Alicia Elsewhere

Today I have a guest post up on Overthinking It, where I spend too much time talking about blood and Greeks and heroes in the Harry Potter series. Have a taste!

Voldemort’s mistake is to think that shedding the blood of others will increase his power. In fact, it increases his enemies, as many of Voldemort’s victims have families and loved ones whose grief motivates their struggle against him. As in Aeschylus, there is a moral imperative to avenge a slain or injured relative. It’s as though kindred blood-ties become more activated by violence. This is why Narcissa Malfoy undermines Voldemort’s plans, why Neville refuses to join the Death Eaters and slays Nagini, why Aunt Petunia’s blood is capable of protecting Harry during all those summer breaks between books.

Read the rest!

Pilot Versus Ballerina

Sometimes, if you are not a cis white dude, life will up and smack you in the face for not being a cis white dude. Even if all you are doing is sitting around typing crappy prose on your laptop.

I was doing just that when the love of my life started scrolling through the updated avatar clothing selections on Xbox Live. "Hey!" he said. "They have a cool jobs section!" And for a moment we delighted in the stereotypical avatar costumes: astronaut, farmer, doctor, pilot, professor.

They were so stereotypical that I was suddenly worried. "Switch to my account," I directed. "I bet you can't be an astronaut if you're female."

"Why would they be different?" he responded. "I bet they are the same."

We checked. They were not.

Astronaut was the same. Professor had been switched to scientist -- in a pencil skirt and lab coat with sassy red flats, rather than a tweed suit and black dress shoes. That raised an eyebrow slightly.

And then, we found ballerina. Ballerina, it seems, had replaced pilot.

And not just one pilot: a male avatar allows you to be either a commercial pilot (spiffy navy blue uniform) or a private pilot (spiffy brown leather bomber and khaki pants).

A female avatar means you can be a ballerina, but not a pilot.

Is this reflective of real life? Maybe if you are a girl and also five years old. But I kind of wanted to be a pilot at age five, so clearly the omgballerina desire is not innate to five-year-old girls.

Let us visit the website for the US Department of Labor! That's where they keep the statistics.

The number of dancers, male and female, employed in the US in 2008 was approximately 13,000. And this is without knowing how many dancers are specifically ballerinas (as opposed to modern dancers, belly dancers, nightclub dancers, etc.), which is undoubtedly a smaller number still.

The number of pilots and flight engineers, male and female, employed in the US in 2008 was approximately 116,000. That figure is higher almost by a factor of ten.

Exaggerated scenario one: if we assume both professions split evenly on gender lines, then you still have nearly nine times more female pilots than female dancers. It is much more likely that you are a female pilot than that you are a female dancer.

Exaggerated scanario two: assume all dancers are ballerinas, which is clearly ridiculous, but bear with me. Where is the statistical point where you have a better chance of being a ballerina than a female pilot? In short, plug 13,000 into 116,000 and see what percentage comes out.

11. Eleven percent. You have a better chance of being a ballerina if less than eleven percent of pilots are female.

Of course, these statistics are just an illustration, because the avatar costumes are not about reality. They are about social norms, and policing gender boundaries. Girls should want to be ballerinas, because ballerinas are super feminine. They shouldn't want to be pilots (and boys should want to be) because pilots are super masculine.

Feminine, in this case, means: cultured, graceful, thin, and sexually unobtainable.

Masculine, in this case, means: gruff, rational, arrogant, and aggressively sexual.

In addition, as the love of my life pointed out, pilots make a significantly higher amount of money than ballerinas, with a significantly lower chance of on-the-job injury. (According to the BLS, professional dancers have one of the highest chances of being injured nonfatally at work.) So women are expected/encouraged to choose a profession in which they must conform to an impossibly high physical standard, with very little monetary recompense.

I have flown planes. I have taken ballet. Flying is much more fun. I would love to dress my avatar in a bomber jacket and black boots -- like I dress in real life.

But apparently that's not very feminine.

Epilogue

Some facts we learned in the course of tonight's research:

• Googling "female pilot uniform" brings up quite a bit more porn than you would expect. Yes, even more than that.
• Googling "male pilot" brings up a lot of whales (oh, I get it) and no porn. At least, not before I got tired of scrolling down.
• Googling "manly pilot" introduces you to early aviation pioneer Charles Manly. So that's pretty neat. No porn, though you do get a cartoon of shirtless anime guys kissing.
• Googling "man" does not bring up Don Draper in the first three pages. We kinda thought it would.
• Googling "men" gets three images of Don Draper on the first page alone.

Hamm Reduction

Here is what you discover when you start reading the latest ode to Jon Hamm from Details magazine:

1. Hamm swears at bikers.
2. While wearing madras shorts and a baseball cap.
3. Because they impede him from going 140 in his borrowed fancy car, a silver Mercedes that is not yet available for purchase by the public
4. While avoiding parking tickets, apparently by the sheer force of Hamm's manly will
5. Before returning to the Malibu beach house he's borrowing for the weekend with the girlfriend who likes all the same things he does, and their German shepherd mix.

Let me stop right there.

In The Mommy Myth, Susan J. Douglas spends a chapter outlining the weird formality of the celebrity mom profile. They read identically: the celebrity mom dotes obsessively on her kids, and even though she's hard-working and financially independent and has a very visible career, she still thinks her children are her greatest achievement as a woman and as a human being. It's as though we need to be reassured that when given enough power and money (same thing, really), a woman will 'naturally' choose to become a wife and mother (but most importantly a mother).

With Jon Hamm (and George Clooney, and that one time in Vanity Fair with Shia LaBeouf until he became a target for mockery), we get the men's version: the retro-dude profile. Instead of having adorable children, he is "piecing together his résumé, quietly building a career and a life." Instead of decorating a home, he is "never in danger of taking the easy way." His words have "the weight of a benediction" because his is the voice of authority. But of course, he is also Everyman: "Not self-consciously handsome. Not a dick. A normal guy . . ."

Here is the difference between the celebrity mom profile and the Hamm piece: the former is all about the actress' personal life, her children and her home and her feelings. The latter is about his career, his talent, and his plans for the future. Nevertheless, both the celebrity mom's maternal warmth and Jon Hamm's self-assurance are supposed to be 'natural,' and effortless. In reality, both gender poses require a great deal of time and energy. Yet the reader is encouraged by the celebrity profile to view this effortlessness as the reason for the celebrity's prominence, the base of their fame and fortune. For example, this sentence from the Hamm profile:

What's startling about Draper isn't just the physical man-ness Hamm projects as the chisel-chinned messenger sent from the past to save us from casual Fridays and Twitter. It's also the way Hamm imbues everything Draper does with a sense of complicated, conflicted adult-ness.

Real men, you see, are tortured -- Don Draper by his false identity, Jon Hamm by the loss of both his parents and his knowledge that his chosen industry is fickle, that he will have to keep on his toes and work hard. Good thing that hard work is an acceptably masculine activity.

Real men are also leaders, particularly of women:

"One of the greatest pleasures of the job," Weiner says, "has been to see Jon create the character of Don Draper. He's smart, deep, and a natural leader. I can't imagine making the show without him."

It is ambiguous whether "smart, deep, and a natural leader" refers to Jon or his character. And there's more:

Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy, says the whole cast considers Hamm "the leader of our little gang. We do defer to him. If there's something that we need to fix, we go to Jon.

"It's funny," she adds. "There definitely are a lot of similarities between how Jon and I get along and the relationship between Don and Peggy. But Jon doesn't yell at me as much—thank God. That would be a bit rough."

That there is a difference between Jon and Don -- oh god, are the names really that similar? -- the author acknowledges, but only just: "It occurs to me that this is why Weiner keeps journalists off his sets: so nobody will realize that the reason his cast is so good is that the 'actors' are actually split-personality cases who've fully inhabited their roles."

Even while the author takes care to note Hamm's versatility as both a comedic and dramatic talent -- coupled with another gushing quote from a woman, Sarah Silverman this time -- he is eliding the distinction between Jon Hamm and the character he has helped create:

Hamm tends to talk about the collaborative nature, the teamwork, of showing up and being a part of something. "This isn't a very solitary experience," he says. "You can't just go into a room and act by yourself. You need an audience to play off of, you need someone to write the material." On cue, Elisabeth Moss, in full Peggy regalia, joins us on the folding chairs. I ask her if there's a Don Draper School of Acting.

"He doesn't say too much," Elisabeth/Peggy says sheepishly.

"Not since you stopped fucking it up and got it right," Jon/Don says, and they both crack up.

Still laughing, Hamm gets up. As he ambles toward the set, the actors' reserved parking spots come into view. The SLS, its wings tucked primly away, is shining like some golden trophy in the sun.

Despite the majesty rays there, the article goes out of its way to note that Jon Hamm has not yet achieved instant-recognition celebrity status: the folks at the burger joint he and the author eat at fail to make a fuss over his presence, which leads the author to conclude that Hamm has not been recognized. (Though if Hamm eats there frequently, it might be simple politeness on the part of the employees.) The author connects the two personalities of actor and character in such a way that Jon Hamm is the Clark Kent to Don Draper's Superman. Only, instead of leaping a tall building, he comes out of the phone booth and shoves a check into his mistress' cleavage.

The article's reader is encouraged to think of Jon and Don as two aspects of a single personality. It is Jon Hamm who has brought Don Draper out of the sixties to save us.

Save us from what, though? From "casual Fridays and Twitter"? Really? The messianic tone of the article is all the more unsettling because the threat Jon/Don will save us from is never explicitly named. Though we can guess.

Jon Hamm does seem to have a surprising amount of dislike for Twitter, which seems odd. He feels luckier than "the Twilight kids or Miley Cyrus or whoever" presumably because he is older, and manlier, and thus more able to handle the pressures of public scrutiny. Even as Hamm laments the invasive curiosity of the public, in another quote he states that being a porn star is equivalent to selling one's dignity -- without a shred of self-awareness that he is, after all, a man who is paid to do things with his body while other people watch. Has nobody ever mentioned to Jon Hamm that he and Miley Cyrus have essentially the same job?

To go back to the parallel with the celebrity mom profile for a moment, it's probably not a coincidence that we specifically frame actors this way. If gender is a performance, who better to embody its most rigid forms than our most well-known performers?

All images via the Vintage Ad Browser.

Nathan Rabin Fails at Modeling and as a Human Being.

It may seem like a clever move to self-deprecatingly refer to your own article as a "lousy blog post", but it doesn't mean the phrase does not ring true. If there is one set of ads I would purge from all the internets given the chance (and the POWER), it is the marketing campaign spat forth by American Apparel. They look like the stalkerish photos taken by serial killers and kidnappers, or else they have contorted models into poses that look not merely painful but even injurious, or else they have weird classist vibes that I try very hard not to ponder at any length. They are train wrecks, and so naturally I can't not look at them.

Which is also why I read Nathan Rabin's recent AV Club post: "Death by sexy: a middle-aged man in an Eat Pray Love promotional T-shirt auditions to be an American Apparel model."

I thought there might be some small bit of revelation in it, some piece of information that could illuminate a corner of the world. And there was, but not in the way I wanted.

Our Author dresses in his worst clothes. He makes fun of the female models while praising their looks, and ignores the male models entirely. He describes the aesthetic of AA ads as being uncomfortably close to child pornography, but appears to have no problem finding this sexually appealing. He talks at length to one hopeful model in particular -- and this is where my bit of revelation comes in.

Martha (a pseudonym) is seventeen, and has been modeling for four years. Let that math sink in a little bit. She is described as "Giddy with the hubris of youth," but she's not the one throwing Greek tragedy terms around and attending modeling auditions as a whimsical prank.

No, Martha is here to get paid. She doesn't model full-time, as she's soon to be a senior in high school, but her mom's been unemployed for two years and modeling helps pay the rent every month.

Let's be clear: this girl is helping keep a roof over her family's head.

Mr. Rabin doesn't care.

He wants to talk about her photos:

She then rifled through her portfolio. It was remarkable how different she looked in each photo. Her fresh-faced, well-scrubbed look of pure Americana was eminently mutable. It was as if her face and body were unformed and unfinished and could only be completed by a stylist and photographer fitting her into their predetermined vision. She could be whoever they wanted her to be.

In short, she's a good model. This is her job. Our Author, who is in no financial straits himself and who has already admitted his own inability to look like anything other than what he is (a writer), nonetheless feels perfectly comfortable looking down on this girl:

She noted sadly that Abercrombie & Fitch wanted to buy one of her photographs, but she didn’t have the rights to the photos they wanted to buy; those were held, I suppose, by the photographers who took them or the modeling agency or the clients that bought them.“Shit, man. I could have been an Abercrombie & Fitch model,” she muttered.

I tried to console her. “Eh, I’ve done a lot of campaigns with them. They’re not so great.” But she did not pick up on my sarcasm.

This girl is hard up. She is at a crossroads of several systems that have let her down: the crappy economy, the copyright system that allows other people (very probably male people) to hold the rights to images of her body, images that could have eased the financial burden on herself and her mother.

Meanwhile, over in the Land of Astonishing Narcisissm, Our Author is sad she doesn't laugh at his joke.

This erasure of Martha and her human experience is a colossal failure on the part of Our Author, both as a writer and as a human being. The whole post started with this paragraph:

It’s hard not to be moved by the print ad’s haunting images of desperation and sadness. Who were these emaciated young people with their gaunt flesh squeezed into gold lamé leggings, their dead eyes pleading for mercy and compassion? Why did a major chain choose advertising redolent of child pornography from the '70s? Were these runaways all right? Had Charney forced them into lives of prostitution, drug dealing, and pornography? Should I purchase American Apparel clothing, or report its owners and advertisers to the proper authorities?

There seems to be some acknowledgment here that American Apparel models are victims of systemic failure. And -- how lucky for his story! -- the intrepid journalist's impression that AA models look desperate and hungry proves to be actually true in real life. This narrative arc should write itself: "I thought Americal Apparel models looked desperate and exploited -- turns out, they are actually desperate and exploited."

But Our Author seems to forget all his concern for these models as soon as he actually meets on in person.

Is that whole early paragraph just a joke? There is a huge disconnect between Our Author's empathetic response to the pictures early on, and his total disregard of Martha (not to mention all the other models auditioning, who barely rate a description). What exactly is supposed to be the purpose of this piece? Rabin claims that he "wanted to experience the weirdness of an open call for American Apparel models firsthand." But we don't hear about anything particularly weird -- unless your definition of weird includes Nathan Rabin, a bald white dude who likes movies.

This is what happens once Our Author's number gets called for the audition:

The gentleman strained mightily to force a smile and nervously asked, “Do you have any questions for us?”

Yes! Now was my chance to uncover the location of the underage models being kept in cages and forced to be sexy 20 to 23 hours a day! I was in a position to demand answers! I was going to take this whole house of cards down with me and expose the shocking, scintillating, titillating truth.

But “Uh, no, I guess not” was all that came stumbling out of my mouth.

It's funny because . . . because exploitation is funny? Because women in cages are funny? Because a journalist failing to be a journalist is funny? Because there is a gap between Our Author's lurid imaginings of being a writerly hero rescuing sexy teens and his actual ineffective behavior? Because disappointment on every level is hilarious, apparently?

At press time, the most recent comment was: "Nobody cares and this is a shitty story." Which sums it up pretty well.

Vodka is for Lame Babies -- Take My Word For It

Previously on this blog, I wrote about Caskstrength's troubling rules for drinking like a man. Today, we're looking at the first of those rules: No vodka. Vodka is not manly, says Caskstrength.

"How so?" you ask.

It just isn't.

I have harped on this for too long so I’ll make it crystal fucking clear, there is nothing manly about Vodka. Almost all domestic vodka is in fact industrial alcohol mixed with water. Vodka can only be sipped neat or taken as a shot, and even then, it is still kind of for lame babies.

This guy begs to differ:

And that's pretty much the whole of Caskstrength's post. There's only two things you can think about when vodka comes up: James Bond, and patriotic Russian/Polish people. The first doesn't count because apparently he only drinks vodka in the movies and screws up the cocktail name -- obviously, this makes James Bond a total wuss, despite all the shooting and the sexing and the well-tailored suits. Wait, are well-tailored suits still manly? They weren't for a while, but now they're back, at least until I hear otherwise. Gender-specific trends are so confusing.

As for the Russians and Poles (and Finns -- shout-out!) who claim to love vodka, well -- they really just want an excuse to talk about their home country. Because all Russian people were born in Russia, and Polish people were born in Poland, and they have no business being born in America like real Americans are:

As for the Russians and the Polish, you know how every time one of those guys are telling you how great Vodka is there is a ton of, “do you know how great my country of origin is? Because I am proud of it and want to talk about it a lot.” Don’t be that guy, don’t listen to that guy.

In fact, the strangest thing about this post is what it leaves out: vodka is not manly because it is girly.

Evidence: vodka is the key ingredient in that most feminine of cocktails: the Cosmopolitan. My mother recently praised my love of vodka tonics, because they're low-calorie cocktails, relatively speaking. A friend once assured me with great authority that the Greyhound, a mix of vodka and grapefruit juice, was considered the diet cocktail of choice for some sorority or other. Flavored or infused vodkas are largely not considered "real drinks," which is to say they are effeminate, like chocolate martinis and such.

When Caskstrength says that vodka is to be taken neat or not at all, what he's saying is: don't drink vodka cocktails like many many women do. Unless it's a White Russian, of course, because of The Dude. Unless you're in a bowling alley, because then you've become That Guy.

So many rules -- how will I keep them all straight?

The Drink-Like-A-Man Trap.

One night, four of us ended up at Seattle's lovely Mistral Kitchen for dinner, because the rumor mill had it that the cocktails were pretty good. The rumor mill underestimated by a mile.

The cocktails were more than good: they were fantastic. Maybe the best cocktails I've ever had: well-crafted, unique, and utterly delicious. And because the list was only eight items long, and because we'd all ordered different drinks in the first round, and because nobody was driving anywhere for the foreseeable evening's future, we managed to taste everything on the menu in the course of an hour and a half.

The bartender Andrew noticed, and graciously allowed us to taste something he was planning to put on the new menu due out the following week. It was something that had the smokey taste of whiskey, but none of the burn, and we just could not figure out how he'd done it. So we asked, and he was kind enough to explain the process and a bit of the chemistry and all of us were starry-eyed and dazzled.

It was a lovely evening, and as soon as I got home I subscribed to the feed on Caskstrength, Andrew's blog. For a while, it was perfect -- he talked about creating a Tom Waits-inspired cocktail, and chainsawing ice, and other such specifics. He introduced me to the word "dipsography," writing about drinking, which is a much-needed coinage in this new cocktail renaissance of ours. Then, just when I thought the blog and I were bestest buddies, or at least could talk intelligently between one another, this post came up, introducing a short series of posts: ten rules for drinking like a man.

Also known as: ten things you can say to make Alicia's head explode.

The only thing I can do is take them apart one at a time, beginning with the intro post.

Problem No. 1: Man = Ideal

When people say, "drink like a man," they never bother to explain that this is for a given value of "man." It's assumed you know this value already: a man is strong, rugged, powerful, successful, and so on. In a word, man is an ideal person. For a woman to drink like a man, she must first disown her own identity. She cannot be soft, quiet, passive, sweet, or fruity. Of course, she has to be all those things, because she is female, and those are the ideal feminine qualities. So if she doesn't drink like a man, she deserves scorn. If she does drink like a man, she deserves scorn.

As Caskstrength's Andrew has it:

The world of drinks, drinking and bars fit nicely into 2 small compartments: ” T.G.I. Mc Flingers in a strip mall,”  or, “Don Draper,” where do you stand?

No options there for a woman, because when Don Draper is the gold standard a woman will always be found lacking. (Especially by Don Draper himself.)

Drinking like a man: it is a trap.

Problem No. 2: Men drink, women don't.

A quote:

Men, It isn’t your fault no one taught you what to drink.  We are going to fix that now.  Ladies, if you see a man break any of these rules you can be assured he is egotistical, close minded, weak, lacks creativity and thusly a bad fuck.

Ah, the age-old double standard for alcohol consumption: men drink, and women don't. Women are not to follow these rules themselves, that sentence implies -- they should be occupied analyzing what a man's choice of beverage says about him as a person and a lover (by which we mean, ultimately, father). Because of course something like romantic compatibility can be reduced to the simplicity of a set of rules no more complex than your average teen-written internet quiz.

But I pose to you, evaluate the man who has placed a menu in front of you offering up an, “X-TREME MANGO MOJITO,” do you really trust him with with high quality and impeccable  taste?

This sentence brings up an interesting point: often, people order from a cocktail menu. A menu is pre-designed, pre-arranged, and the person ordering from it is discouraged from asking the menu item to be altered. What the woman is supposed to do is critique the man she's dining/drinking with (though, as we've seen, she's not really supposed to be doing any of the drinking). She's not encouraged to critique the person who put an X-TREME MANGO MOJITO on that menu in the first place, although there is a strong case to be made that it is the taste of the menu's creator that should be faulted. To fault the person who orders from the menu, and not the menu itself, seems to ignore the larger context in which the drink order occurs. The same goes if women are supposed to reward the person who orders a "manly" cocktail -- and we still don't know what that is -- but not to reward the creator of the menu. She is supposed to ignore the larger context, as if it didn't exist.

In the same way, she is supposed to keep herself clean and thin and mostly hairless. She is not supposed to ask why women have to be clean and thin and hairless, when there is no correspondingly significant pressure for men. She is not supposed to ask what this system does for her personally -- she is just supposed to follow the rules.

Telling women to focus on the immediate situation rather than the larger context is often also a trap.

Problem No. 3: Turns out all this is geared toward one specific dude.

I left a comment on Caskstrength, to this effect: "Hey, dude, this kinda leaves the ladies out in the cold, cocktail-wise. Know what I mean?"

And he replied -- very graciously, I might add -- that the series was directed at a personal friend, for personal reasons.

Which is very sweet, helping out a friend like that. I also have a friend, and this friend is terrified of kittens. So, rather than personally helping this person conquer their fear of kittens, or even writing a post explaining how to help this specific person conquer their specific fear of kittens, I have written a post that details all the ways in which kittens are harmful and should be thrown out the window of a moving train.

I have another friend, who is a woman. This woman -- let's call her "Balicia" -- has been on the wrong side of way too many "here's how to drink/think/read/write like a man, because we all know men are teh awesome" conversations. She doesn't mind learning how to drink/think/read/write better, but it really bothers her when "better" = "like a dude," because it is a very short step from "traditional masculine-coded areas of know-how are an ideal everyone should strive for no matter their gender" to "men are inherently superior because of a wiggly thing between their legs."

You see how this works. It's Refute-A-Thon 2010 all up in here.

Because if I don't try and speak out on things like this, they will drive me crazy. Andrew at Caskstrength is truly an authority on his topic. His knowledge is beyond vast. He may well be one of the best bartenders of our generation; he is certainly the best bartender whose drinks I have ever had the privilege to consume. And when someone whose work I admire turns around and says something so regressive and hurtful, well, it makes me feel like I've been stabbed in the back, just a little.

Here's the list of upcoming posts:

Rule 1: No Vodka Rule 2: No “Tinis” Rule 3: No Light Beer, unless… Rule 4: Jack Daniel’s Is For Pussies Rule 5: Read the Cocktail List Rule 6: Cash, the Etiquette of Dollars Rule 7: Own Your Drink and the Glass It Is In Rule 8: Order Champagne, Often Rule 9: Own a Flask And Good Home Barware Rule 10: Know Your Limits

I can hardly wait.

E-reader Ads and Gender Bias: A Rebuttal

So lately -- on Shakespeare's birthday, in fact -- there was this Huffpo post by Jason Pinter, which then meandered through the blogosphere until it reached my habitual environs (NPR's delightful Monkey See Blog). The article alleges that there are not enough books for men because of a publishing mantra: men don't read. So there should be more books marketed for men. And I got very angry and had to kill some pixelated zombies in Castlevania until I calmed down a bit. The comments are pretty evenly split between the expected "Oh man you are totally right publishing is totally sexist to dudes" and "what are you talking about I'm a man I read/I know a man he reads." And, of course, absolutely everyone heaps scorn on the romance novel, as represented by Twilight, chick-lit, and Danielle Steele. Negative bonus points for Huffpo commenter RobinSeattle, who offered the following gem: "There is almost no piece of advertising on tv that doesn't make men look like knuckle dragging hapless boobs. Feminists are silent on this sort of sexism because they are largely a bunch of intellectually dishonest opportunists anyway." On RobinSeattle's profile: comments: 6243, friends: 2.

But that's not what I wanted to pinpoint here.

One of the things Pinter laments is the way e-readers are supposedly marketed primarily to women, and cites the ads for the Nook: . . . and the Kindle:

Pinter then offers this lovely sentiment:

Why would men buy an e-reader, considering the takeaway from these ads is you can a) learn about your pregnancy after falling for Mr. Darcy, or b) become Amelia Earhart or Holly Golightly?

Yeah, Amelia Earhart's alright -- for a girl. And no man in the history of men has ever found Holly Golightly interesting -- except, you know, the dude who created her. And who needs to learn about pregnancy? Nobody important, that's for sure.

I like to think that every time a male writer dismisses the attractions of Mr. Darcy, somewhere in the world a romance novel is born.

Luckily, according to Mr. Pinter, the iPad ad gets things right:

Cool, right? They catch your attention without alienating half the consumer population. Why can't we do that? Make a fun, cool campaign that doesn't cut your audience off at the knees?

It's funny he should mention knees, because here are the full lyrics for that particular (admittedly catchy) song:

Be Be the charming type Take off your gloves And show what they hide Please take my naked wrist With your hands and fingertips

And please, baby get on your knees Don’t bare bare bare your teeth

I’ll let you pry if you close your eyes

I’ll have an answer for your wives

There goes my love There goes my love There goes my love love love love love

There goes my love There goes my love There goes my love love love love love

oh

Why be the charming kind? Oh you’ll get yours when I get mine Oh no it’s not for me If you’re too good you won’t be free

Meanwhile, the full lyrics for the song in the Kindle ad (which Pinter dismisses as "twee") are:

Silver Moons and paper chains, Faded maps and shiny things. You're my favorite one-man show. A million different ways to go.

Will you fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Painted scenes, I'm up all night. Slaying monsters, flying kites. Speak to me in foreign tongues. Share your secrets one by one.

Will you fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Now I cant think what life was like Before I had you by my side. Cant say what I'd do without you, Knowing what its like to have you.

Hidden walk ways back in time. Endless stories, lovers cry. In my mind I've been set free. Will you take this Journey You and Me?

Will you Fly me away? Take me away with you, My love.

Fly me away with you, My Love.

Take me away with you, My Love.

In sum: the Kindle wants to keep you up all night with adventures, words, and monster-slaying. The iPad wants you naked and submissive. Which one sounds more like a satisfactory reading experience?

Here is a list of things momentarily featured in the iPad ad above: photo displays, a romantic suspense/mystery novel by Tami Hoag, the New York Times, the new Star Trek, Ted Kennedy's memoir, and some kind of dude-heavy outdoorsy document/blog called "The Powder Report," which the user is editing. Note how many of those things are not books.

A list of things that are featured in the Nook ad: Where the Wild Things Are, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Pride and Prejudice, What to Expect When You're Expecting, The Book Thief (which if you haven't read you should do so immediately, but have a hanky close to hand). Of course, all these are also coyly referenced in the first-person female voiceover -- which then gives way to a male voiceover, which says this: "Experience the only e-book reader from the bookstore you've grown up with. Nook, by Barnes and Noble. Browse and download over a million titles wirelessly, and take your story wherever you want it to go."

The Nook ad is, of course, personal. It is designed to be this (undoubtedly fictional, but thoroughly plausible) story of one woman's history with books. And the male voiceover at the end reinforces the fact that this is one particular story, and that you (whoever you are) have a story of your own, and somehow buying a Nook helps you tell it or relive it or something. (Also: putting The Book Thief right there in an e-reader commercial is kind of hilarious for several reasons.) There is a mix here of books by male authors (Sendak, Zusak) and female authors (Blume, Austen, Murkoff and Mazel).

Whereas the iPad ad does feature both male and female hands on that pretty, pretty touchscreen, the content displays one female author (Hoag), one male author (Kennedy), a newspaper (journalism being an industry notorious for its sexism), a movie written by, directed by, and starring mostly dudes (though at least they tried to clarify Uhura's job in this one, but come on, we know it's all about the Kirk-Spock bromance), somebody's kids, and snowboarders. Moreover, the only book opened in the iPad commercial is the Kennedy memoir -- the Hoag mystery only appears as some kind of ad or banner that the user's hand never touches.

By preferring the iPad ad to the Kindle and the Nook, Pinter is saying two things. One: despite his screed against the publishing industry's neglect of men, Pinter is more interested in shiny gadgets with a rock soundtrack than in something that uses actual books, and not just the latest trendy political read. (Partly this is because the iPad is meant as a media-consumption device rather than just an e-reader -- but don't get me started on that whole mess.)

And two: gender disparity in the material (so many dudes in that iPad!) looks like equality to Pinter if you see both men and women dealing with it, and something closer to actual equality (60/40 if you count Murkoff and Mazel as one author) looks like it's skewed because the ad's protagonist happens to be a woman. The same is true of the music above: Pinter likes the male vocalist's rock song despite the lyrics, which are questionable from an advertising standpoint (how does this song sell iPads aside from being catchy?), and dislikes the female vocalist's piano melody despite the appropriateness of the song's sentiment for the product being advertised. (Shades of the recent Tiger Beatdown guest post on dude music, anyone?)

Pinter does not expect to identify with a woman -- but he expects women to identify with men. Because men are the default. (White men. Straight white men. With short hair. And guns.) All this tends to take the wind out of the whole "I don't read because publishers make books look girly" argument, which essentially amounts to "Why don't they put some explosions on the cover so it won't threaten my masculinity to be seen holding it?" Men shouldn't have to imagine themselves in a woman's place -- because that's a woman's place.