Busy signal...

Today I joined not one, but two social networking sites--Pownce and Ravelry. I'm geeking out, even though I'm on dial-up, and am probably going to end up spending the entire weekend adding my knitting projects to Ravelry. Oh, I didn't mention is was a knitting network? Yeah, I meant it when I said I was geeking out. But not before I finish Harry Potter...

I didn't want to read this...but I did.

Hillary Clinton's Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory

Okay, it was appropriately filed under "fashion" but is was on the front of the WaPo website. I cringed. Then I clicked on it:

There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

She was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. She was wearing a rose-colored blazer over a black top. The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.

The article goes on to talk about how sartorially conservative and masculine the Hill is, and Hilary's uncomfortable relationship with fashion as the First Lady, and her adoption of the black pantsuit as her uniform. Until now, apparently. There was the requisite "really, this isn't just about women, we swear" observation:

It's tempting to say that the cleavage stirs the same kind of discomfort that might be churned up after spotting Rudy Giuliani with his shirt unbuttoned just a smidge too far. No one wants to see that. But really, it was more like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!

And the requisite "oh, America, we're so prudish" observation:

Not so long ago, Jacqui Smith, the new British home secretary, spoke before the House of Commons showing far more cleavage than Clinton. If Clinton's was a teasing display, then Smith's was a full-fledged come-on. But somehow it wasn't as unnerving. Perhaps that's because Smith's cleavage seemed to be presented so forthrightly. Smith's fitted jacket and her dramatic necklace combined to draw the eye directly to her bosom. There they were . . . all part of a bold, confident style package.

And then ends with:

With Clinton, there was the sense that you were catching a surreptitious glimpse at something private. You were intruding -- being a voyeur. Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn't necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease. It means that a woman is content being perceived as a sexual person in addition to being seen as someone who is intelligent, authoritative, witty and whatever else might define her personality. It also means that she feels that all those other characteristics are so apparent and undeniable, that they will not be overshadowed.

To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d'oeuvres is a provocation. It requires that a woman be utterly at ease in her skin, coolly confident about her appearance, unflinching about her sense of style. Any hint of ambivalence makes everyone uncomfortable. And in matters of style, Clinton is as noncommittal as ever.

Huh? Cleavage equals confidence? Cleavage equal provocation? Confidence equals provocation? I don't really know what to take from this. I mean, I like the part about being confident that sexuality will not overshadow her intelligence, etc. We can bring up the Edwards $400 haircut here, but remember, Hillary had her own overpriced haircut scandal back when she was in the White House. And those articles focus on the price, not what Edward's haircut says about him. Obviously, Hillary shouldn't have to dress like a nun to be president. But this author seems to be setting up a damned-if-you-do, dammed-if-you-don't dichotomy for her: show too much cleavage, we're going to be uncomfortable; show too little cleavage, we're going to think she's not confident enough to lead.

Excuse me while I go Google "Margaret Thatcher" and "cleavage."

Mad Men

Any of you other comm geeks going to watch this? Hell, I'll watch it just for the costumes, but maybe we should start a drinking game--take a shot every time someone mentions Edward Bernays or Ivy Lee? No?

"If you use a frying pan to hit someone over the head, you don't call that cooking."

I don't know how this hasn't made the evening news. Then again, I had to hear about it from the Yarn Harlot, so maybe it has been. I'll let Stephanie explain:

Tory Bowen says that she was raped. Actually, Tory Bowen, was pre-law at college when she had a drink at a bar that was the last thing she remembers until she woke up in a strangers bed, with a stranger, who was doing something she hadn't consented to. (That would be the rape.) She went to the emergency room, was treated and had a rape kit done and called the police. The police charged her attacker with 1st degree sexual assault and a trial was set. That's where things got weird.

The judge decided that many words around this issue were too inflammatory. That they made the defendant sound guilty, and that they implied a crime...."Rape" is a legal conclusion- he thought. We cannot call it rape until a jury says it's rape. (Hear that women? You can't know something is rape until there's a vote. I suppose being there doesn't grant you any special insight.) So he banned some words. Nobody in his courtroom may use these words, when it comes to this trial:

Rape.
Sexual Assault.
Victim.
Attacker.
Assailant.
Forced.

No one can say that the hospital did a "Rape Kit" and they can't say that at the hospital she was treated by the "Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner." In fact, inside the courtroom no one can even say that the defendant is charged with 1st Degree Sexual Assault.

So what, if anything, was allowed?

Ms. Bowen is allowed to say that she and the defendant had "sex" or "intercourse", which she complains (and very rightly so) implies the exact opposite to a jury, that the acts were consensual and non-traumatic.

The whole thing got laid out from a legal perspective by Dahlia Lithwick in a June 20 article in Slate:

Nebraska law offers judges broad discretion to ban evidence or language that present the danger of "unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues or misleading the jury." And it's not unheard-of for judges to keep certain words out of a courtroom. Words like victim have been increasingly kept out of trials, since they tend to imply that a crime was committed. And as Safi's lawyer, Clarence Mock, explains, the word rape is just as loaded. "It's a legal conclusion for a witness to say, 'I was raped' or 'sexually assaulted.' … That's for a jury to decide." His concern is that the word rape so inflames jurors that they decide a case emotionally and not rationally.

The real question for Judge Cheuvront, then, is whether embedded in the word sex is another "legal conclusion"—that the intercourse was consensual. And it's hard to conclude otherwise. Go ahead, use the word sex in a sentence. Asking a complaining witness to scrub the word rape or assault from her testimony is one thing. Asking that she imply that she agreed to what her alleged assailant was doing to her is something else entirely. To put it another way: If the complaining witness in a rape trial has to describe herself as having had "intercourse" with the defendant, should the complaining witness in a mugging be forced to testify that he was merely giving his attacker a loan?

Since the jury wasn't told particular words words were banned, the first trial, unsurprisingly, ended in a mistrial. Stephanie again:

Can you imagine being a juror at a trial where a man is accused of not even sexual assault, but just sex? A trial where the victim (oh, crap. Forgot we can't call her that.) the "complainant" can't say she was forced? A trial where the victim never accuses her attacker of rape? If you were a juror, how seriously would you take a woman who testified about what happened to her for 13 hours without ever using a single word that implied that she thought what had happened to her was a crime?

Before the second trial, and to prove a point, Tory's lawyer tried to get "sex" and "intercourse" banned from the court as well. To which I say: heh. Dahlia did too:

The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—sex—to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they'll just have to read the witnesses' eyebrows to sort out the difference.

Apparently, the second trial has been declared a mistrial by the judge, becaues he fears all the media attention will get in the way of jurors unbiased opinions. Seriously.

A reader of Stephanie's posts in the comments about a psychiatrist in Canda who studying how language events, especially those implying violence against women aren't just semantics, but create reality, a

"real-live reality where perpetrators don't go to jail for crimes they've committed because the language that's used has consent embedded in it. This is absolutely the most egregious example of this that I've heard...One of the examples Allan Wade gives is the problem in calling something 'sexual' that isn't 'sexual' at all. He says, 'If you use a frying pan to hit someone over the head, you don't call that cooking.'"

Okay, ladies of the blogosphere, let that be our rallying cry. Let's let out a collective "WTF??" loud enough for everyone to hear.

Markets are conversations and...

Okay, by now you know the Cluetrain Manifesto: Markets are conversations.

Today at work I stumbled across a great definition of marketing, courtesy of Seth Godin: "Marketing is an act that starts a conversation."

Real Food, Fake Entertainment, and Framing a Movement

The Ethicurean's Dairy Queen had a post today titled Truthiness and Real Food: Hellman's, get your paws off our framing! The title alone referenced, Steven Colbert, food and framing, so I had to read it. Turns out it touches on a lot more of the issues we've been covering this year in class. Hellman's Mayonnaise is starting a "real food" web campaign, and was trying to get bloggers to join in. I can't quite figure out what it all entailed, but apparently Unilever attempted to pitch an integrated marketing show (ie, "infotainment") to the Food Network, which turned them down, so they've now developed a "In Search of Real Food" website on Yahoo where people can share recipes and thoughts on "real", local, and fresh foods--and Hellman's mayonnaise.

What’s keeping me up so late with annoyance is the insidious way that Hellman’s/Best Foods is trying to co-opt the idea of real food by velcro-ing their manufactured "foodlike product" to it in this smarmy marketing campaign. It’s factory food: sterile, shelf-stable, and the "natural flavors" it mostly tastes like come from another factory, one that makes chemical compounds that mimic real food.

To emphasize her point, she posts the ingredients list for Hellman's. The fifth ingredient is high fructose corn syrup, and it gets worse from there. Now, I'm no snob. I think there's a place for Hellman's mayo, and I'm pretty sure one of those places is in my refrigerator. But "real" is never going to be an adjective I'm going to use to describe mayonnaise. Just like no one has ever described McDonald's and "good food." I've heard it described as many things--fast, convenient, addictive--but no one's ever going to confuse it with home cooking. It's a stand-in for when we're too tired/busy/poor for the real thing.

I refuse to link to the actual site, but I think it's worth a laugh to look at the original press release on PR Newswire.

You know you've made it when your frame is being co-oped by Unilever. I think "real food" is a good frame--the folks over at Farm Aid call it The Good Food Movement. Simple and effective. I've been struggling with framing this issue for a few months now-"organic" and "local" don't encompass it all; "slow food" is elitist. And although "sustainable" works as a concept, it's not a word that works with the public. I never even bothered with epicurean or agrarian...

And now for something completely different.

I'll admit the new Disney cartoon Ratatouille looked cute, but with the combination of being broke and still feeling well enough to look at food, I figured I'd pass on it for awhile. But according to Eating Liberally, I really should go see this movie. Its message?

Yes, even a lowly rodent can learn to cook, but just like the rest of us, his culinary endeavors will succeed or fail depending on the quality and freshness of his ingredients. Am I the only one who finds this message pretty radical
for an animated film supposedly aimed at kids? And it seems all the more astonishing when you contrast it to Pixar parent Disney’s Shrek the Third, with its endless tie-ins to processed foods that target toddlers’ taste buds.

Apparently the villain in the movie sells junk food. How awesome is that?

Now, I'm not naive enough to believe kids are going to trade in their popcorn for carrot sticks at the movie theater, especially after the Associated Press recently reviewed 57 programs aimed at encouraging kids to eat healthier, and found that all but four of them were complete failures. Apparently, one program flat-out bribed kids to eat healthy. To absolutely no one's suprise but the idiot who thought up that program, the kids stopped eating healthy when they stopped getting rewarded for it. I'd be willing to put money down that at least one of the four that didn't fail were grounded in some strong social marketing research.

I'm 28, for the record.

I had forgotten until today that I had posted my picture on The Age Project, in order to prove my suspicion that most people think I look younger than I am. Well, I was disproven. The average guess was 27, which is close enough. For those friends curious enough, the photo I posted is the same one I'm using for my Facebook profile.