Sex Toys In The Subway And Other Lowdown Delights

Immediate tease disclaimer: I blog about copyright-related issues. This is that.

Sex Toys for boys but not for girls?

How fair is that, in an advertising context, in the underground? Well, there was a law suit by Dame.com against the MTA. Apparently, the MTA's rules have or had no issue with advertisements targeting erectile dysfunctional males, but they drew the line at displaying inserts for ladies.

Among other things, Dame claimed:

“The MTA was disproportionately applying their anti sexually-oriented business clause to women’s pleasure advertisements, which is unconstitutional. They allowed erectile dysfunction advertisements to run while denying us…”

Legal blogger Jeff Greenbaum for the law firm Frankfurt Kurnit Klein and Selz PC  offers legal analysis. It looks like the court may still be out (to coin a phrase) on whether MTA patrons will be treated to mind boggling illustrations of fun stuff for ladies anytime soon.  There appear to be illustrations on the fkks post.

Lexology link:  

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ab7aa941-372e-48cb-8c8e-538b29d576a8

Original link: 

https://advertisinglaw.fkks.com/post/102hbky/selling-sexual-pleasure-on-the-subway

 

The Illogic of tracking-based advertising.

Upon reading Seth Zawila's legal blog for the UK-based law firm Robins Kaplan LLP about how the UK's supreme court blocks a multi-billion class action suit, this writer's mind wandered to a personal peeve.

Lexology link: 

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c7fe7d8e-992e-4a63-a9d4-48e534c982c2

 

Original Link:  

https://www.robinskaplan.com/resources/blog-posts/2021/11/united-kingdom-supreme-court-blocks-multi-billion-dollar-class-action-suit-against-google

"The claimants alleged that Google misused the data of millions of iPhone users under the DPA by tracking user internet usage even when users were assured in notices that they would be opted out of such tracking by default."

Apparently, to pass the smell test of the supreme court in the UK (and no doubt in other supereme courts) one has to show actual, provable financial harm, not merely annoyance or exposure to the risks of identity theft.

It seems to me, the wrong people were suing.

How often have you purchased a product online (happily, voluntarily, without clicking on anyone’s ad), only to be bombarded later with adverts for the exact same product?  Where is the return on investment for whoever makes Origins Bar Pulls in paying AdNonsense to show ads to a client who has no further interest in buying more of what they already bought? 

Once one has made a purchase, paid reminders are a waste of the producer’s budget. They can lawfully and appropriately email the customer directly.

Why not further personalize the obvious result of purchaser-stalking by posting “Thank you, Rowena Cherry, for buying 30 of these exact bar pulls. We hope you don’t return them! (As you did the Glide-Rites).”

It would have made more sense if Celeste had stalked me with ads in the footer of an online newsletter.

I wonder whether authors who pay Facebook and their like for pay per view targeted ads are wasting their marketing budget in similar fashion? Perhaps one should pay for click-throughs, and not for "impressions". 

Bar pulls, by the way are not sex toys. In no way do they resemble a Prince Albert piercing.... but one simply had to get that (link) in.  One will do it again. 

https://metro.co.uk/2018/04/27/prince-albert-piercing-7502229/

Does mentioning a couple of products make this writer an influencer?  Highly doubtful! For a start, one is not being paid, and one receives no perquisites.

Bad??? Influencers:

https://www.squirepattonboggs.com/-/media/files/insights/publications/2021/11/brands-influencer-marketing-practices-in-regulators-crosshairs-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic/brandsinfluencermarketingpracticesbrocure.pdf

An international ensemble cast at Squire Patton Boggs has developed an 8-page .pdf about the influence of influencers, and on what regulators are cracking down. Or should that be "down on what regulators are cracking"?  That sounds too Yoda to be natural.

The lawyerly writers on influence peddling of the marketing kind are Marisol C. Clark, Daniel Carlton, Alan L. Fricl, Rosa Barcelo, Kyle R. Dull, Natasha Marie (none of whom to my knowledge have anything to do with anything seamy-/sex toy-/or subway-related other than a familiarity with what is in the regulators crosshairs). For businesses they dryly and most professionally recommend a comprehensive review of online advertising practices.  (One agrees.)

Problems with regulators mostly result from misleading advertisements or claims, or from misleading by omission.

Writing as a questionable logomanic, this writer would say that almost ALL advertisements by their very nature meet the definition quoted by Squire Patton Boggs lawyers of causing the average consumer to take a transactional decision that they would not otherwise have taken.

Weaselly words and claims abound on television.  So, too, does execrable grammar. More of that another time.  A great deal of good would be done for literacy and education if advertisements were required to be copy-edited by a grammarian. Moreover, for the sake of critical thinking, rather than the government suing advertisers, there ought to be community service spots parsing some of the adverts. It would be far more amusing.

For instance, ranting a tad here, if a new Medicare Part C program offered crowns, caps, implants, bridges, deep root scaling and/or planing, they would surely say so.

Thus when a very attractive nonogenarian male croons at you about fillings, extractions and dentures, and so much more, you should realize that you are getting Amish level dental coverage free with your seductive-sounding plan.

On the other hand, some of these FRRRREEEEE  programs being advertised with benefits varying by zip code appear to be very thinly veiled income redistribution program. Color me critical.

Critical thinking is a valuable defense against the dark arts of advertising.

By the way, SFWA and AG are probably still offering LIG Insurance consultations to SFWA members.

https://www.ligmembers.com/sfwa/

Parting word:

Delightful word of the day: logorrhea

If you know someone who likes both words and poop jokes, pass it on.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

In Defense of Unsuspicious Immersion

The May 2018 issue of PMLA (the journal of the Modern Language Association) contains an article by Faye Halpern titled "Beyond Contempt: Ways to Read UNCLE TOM'S CABIN." The author describes how a beta reader of her dissertation remarked on the "contempt" with which Halpern obviously regarded the "sentimental" aspects of the novel. Halpern confesses that she somewhat took pride in her disdain for the work she was studying, because this reaction proved her qualifications as an academic critic, one who isn't taken in by the overt plot and seduced by the novelist's attempt at evoking emotion from the reader. A proper critic rejects "what we perceive as the surface meaning for a deeper meaning," a technique that has been labeled the "school of suspicion" and "paranoid reading." Halpern notes the response of another critic whose approach to UNCLE TOM'S CABIN she found "fascinating and appalling" because it dared to mention the real-world background for the novel's scene of the death of Little Eva—the actual rate of infant and child mortality in the nineteenth century, hence the frequent motif of innocent children's deaths in Victorian fiction. What Halpern found "appalling" at that earlier stage in her career was the other critic's "strong and sympathetic reaction to the text."

Now, I've written academic criticism myself, and I can rejoice in a keen, multi-layered analysis of a literary work. I endorse the principle that a work may hold dimensions and meanings of which the author is unconscious, maybe even contrary to the author's stated ideas and purposes. I believe, however, that a proper critic can (and should) begin with what Halpern calls "unsuspicious immersion" in the narrative. If you don't understand, preferably from personal engagement with the story, what the author claims to be doing, how can you answer the fundamental critical questions: What is the author trying to do in this text? Does the author succeed in this aim? And is it worth doing?

As Halpern says, a novel such as UNCLE TOM'S CABIN "does something to many of its readers, and what that something is depends on how a reader reads." One feature of this novel in particular is that it functions as a "literacy manual"; containing many scenes of characters reading and interpreting books, it apparently "takes pains to teach its readers to read properly." Yet, in Halpern's opinion, the novel is also in some sense an "illiteracy manual." Her reason for this label: "It teaches its readers to think of it as real, to think of its characters as real people."

That's the point where I gasped in disbelief and mild horror. How ELSE is one supposed to read a novel? Isn't that type of immersion ("unsuspicious" openness to the story) exactly what fiction invites? Granted, that's not how we teach English students to read and how professional critics are supposed to approach texts. Those kinds of reading, however, should build upon an initial receptivity to the story. How can we critique a work intelligently if we don't give it a fair chance in the first place?

According to C. S. Lewis in AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM, "We can find a book bad only by reading it as if it might, after all, be very good. We must empty our minds and lay ourselves open." At another point in the same book, he discusses the reading tastes of the "unliterary." Such people don't care about style, theme, or depth of characterization. If anything, those elements distract them from what they want in stories—excitement, suspense, and vicarious pleasure. Their reading is "unliterary," though, not because they enjoy excitement, suspense, etc., but because they're oblivious to anything else in fiction. "These things ought they to have done and not left others undone. For all these enjoyments are shared by good readers reading good books."

Likewise, Tolkien refers to what we're calling "unsuspicious immersion" in his essay "On Fairy Stories," where he discusses the concept of willing suspension of disbelief. In his view, that's not enough. Rather, he says, "But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator.' He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside." He calls this "enchanted" state of mind Secondary Belief.

If Tolkien and Lewis don't qualify as academic authorities on the proper way to read a story, who on Earth does?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Skeptical Thinking

Two articles in the March-April issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER deal with critical, scientific-oriented mental habits, which are usefully relevant to thoughtful world-building. I subscribe to this magazine, which tackles pseudoscientific beliefs and theories of all types, mainly because exploration of topics such as UFOs, Bigfoot, poltergeists, and many other subjects in the fields of the paranormal and cryptozoology can yield story ideas (and also keep fictional characters who encounter such phenomena from seeming too gullible, if they're aware of the major arguments against, say, telepathy or channeling spirits). Some articles do take a blatantly anti-religious stance, but not enough to put me off the magazine as a whole. "Skepticism" doesn't mean "cynicism" or stubbornly doubting everything. As used in this publication, it means keeping an open mind, asking questions, and being ready to change one's beliefs as evidence demands.

The parent organization that publishes SKEPTICAL INQUIRER is here:

Center for Inquiry

"Why We Believe—Long After We Shouldn't," by Carol Tarvis and Elliot Aronson, analyzes the well-known phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. Once we've made up our minds on a topic, further information that contradicts or invalidates our belief or position makes us uncomfortable. The idea that we've made a mistake in holding a certain belief threatens to undermine our self-concept as intelligent, informed, morally upright people. We tend to pay more attention to and give more credence to data that support our position (confirmation bias). Social media exacerbate this problem. As everyone knows, Facebook (for instance) makes it easy to control our feed so that we end up in a bubble where we encounter only information that agrees with the beliefs we already embrace. Confronting evidence that we made a mistake in choosing the last car we bought (one of the authors' examples) and consoling ourselves by seeking out facts that reinforce our original high opinion of the vehicle is one thing. Letting confirmation bias rule us in matters such as politics or religion is more serious. This article uses the metaphor of a pyramid to illustrate how confirmation bias can drive people on opposite sides of an issue further apart. Imagine two people starting near the top of the pyramid, pretty close together. Often, at this point, "we are faced not with a clear go-or-no-go decision, but instead with ambiguous choices whose consequences are unknown or unknowable." Forced to make a decision, often an "impulsive" one, "we justify it to reduce the ambiguity of that choice." The more actions we take to justify our commitment to that initial choice, the nearer to the bottom of the pyramid we move, so that the two people who started close together at the top end up getting further and further apart. The authors acknowledge that "it's good to hold an informed opinion and not change it" every time a possible objection comes along. At the same time, though, it's "essential to be able to let go of that opinion when the weight of the evidence dictates." I'm reminded of C. S. Lewis's discussion of faith, which, he explains, doesn't mean blindly believing apparently impossible things. It means that once we've reached a certain belief (in his example, in God) for what we consider good reasons, we should stick to that belief unless we encounter solid evidence to disprove it, not let every adverse life event or shift in our emotions override our rational commitment.

"The Virtuous Skeptic," by Massimo Pigliucci, outlines the ethical principles a person intelligently seeking truth should embrace. Humility—knowing one's limitations and recognizing what kinds of expertise are needed to produce an informed opinion on any particular question—heads the list. The author lays out a table of "epistemic virtues"—curiosity, honesty, objectivity, parsimony (Occam's Razor), etc.—and the opposite "epistemic vices"—closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, self-deception, etc. The article ends with a list of questions we should ask ourselves, which apply well to any argument, scientific or not (slightly paraphrased and shortened): Did I carefully consider my opponent's arguments instead of dismissing them? Did I interpret my opponent's statements in the most charitable way possible (very important in politics!)? Did I entertain the possibility that I could be wrong? Am I an expert in this area, and, if not, have I consulted experts? Did I check the reliability of sources? Finally, "do I actually know what I'm talking about, or am I simply repeating somebody else's opinion?"

Critical thinking is hard work!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt