And my good friend, Maria, picks up the gauntlet. Welcome to the Land of Righteous Indignation, M! It was getting pretty lonely here for a while. 
Archive for the ‘Heads up’ Category
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Sequel to “Oh look, bright shiny things!”
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Oh look, bright shiny things!
Both Good Morning Silicon Valley and The Register reported this one, so I couldn’t run away from it. SIGH
Women are four times more likely than men to give out “passwords” in exchange for chocolate bars.
This finding came as the result of the latest annual Infosec survey (held outside Liverpool Street Station), and was held just before the Infosec Europe conference, which is scheduled to start next week in London. Out of 576 office workers surveyed, 45% of women (as opposed to 10% of men) were willing to provide their user
namsnames and passwords to complete strangers in exchange for a chocolate bar (no details on what brand of chocolate bar). The Register was a bit more sceptical in its coverage by adding that:Little attempt is made to verify the authenticity of the passwords, beyond follow-up questions asking what category it falls under. So we don’t know whether women responding to the survey filled in any old rubbish in return for a choccy treat or handed out their real passwords.
Oh, I really really hope so. Because the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Look, we’re women! Just hold chocolate or ice-cream under our noses and we’ll crumple faster than a modern car’s chassis in a pile-up. Aw crap!
For the original press release, go here.
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Female athlete? Get a bikini!
I don’t know how many of you look at the intertwining of politics and sport. It’s one of my casual interests, I’ll admit. And here’s another brick in the wall of repression that I’m seeing slowly getting built all across the Western world.
Feminism has a long and interesting history, which I really don’t want to go into here for the simple reason that I cannot do it justice. However, the idea that half of the world’s population is entitled to the same rights as the other half seems, to me, neither banal nor apocalyptic. If that makes me a feminist, so be it.
One of the truths in feminism is that women have fought long and hard for equal rights and these rights seemed never so available, never so promising, within the USA until the 1960s and the advent of the civil rights movement, the tide trying to lift all boats, as it were. This was not the recognition of women just because the men were away fighting (as was the case in World War Two), but a need arising from societal change and more professional women in academia and the workplace. (I’m compressing decades of history into two sentences here, so bear with me.)
If you agree that the post-60s era (to the present time) was kinder to feminism than the pre-60s era — and I’m sure most of you do — how do you explain the Sports Illustrated covers? I am entirely indebted to Charles Modiano’s article “Sports Illustrated’s Cover Barrier: Who Will Break the Bikini Line?” on the Cosellout website for providing my casual observations with solid ammunition.
Modiano points out quite clearly that, in the 1950s, “the decade of Sports Illustrated’s inception and hardly a period of progressive feminism, it was quite common to have about an average of five issues per year where a female athlete graced its cover. By the 1990′s that figure had been reduced to about 2 or 3 per year.”
Modiano also quotes Michael McCambridge’s 1998 book, The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine, in which McCambridge says:
“The magazine might have deflected some of these complaints [about the Swimsuit Issue] if it had done a better job covering women in sports. But it became a truism that the only time a woman was on the cover was when she was, in the words of one staffer, ‘a victim or a babe or both’. Monica Seles made the cover alone after she was stabbed in a tournament in Germany, but not after any of her 8 grand slam women’s titles. (She shared a cover in 1990) Nancy Kerrigan graced the cover after being clubbed, but not after winning the U.S. Figure Skating championships …”.
Since 2000, Sports Illustrated has scaled back to one cover of a female athlete a year:
Since 1990, the Williams sisters (Venus & Serena) COMBINED have not received as many covers (3) as Ted Williams — who retired in 1960. In contrast, at least five swimsuit models have graced the cover three times. The record for most SI covers by any woman is five — held by Elle MacPherson.
In 2006, one cover showed 6 athletes, half of them women. In the same year, the cover also sported 8 half-naked supermodels.
2007? One woman. Beyonce. In an orange bikini. Remember how the late-night show hosts were slavering over that issue?
2008? One so far … swimsuit model, Marisa Miller. In, ah, beads and a bikini bottom.
So what, you say? Everyone knows these are sports jocks, and they like (a) beer, (b) giant TVs with remote controls, and (c) women. Okay. But the truly eye-opening thing is that, even within those constraints, the equality quotient, if you will, has been consistently falling. You cannot tell me that Americans in the 1950s were any less sports-crazy than Americans in the present day. And yet, the number of positive female athlete role models on the cover of the same magazine has reduced to … almost zero?
What does that tell you about the progress of feminism/equal rights over the decades? Or, more generally, what does that tell you about progress in general?
I am of the opinion that, as the Western world veers ever more into conservative territory, the rights of all minorities get chipped away. Considering I’m a member of several minorities, this is of particular concern to me, and I keep an eye open to any area where I feel this erosion of respect manifests. (Where respect disappears, rights soon follow.) Sports is one of these areas. Most politically-active readers tend not to watch that arena, but over the past decade, I’ve come to realise that that’s a mistake, because observation of sports gives an insight into how average people think, and — perhaps more importantly — into how large companies think average people think.
Go have a read of Modiano’s article, which I have brutally chopped here to suit my own ends. It’s cogent, eye-opening, and deserves to be widely read.
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