Echo Is Now On

The comments no longer use the old Haloscan system. I have changed into Echo. Let me know how it works for you. So far it looks like the site is loading more slowly and you have to wait until it has finished before you can access the comments. On the other hand, the comments have more toys for you to play with, and the slowness may have something to do with teething pains.

Added: Use the thread below to experiment.

Tiger Woods & Ann Cook

Let’s look at two columns that discuss waitresses and models, in connection with Tiger Woods. Yesterday and the day before, Echidne tore up alleged liberal Richard Cohen, who called cocktail waitresses “dreck” in the Washington Post. The word means “trash, especially inferior merchandise,” from the Yiddish word for excrement.

In the West, under patriarchy, there’s a long history of men judging women who work in public places as less moral and low status. This attitude strengthened as industrialization spread to cities in the 1800s. A “public woman” was another name for a prostitute. It’s not surprising that men considered

waitresses up for grabs, in more ways than one.

Models could be similarly tainted, especially if they posed for a man without a chaperone, or if they exposed a part of their body not normally seen in public.

For the most part, men created the demand and made the demands.

These days, there are plenty of liberal men who oppose restrictions on sexualizing workers (think Hooters), as well as prostitution itself, and yet view the women as “inferior merchandise” – if not crap – when they use their services or when the women are in conflict with men of higher status.

Some journalists knew that Woods treated sex as a sport, but they kept it secret to protect his image as a wholesome family man. It wasn’t just men protecting another man. The media also made money off of his image. They are making money on the scandal, too, but it won’t be nearly as lucrative for mainstream media and advertising as his golfing career has been.

Robin Givhan, also in the Post, writes:

… while Woods is being portrayed as complicated and troubled, the women are merely types. … The women are just "the mistresses." The golfer has been called a dog, a liar and worse. But he still gets the benefit of being perceived as an individual. He is still Tiger Woods.

She notes the power imbalance between a billionaire and women in jobs with little pay or prestige. Women are much more likely to work as models and servers, she notes, which may be one reason that young, attractive ones are so easily stereotyped as dumb and slutty.

Here’s her paragraph that inspired this post:

And pity the poor women who have ever been models. It does not seem to matter if one's only experience modeling was as an infant promoting Gerber's. If you should ever find yourself under media scrutiny, you will forever be referred to as a former model, a kind of shorthand meant to imply that you are vacuous -- all style and no substance.

I attend a Unitarian Universalist church with Ann Turner Cook, in the photo above. She's a woman of intelligence and grace, who writes mystery novels set in Florida locales. I emailed her what Givhan wrote, and she replied:

As the actual model for the Gerber baby, the experience has been a joy to me. The media always treat me with kindness. My real career was as an English teacher and mystery writer, but what could be nicer than to also be a symbol for babies?

Happy Winter Solstice (by Suzie)

This year, the Winter Solstice falls on Monday, the 21st, but I wanted to get my greetings in early.

To get you in the mood, here's a sculpture by Dale Chihuly, who used glass to interpret water, ice and sky at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

This is another song I interpret in my own way. The bit about refusing to be kept on the pedestal, for example. But it's also a nice molasses-flavored tune...

A Housekeeping Post

Haloscan, the commenting system I use for this here blog, will be discontinued on December 26. The alternative I'm considering is Echo. Do you have any preferences? And what are the bells and whistles you'd like to see?

I'm not that fond of the system Blogger supports because it is very slow.

Cohen, After A Night Of Sleep

When I woke up today I realized I was far too nice on that piece about Richard Cohen. So here are a few additional gentle thoughts from the supposedly frailer of the supposed two sexes:

1. To write an opinion column does not mean checking out what interesting lint you might have in your belly button. Opinions totally unsupported by any study are not worth paying for and they smell bad, too. Besides, reading them feels like going through the homework of an elementary school student. To anyone who has actually read in the field or thought about it.

2. To write an opinion column does not mean that you can safely ignore the fifty-plus percent of your potential readers who are women AS READERS. At least don't start lisping and tickling them under the chin and thinking that if you change into French at the last moment they will be enchanted. You insult them.

3. To write an opinion column does not mean that you can leave all logic at home. You can't skate across all the changes in the relative position of women in this country and then argue that nothing has changed. Because you wish that nothing has changed.

How To Make Good Coffee

My fluff post for the week, but also a serious question. I used to think that dumping the coffee grounds into boiling water and then waiting a while made the best coffee. My grandmother made her coffee like that.

Now I think it's the whatever-it-is-called which presses the water through the beans. In any case, I've had it with the machines which use filters, because every single one is incontinent around the pouring beak and I have a kitchen covered with coffee stains now. It doesn't matter how expensive a machine I buy; it still leaks. Neither do they keep the coffee hot.

So how do you make coffee if you do?

Today's Hilarity

Richard Cohen offers us a bouquet of laughs with his new column starting:

Why is there no female Tiger Woods?

Why are there no female sex scandals?

Then he goes on the way one does in these kinds of articles: First you bash men as creatures who are driven by their pricks, pushing them along in wheelbarrows and obeying their every urge. You explain, patiently and kindly, that evolution has made men like that (thanks evo-psychos*).

But for some odd reason, all this male-bashing can only end up in one place: Putting women down! It's very very funny. This is how Cohen ends his column:

The reason the Glass Ceiling has not broken is that women have other priorities — maintaining relationships and being a mother. This is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been. As any of Tiger Woods's cocktail waitresses could tell him, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

N'est ce pas?

I don't know about you but I'm enjoying this shit. Take that last paragraph and tweak it a little:

The reason the Glass Ceiling has not broken is that men have other priorities -- they don't care to maintain relationships or be a father. This is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been...

But Cohen doesn't say THAT. His writing is about as informed as mine would be on the topic of the division of labor in an anthill. He doesn't know anything at all about the Glass Ceiling so of course it doesn't exist! He walks through it every morning and still has hair!

All of that is shorthand for Cohen's privilege to ignore the culture and the environment, both of which are different for women than for men. It could be that our biological inheritance explains the dearth of female Tiger Woodses. But I'm pretty sure that a culture which condones the male type (nudge-nudge) and disapproves of the female type has a role to play, too. And so do writers like Richard.
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*I have written much on the topic of how we know what men did in prehistory without any actual evidence. The way these theories have become "common wisdom" is pretty disheartening for those of us who'd like to see that evolved brain actually be used.

Putting On The Mask

So I got a bit angry yesterday, when reading about how just pretending to be a guy (including joining in the chick-bashing when needed) can double or triple your income on the Internet. The anger is still there simmering away nicely, because I picked the very opposite path as is usual for me. I became everything that guarantees I don't get paid for my writing: An openly feminist female writer. Even if I can also write on a zillion other topics I've cut my wings by that one choice.

Putting on the male mask is not a new thing at all. The Bronte sisters did it, George Eliot did it, James Tiptree Jr. did it more recently, and several research papers have shown that sending off identical resumes except for the male and female names attached to them, gives the male names more calls for interviews. But still. I keep believing in people, hoping for the change that should be me, and every morning when I raise my goddessy head from the pillow I think the world has repented.

Such a mystery. But I digress.

When Digby came out as a woman her comments threads changed into something much more vicious and violent and disrespectful. All this is easy to see from outside. What's much harder to know is how I or other women bloggers would be treated if we had names like Brawny Bob, Tess Tickle or Tess Stosterone. When something I say gets no attention is it because it wasn't a useful statement at all, because I didn't write it well enough, because others have said it better? Or is it because it was said by a woman and women can be safely ignored as they're less likely to kill you and then to stomp on your corpse?

How can I ever know what the alternative treatment would have been? It's too late to change my name now and in any case nobody else writes like a shorthand machine with mittens on.

This is not just about me. It's something all women might be affected by and about the choices we must make. Note that James Chartrand of the "Men With Pens" didn't just take a guy handle; she also went along with the chick-bashing to fit in.

And that's where the deeper question of the masks lies: How does a woman negotiate a society which takes points off for her very femaleness? What cost is not too exorbitant?

If I had Been A God And Not A Goddess...

I would probably have made more money. This post suggests so:

James Chartrand of Men with Pens, is not who he seems.

Chartrand has been all over the 'net for years, blogging at Copyblogger, FreelanceSwitch, FreelanceWritingGigs and basically everywhere else freelance web writers hang out.

He's a she.

She used to write under a female name, but one day:

One day, I tossed out a pen name, because I didn't want to be associated with my current business, the one that was still struggling to grow. I picked a name that sounded to me like it might convey a good business image. Like it might command respect.

...

Taking a man's name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.

A proper study of this phenomenon would be most fascinating. But right now I don't want to talk about that. Instead, I will give the floor to Typhon, a guy I had a few monster kids with and some hawt sex. Other than the sex he's an idiot of the highest order. But a guy god. He will tell you how I should have written on the health care reform to be successful:

Well, hello there! Nice rack, babe. (Scratches balls meditatively, burps.) How about that health care reform, eh? Line 'em up against the wall and shoot 'em, that's what I always say. (Watches a cleavage on television flit by, scratches some more, looks right through the women in the room.)

Hey, did I tell you about that hot goat goddess, in Sparta? Do you know what those chicks do with that beard? It tickles, man, but in a goood way, if you get my meaning.

Anyhow. About that health care crap. A real man would just make them all put their kneepads on or grab their feet. Slam, bam, thank you Rahm. You take Joe's jowls and tie them into a bow. Then you go bwahahah!

You make them all your hoes and you say "jump" and then see them fly over Mount Olympus. Yup. Hey, is there any cool beer in the house? Bitches!

You gotta show them who the boss is. You gotta teach them to blog and to stand up for things, not to be all chickenlike. But they do have nice tits, mostly, and should post them more. That's how you make money. (Finds a nice, ripe boogie. Watches it before sticking it under Echidne's desk.)



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OOPS! Turns out that my parody wasn't much of one.

A Health Care Reform Post From Mount Olympus

A report from the health care reform wars. By me.

I have been following the debate over the idea that people 55 to 64 could buy into something like Medicare with great interest. Mostly I knew it could not be a real thing because it so suddenly dropped from the skies, late in the process, and because it's everything the Republicans hate (and we are ALL bipartisan now).

On the other hand, getting that group out of the private insurance markets would make the companies swoon in excitement and have even more caviar-on-gold-leaves parties on their yachts. The average costs of health care rise with age, so if the market could get rid of people over 55 altogether, without being told to cut the average premium, they could get even richer. "They" being the shareholders in the companies, ultimately, though also some groups who work in health care.

On the third hand, letting only the 55-64 group into a public program would guarantee that the costs of that program would remain pretty high, and that would make the public option look bad. Because of those higher-than-average risk levels. So perhaps the Republicans should have wanted it so that they could take the whole program down later.

All that is irrelevant now that Joe Lieberman has torpedoed the idea. We are left with a smaller reform proposal, still containing useful things, still helping some people, but not the kind of thing that would be inscribed in future history books. Except perhaps as an example in political science texts: How a party which governed the country and had majorities in the House and the Senate was finally taken down by one single jowly guy.

If I sat on some other planet I'd be settling down with a few barrels of pop corn to watch this all. It's pretty incredibly hilarious for those who have no cow in the game. With a bit of sarcastic cynicism it still is, because the debate takes place in a country where money buys votes and where the industries threatened by any proposed reforms are the ones who are paying the politicians, where the average person does not vote at all and where lots of voters vote on such populist principles as being scared of foreigners and blacks and gays and "vaginas". Shooting your own toes, that's what a lot of this boils down to.

And we will have no insurance coverage for that.

Tit-For-Tat Strategies In Politics

A few days ago I was struck by this comment about Joe Lieberman and his despicable recent behavior:

Joe Lieberman is an odd political duck, to put it mildly. I understand that he seems to bear a grudge against the Democratic liberals who tried to unseat him in 2006 because of his vote for the war in Iraq, and that he might be engaged in a little pay back right now. Perhaps he's shilling for his home state insurance interests, as if no other senator would ever do such a thing.

Ezra Klein agrees and argues that Lieberman is driven at least partly by pique.

Games of this sort* are meant to make the opposition hesitate before that first move (the tat, I guess), because they know that the revenge is forthcoming (the tit, um). The intention is to make the opposition abstain from the tat move because of the high future cost. So just threatening to tit will kill the tat! Gosh, I sometimes write like an idiot.

I also sometimes think Clarence Thomas is doing something similar when it comes to Supreme Court cases about women's rights, as if he is revenging the Clarence Thomas hearings on all American women. If that were truly the case he'd be a very small man, of course.

Neither Lieberman nor Thomas are playing the sort of repeated game where the tit for tat strategy would work. If they are looking for revenge it's for some other type of reason. But observing these events may make others hesitant to attack politicians too strongly or to fight against them too hard. There might be game going, after all, even if it's in some meta sense.

Of course politicans or Supreme Court justices who act out of personal spite should be sent to the duck pits.
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*Tit-for-tat strategies in repeated games such as in a repeated prisoners' dilemma.

Recession Is Over, Summers says

Here.

I hope recession hears and obeys.

Eek! Masculinity Threatened Again. Take #356894

It is, my friends. Men are turning into softies and there's nobody around to do manly things such as dominating women:

More women are drawn to softy fellows, which is prompting more men to get dolled up at hair salons, adorn themselves in the latest hip fashions and paint up their noggins with the latest from Mary Kay.

Whatever the cause, the trend may not bode well for America.

If your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, will there be any regular fellows around who know how to fix things and don't mind getting their hands dirty?

The best you may be able to hope for is that a modern fellow stops his car to offer consolation and hand you a cell phone from his purse.

There's something terribly sad about a man who tries to justify the whole existence of manly men with references to changing tires and such.

But even sadder is the author's explanation for the demise of real manly men:

A scientific study, highlighted in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, offers a theory as to why more women appear to be drawn to softy men.

It may have to do with the contraceptive pill.

When a woman is fertile, a few days a month, she is attracted to men who are assertive and masculine.

Her DNA directs her to pick a mate whose genetic makeup is rugged and dissimilar to her own, thus increasing her chances of having a healthy child.

The pill blocks fertility -- thus, women are more prone to go for boyish, softy men?

Note how those silly evo-psycho studies get knitted into the popular culture in no time at all?

The study, having to do with female students ranking pictures of men they'd like to date, did not allow those students to explain why they ranked certain faces higher than other faces. And it's hard to know how pictures of faces can be assertive or how anyone knows whether the DNA of the men in those pictures is "rugggeder" than the DNA of some other men.

It was the researchers in that study who provided the interpretations so eagerly applied in the linked piece. I wish I still had the link to that study, because the faces of the "tough guys" and the "softies" don't look very different at all. And all the study really used as evidence were those faces. Nothing about the actual DNA compatibility. Nothing about assertiveness.

Violet Thoughts

Sometimes I tire of writing feminist criticism of the world. Such a lonely job it is, a job full of hidden dangers and much openly expressed anger, a job most unsuitable of who I am, Sometimes I want to wrap my hair around me and disappear. Let others carry the unlit torch for a mile or two. That is how most women seem to view the question of their own liberation, after all.

I call these thoughts violet thoughts. They are almost violent thoughts but not quite, and they write themselves in purple ink. For instance, my hair is roughly two inches long so it would be very hard to do any wrapping with it and I'm not exactly the only feminist on this earth. But still. The job is hard, the pay is nonexistent and the results at most iffy. It would be so very lovely to write something everybody loves to read! To cheer people up when they come here!

In my next life, perhaps. And under some brawny sounding male pseudonym.

Sunday Sasha Blogging. With Purple Finch.

Sasha the mastiffy pup is not really a fully grown dog yet. That might take another year. Here she sends you Season's Greetings. (Yes, she is an enemy of Christmas, too.) Pictures by Doug.





Purple finch picture by 1WattHermit.

If Reid and Obama Don’t Value The Peoples’ Lives More Than The Rules of the Senate, They Will Be Defeated by Anthony McCarthy

It must be so much easier to be a Republican. With Republicans you know what you get, an elitist party that never ceases on the track of extracting as much of the value out of the labor of the masses as possible in order to benefit the wealthiest, the elite that is their patron and which they aspire to join. They are so dedicated to that prime directive that they have subordinated everything to it, principle, integrity, and all else. They are so fixed on Job 1 that they have held their delicate noses and taken the most backward, ignorant, dangerous of the rabble under their umbrella in a gamble that they can throw just enough red meat to them to keep them from doing anything so unprofitable as to set up a copy of one of various unprofitable despotisms, though one that yields sufficient benefits is not unobjectionable to the “moderate” Republican.

Being a Democrat is harder because it is so much harder to organize around the idea of sacrifice for the common good than it is to motivate with selfishness, resentment and bigotry. It’s always been that way for progressive parties, parties that, at bottom, are more about common good won by giving something up as individuals.

I can hear the snickers, it’s hard to maintain the idea that the Democratic Party is about the common good with the irrefutable proof in the Senate this week that a large part of the Democratic caucus in the Senate and the House are in the pockets of the insurance, pharmaceutical and other industries that should have been regulated as a public utility a century ago. I certainly know this, I’ve always known it. The blue dogs have done what they’ve always done, made common cause with the part of the elite. As I recall, not having the script in front of me, a scene in the Frank Capra movie State of the Nation in which a reluctant Katherine Hepburn is having her ear chewed by the inebriated wife of a Southern Democratic Senator of the 1940s era. She jokes how they might have a D after their name but they vote reliably Republican when it comes time.

That was a depiction of the infamous Dixicrats, a minority of nominal Democrats concentrated in the South. Democrats by virtue of the regional resentment of the Republicans as the party that defeated them in the Civil War, but always a hindrance to the progressive part of the party.

With time and the conservative, Southern, Lyndon Johnson forcing through the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s, they gave up the party affiliation and now dominate the Republican Party. That’s not news, Johnson knew that was a price the Democrats of that generation would pay for ending legalized apartheid in the United States.

Proving that the defects in human nature are distributed more homogeneously than makes for facile categorization, the blue dogs are the new Dixicrats hindering attempts at progress coming from within the Democratic Party. These neo-Dixicrats aren’t explicitly motivated by racism, though they aren’t notably progressive on that front in many cases, they are more aligned with the old style cleptocrats that have dominated the Republican Party, certainly since the Hayes administration.

With the election of Barack Obama, a good majority in the House and 60 Senators, nominally within the Democratic caucus of the Senate, we were supposed to get real change this year. But, despite a few welcomed improvements, that change is proving impossible. I fully believe that Nancy Pelosi would like to make progress, I still believe that Barack Obama wants to make more progress than it would appear he’s pushing for, despite growing reservations on that count. Why can’t they do it? There are a number of reasons but there is one important one that is pivotal to the failure to make progress today.

There is a big difference between now and the short period of progress from Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson, there is no liberal-moderate wing of the Republican Party which will cross lines except on the rarest of occasions. Snowe and Collins are proof that the “moderate” Republicans of today will only cross over when it will cost them little and they have to in order to maintain the charade of “moderation” necessary to get elected from their home state. I don’t know if their part in destroying the possibility of real health care reform will cost them an election. Living in Maine, the electronic media here, including the public radio network, are solidly Republican propaganda efforts.

The Senate was set up by the earliest opponents of democracy in our history, the elites who wrote and adopted the constitution. Originally appointed, it was set up to not be proportionally representative on behalf of some of the most regressive state-based establishments of the time. That was allegedly done to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. And that minority was the wealthy. On rare occasions since then, it has had a role in protecting other minorities and prevented the excesses coming out of the House of Representatives and, on occasion, from the Executive Branch. But its major role hasn’t been that. As in the long years of Jim Crow, the Senate was often the roadblock towards ending the bloodiest and murderous oppression. If the House is hard to move, the Senate is set up to be a roadblock to progress, it has made itself into even more of one. Despite Frank Capra’s other movie, the filibuster is now the tool of the Republicans and their allies in the neo-Dixicratic wing of the Democratic Party which will prevent the death for profit machine that the insurance-pharma-for-profit medicine block is. The deaths caused by them are less dramatic than the terrorism of lynching, their victims are no less dead.

Harry Reid has earned himself a place in American history as the man who thought more of the rules of the Senate than the millions of uninsured people in this country. He obviously cares more about his own position than in actually doing something with it which will earn him a distinction that his past term has certainly not deserved. The Democratic Senators who maintain him in that position despite his proven and abysmal ineffectiveness share in the ignominious reputation that he has earned. They apparently don’t want a strong leader, the last two have certainly been about as weak as watered skim milk. Apparently they prefer being in the minority than giving up their petty fiefdoms within the senate. I don’t see any other way to view their keeping incompetent, ineffective leaders.

My growing doubts about President Obama stem largely from his inability to do what Lyndon Johnson was able to do, see that there are greater stakes than maintenance of the rules and traditions of the Senate and the sanctity of the dogmas of market economics. He is well on his way to blowing the greatest chance a Democrat has had to make progress since the first half of the 1960s. If he is going to turn it around he had better stop relying on his abilities to give an impressive speech and to do what Lyndon Johnson did, get down and dirty with the Senate and House. He has no progressive Republicans to work with, he’s going to have to do it with the Democrats, and I don’t include Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln or the other neo-Dixicrats. If any of the domestic agenda, on which his reelection hopes ride, are to pass, he will have to pressure Reid and the rest of the Democrats to scrap the 60 vote rule and go with a simple majority in the Senate. That has been done before, through manipulation of the rules. It was done to put some of George W. Bush’s worst judicial candidates in office just a couple of years ago.

Barack Obama seems to mix that inability with what has signs of matching Johnson’s greatest flaw, his inability to extract the United States from futile and ruinous wars.

If Barack Obama and his allies in the Senate don’t get real health care reform passed, with a real public option of some kind, they will be defeated at the polls. They fear that passing real health care reform will defeat them. That might happen but I doubt it. If the American People got real national health insurance it would give them something they haven’t had for a long time, a real, every day, reminder of their stake in the political system.

If they fail, which they are on the verge of doing, if they pass the mandate to buy insurance without a real, public option, they will have insured something, the defeat of the Democratic Party in the next election and an ironic place for Barack Obama in history as a man who destroyed his historic opportunity for greatness by his lack of courage, vision and integrity.

Losing women editors (by Suzie)

Echidne's post Thursday on the closing of Editor & Publisher led me to its site, where I saw a story on three female editors resigning.

After those three depart, only two of the top 20 circulation daily newspapers will have women editors. Those are Nancy Barnes at The Star Tribune in Minneapolis and Susan Goldberg of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.

The article notes that only six of the 18 board members of the American Society of News Editors are women.

"It is a difficult time in the industry and there are some concerns about diversity," says Goldberg. "We have never been able to get to a level of parity, and we have seen some backsliding. I think it is a huge cause for concern."

Barnes also believed [that] diversity was a problem, but did not think it was irreversible. "It is a brutal business for women, particularly women who want to have a family," she says. "There are just different choices you have to make. But I believe we will grow more women editors."

I'm not so hopeful. Historically, journalists have been expected to work long and uncertain hours, and this set-up favored men with stay-at-home wives. I never worked at Guild newspapers, which are uncommon in the South. As a reporter, I either didn't fill out a time card or was expected to lie. You risked your career if you went to the Labor Department. To add to the risk, there was dispute over whether reporters were salaried or hourly, exempt or non-exempt. I'm sure this is true of other businesses in which performance is subjective, and companies don't want to pay overtime.

Increasingly, journalists are expected to be proficient in different forms of media, within a 24-hour news cycle. That makes it even harder for women with family responsibilities to rise through the ranks.

One small sign of hope is that women have been less affected by the sweeping layoffs in the industry, according to an APME survey, although that may be because there are more men in more high-paying positions.

Dockers Wants Patriarchy Back

This seems to be our week for manly ads. Now Dockers has joined the team. The ad begins:

Once upon a time, men wore the pants and wore them well. Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone. Men took charge because that's what they did.

Men took charge. Of what or whom? Given that men took charge who relinquished it? The ad then goes on towards shaming those effeminate modern men and ends with this:

It's time to answer the call of manhood. It's time to wear the pants.

So Dockers wants patriarchy back. They could just hire the Taliban to learn how that is done.

Sigh.

How about a campaign of our own? Don't fuck any guy who eats at Burger King. Don't fuck any guy who wears Dockers. Just Say No To Assholes.
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You can contact the owners of the Dockers brand here.

Marketing to men (by Suzie)

Although I have a Mac, I dislike the ads portraying it as a young, handsome, hip dude vs. the older unhip PC guy that runs Windows. I prefer the Windows ads with real people; at least they include women as more than people to be wooed.

Whenever I see a great ad, especially for a large corporation, I remind myself that the same company may have some execrable ad, like the one that aired last Friday during “Dollhouse.” Microsoft played off the idea that the latest Windows is simplified, by giving a simplified version of the TV show: There are hot and sexy dolls! Fans vomited.

A male, feminist friend who works on PCs pointed out other bad ads, such as the one for Internet Explorer 8’s “privacy mode” for browsing. This allows people to keep private some of their favorite sites and some of the sites they’ve visited. This is less suspicious than erasing details of all the sites you’ve visited. It has been dubbed “porn mode,” and Safari (which I use) has had it for several years. Preston Gralla of Computerworld says

The ad features a squeaky-clean young married couple sitting at a kitchen table. The wife asks to use the husband's laptop, and when she does, she obviously sees some kind of grotesque porn on the screen, and begins vomiting, first on the floor, and then on her husband…

Microsoft says that it pulled the ad because some customers found it offensive. I'm sure that's true. But the entire controversy may well be a setup as a way to generate publicity --- the agency that created the ad and Microsoft may have known from the beginning they were stirring up trouble with the ad, and planned to pull it from the moment the ad was created.

It’s an interesting marketing ploy: Kill an offensive ad after it gets publicity, knowing that it will continue to exist on the Internet, and the controversy will drive up viewership. This is similar to making an offensive ad that runs only in a foreign country, knowing it will get back to the U.S. market. An example is the Burger King ad of the big sandwich heading toward the mouth of a wide-eyed woman.

(I usually write posts ahead of time. Just after I scheduled this one, I saw Echidne's post on another offensive BK ad in another country.)

For more sexist fun, watch NetworkWorld's slide show of vintage tech ads, courtesy of ITWorld. That’s where I got the ad above. And, no, I have no idea what the ad is about.