Day: September 20, 2000

Violence Against Men Doesn’t Count

One of the more fascinating sexual dynamics in the media is how it is usually perfectly acceptable to depict violence against men as humorous while using the same tactics against women brings an immediate protest reaction. This was highlighted over the weekend when NBC announced it was pulling a Nike ad featuring American runner Suzy Hamilton.

The ad is a parody of horror films and starts with Hamilton in a remote wilderness cabin when “a chainsaw-wielding masked maniac” arrives on the scene. The only problem is that Hamilton is obviously in much better shape than the would be killer and leaves him eating her dust. The final shot shows the killer out of breath, limping away and ends with the tagline, “Why Sport?” which is quickly answered with “You’ll live longer.”

Apparently when this ad aired, NBC’s switchboard lit up with outraged viewers. Some parents were apparently upset at the horror spoof showing in prime time where children might see it, but there also concern about the ad depicting violence against women. USA Today quoted David Lubars, president of ad agency Fallon McElligott, saying,

I have loved almost everything Nike has done in the past 15 years. But this spot I did not like at all, because of the violence against women. I am not a creative prude in any way, but that’s not funny to joke about. It had me squirming. It’s something you can’t kid about.

The interesting thing here is that Nike ran a parallel ad that USA Today doesn’t even bother to mention and which apparently nobody objected to. In the ad a skateboarder in a crowd city street is confronted by a sword-wielding gladiator who repeatedly tries to kill the young man. As in the Hamilton commercial, however, the teenage boy repeatedly dodges and evades the gladiator’s murderous schemes and the ad ends with the “Why Sport? You’ll live longer” line.

Violence or the threat of violence in a Nike ad is apparently completely acceptable when the commercial features a man, but not when it features a woman.

Cathy Young on Women’s Health

Some days I think I could just replace this web site with a page saying “go read Cathy Young.” She really hits her stride in a Salon.Com article, Medical gender wars, which deflates a lot of the myths put out by individuals and groups that the medical establishment fails women due to sexism (the “patriarchal medicine” myth).

Young really drives home the hypocrisy of this claim in that activists can’t even decide amongst themselves whether a given health care approach is good or bad for women, leading to a damned if you do, damned if you don’t result.

What’s more, with some activists, “patriarchal medicine” can’t win no matter what it does. First, male doctors are accused of doing too many hysterectomies and gratuitously cutting up women’s bodies. (While hysterectomies are far more common in the U.S. than in Western Europe, this difference seems to reflect less gender bias than the overall scalpel-happy attitude of American physicians; it is just as stark with regard to male-specific surgical procedures like prostatectomy.) As a result, HMOs try to curb questionable hysterectomies and are accused of denying care to women. First, a highly politicized breast cancer movement claims that a terrible disease that affects only women has been neglected. Then, in 1999, a women’s health exhibit at the Maryland Science Center blames our society’s fixation on breasts as a “symbol of women’s sexual desirability” for a disproportionate focus on breast cancer to the exclusion of some other diseases that pose a greater threat to women.

Volunteers Whine, Sue Origin

There’s an interesting interview here about a lawsuit against Origin Systems by people who volunteered to do various things on Ultima Online. This is a derivative of the lawsuit against AOL by volunteers on that system.

In a persistent online role playing game like UO, typically there are going to be hardcore users who are going to play the game an unbelievable amount of time and are going to be helping newbies out with their problems as a matter of course. In the past, typically a company will have some sort of program so such people can have a more formal position within the game and in return typically give deep discounts or even provide service free to these folks.

With the AOL lawsuit and now the Origins lawsuit, however, the claim is being made that it is illegal to volunteer at a for-profit enterprise, period. If I tell Origin, hey I’m going to be playing your game 20 hours a week anyway, why not tell newbies they can seek me out for help and in return give me a discount on the game? According to this lawsuit, such agreements constitute a crime.

This is a good example of the New Economy meeting the old, rigid legal structure, and a lot of small and medium sized web sites are exposing themselves to liability because of it. One place I see this a lot is volunteers acting as moderators on discussion forums for small, but definitely commercial, web sites. On several of the web sites I run I’d constantly get e-mail saying, “User XX is out of control, why not appoint me or someone else as a moderator so we can deal with these problems when you’re busy with other things?” I’d love to, but since my sites are all commercial, that’s just a lawsuit waiting to happen.

I’m similarly concerned about people who write me wanting me to put their article on my web site. Most of the articles are very good, but I suspect that if I don’t compensate the author I’m also violating any number of laws regarding minimum wage.

You have to wonder how far this will can be taken, especially given the Open Source community ethos. It isn’t too much of a stretch from saying that it is illegal for me to volunteer for Origin to saying that if Red Hat can’t incorporate Open Source code I’ve written into their Linux package without compensating me, regardless of whether or not I want to be compensated.

Don’t think such lawsuits can’t reverberate. The lawsuits by Microsoft temps, who agreed to a contract when they were hired but then sued saying it wasn’t enough, is really changing the world of freelance journalism. I used to write for a couple papers with a pretty clear understanding — they had first time North American rights to my work, but I retained the copyright. Then several lawsuits involving temps came along and all of the newspapers I wrote for now wanted me to sign work-for-hire contracts, which I was unwilling to do.

Such lawsuits certainly provide a short term economic benefit to lawyers, and occasionally the plaintiffs suing, but in the long term they tend to have far reaching negative consequences that limit the sort of agreements that individuals can enter into and the sort of business models that can prevail on the Internet and in the real world.