that a) it needs women to work and b) it needs women to have babies, so c) it should let a given woman do both of those in her lifetime. It's a pity that progress toward gender equality sometimes only happens when men realize it's their ass if it doesn't, but at least that progress is being made.

The most interesting bit of analysis in the whole piece was that, statistically, countries with better workplace participation have higher fertility rates. Women who have jobs and know they can keep them have babies earlier, because it's not a death sentence for their career. So having a baby is bad for your job, but having a job is good for having a baby. Got all that?

If you haven't had enough of workplace discrimination statistics yet, here's an excellent graph from the NYT that illustrates some of the U.S./Japan distinctions.

Just don't get married, have kids, or move to the suburbs.

Or, as an alternative, be a man.

Via Feministing and Lawyers, Guns and Money, the New York Times has a report on how young urban women are actually outpacing men in wage-earning. New York men make 85 cents on a woman's dollar, and Houston men make 83 cents. Then that women becomes a mother, and she falls behind men in earning again.

I don't think any of this is good news. First of all, fathers still make more money than anyone, single young women included. So apparently becoming a father increases your earning power, but becoming a mother torpedos it. Second, that women fall off drastically when they leave their twenties only confirms the existence of a "glass ceiling" that seems to keep women out of the upper echelons of job advancement. And finally, single young urban women are the only group that is ahead of men. Everywhere else, they seem to still be ten or twenty cents behind on the dollar.

And what is wrong with young urban men? The Supreme Court is certainly doing everything it can to help them out. And a couple hundreds of years of old-boy networking and being the traditional figure in every higher-paid job can't hurt. The article has a couple of answers. One is that women may start earlier, because they plan out time from their career to have a family. The other—and this statistic bothers me every time I hear it—is that young women just tend to be better educated nowadays.

Women are attending 4-year colleges at higher rates than men, which raises some interesting questions about masculinity, and especially about how male gender roles affect high-schoolers. Is it just because men are more likely to feel welcome in skilled blue-collar work, like construction work or electrical engineering? Or are men embracing a less bookish self-image because only queers like English class? Or maybe a little of both? Either way, it's just as unacceptable for men to be systemically discouraged from higher education—if indeed that's what is happening—as it was for women to be shut out. I'll rant about the masculine mystique some other time, but suffice it to say that I think we talk a lot more about femininity's problems than we do about masculinity's, and it might be necessary to try to fix both to fix either.

The NYT article ends frustratingly. What's the important kernel the Times leaves its reader with? What "sums it all up and blows it all wide open?" (Extra points if you know what musical that is). Well, apparently being richer than men their age is making it harder for women to get married. Figures.


UPDATE: Zuzu also posts on this topic.

Dartmouth Saturday—Sexual Assault

Saturday will be a Dartmouth-themed post.

The beginning of this summer saw a rash of sex crimes (two qualifies as a rash in Hanover, NH) at Dartmouth. And the weird thing is, they were both the kind of sex crime that everybody thinks about when they think "sex crime," i.e. the kind that rarely happens. The first was an assault on the green—that's the quad, for you non-Dartmouthers—at night. A college student groped a high school camper under her shirt and then ran away when she screamed. Then, a day later, an older man followed a walking female student in his car, masturbating while watching her.

There were two important responses. The first was that the sorority system on campus immediately spread the news about the assaults and started a "ride home" service of their own to supplement the (limited) one provided by Safety and Security. Good for them. The second response, however, was a bit more puzzling. The administration immediately posted long notices about the incidents on the doors of every dorm.

Good for them, too, but what the hell? Sexual assault occurs regularly on this and every college campus. Usually it is the kind of sexual assault that makes up 90% of assault cases: the kind where the victim knows the assailant. However, have one "creepy guy in the bushes" style assault, and now the administration sees fit to start warning students? That's not to decry the response that the administration made—it was appropriate—but it highlights the culture of secrecy and shame that surrounds campus sexual assault. Where is the notice every time a rape is reported to SAPA, the (excellent) Sexual Assault Peer Advising service on campus? Where is the notice every time a woman—or man—is taken advantage of after a night of drinking? Where is the notice every time someone gets unwantedly groped on the dance floor at a frat party? But one random dude gropes a random girl on the green, and now it's headline news in the campus paper and a priority for the administration. The end result? The all-too-ordinary, all-too-mundane type of rape, the kind that happens every day while we watch, gets normalized in contrast. Rape apology becomes easier, because the "ordinary" kinds of rape don't get the drama and coverage that the "guy in the bushes" kinds do.

I'll leave off with a quotation from the second victim, the one who was followed, in case anyone is still under the impression that sex crimes, even those as comparatively mild as getting followed by a creepy guy, don't do serious damage to their victims sense of security and personal integrity:

I’m not walking outside alone after dark. This past weekend my flatmates were both out of town, so I slept at a friend’s room Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. I felt pretty vulnerable on Thursday, and took the day off from work on Friday…I’ve also been looking at license plates like crazy.