December 2011 – Page 5

Emma Sullivan vs. Sam Brownback: A marketing case study

The biggest screwup out of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s office of late is easy: tattling on an 18-year-old to her high school for some juvenile comment she made on Twitter during a Youth in Government field trip to the capitol. I mean, seriously: Emma Sullivan says, to her mob of 60 whole Twitter followers, “Governor Brownback sucks.” Brownback’s staff runs to YinG and Sullivan’s school to say, “Waah! Your student is being mean!” And supposedly Sullivan is the immature one.

One thing Brownback’s office didn’t do wrong, although they’re taking some flak for it, was monitoring Twitter for mention of Governor Brownback. This isn’t creepy or paranoid–it’s actually marketing best practice. Online social media offers people, businesses, and organizations unprecedented access to the feelings and opinions of their target audiences. If you hear that people are criticizing you about a certain issue, you’re now able to reconsider your stance on it, make a note to address it publicly in the future, or even communicate with aggrieved individuals directly. Or if you see that some high-school student has tweeted that you suck, you can roll your eyes and say, “Nice. Really mature” and move on. (Or show some respect to a constituent and reply, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Why do you think the governor sucks?” Or be silly and reply, “No, YOU #blowalot… for tweeting about the governor when you could just ask him yourself. What can we do for you?” There are a hundred ways to handle it before you get to tattling.)

But there’s one comment from Brownback’s director of communication, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, that makes me think she’s completely ignorant of the functions of her own job:

That wasn’t respectful,” responded Sherriene Jones-Sontag. “In order to really have a constructive dialogue, there has to be mutual respect.”

1. When someone tells you you suck on Twitter, she’s probably not attempting to start a constructive dialogue–she’s probably just venting. And/or goofing around with her friends.

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Dr. Erik Fleischman and Involuntary Sterilization

Via Femonomics, we find a really disturbing post from Dr. Erik Fleischman, an American doctor practicing in Tanzania who brags about participating in an involuntary sterilization, calling the doctor who performed the procedure a “hero.” After a pregnant patient’s heart stops beating on the operating table during a C-section (because they screwed up the epidural and then didn’t monitor her vital signs), Dr. Erik performs rib-cracking CPR, and his partner doctor ties the patient’s tubes:

“Daktari, the epidural injection must have gone too high and paralyzed all her nerve function,” I said as I started doing chest compression over her sternum.. I heard a rib crack with a loud POP under my hand and I winced.
“Yes Daktari. I believe that is correct,” said Dr. M. She is a young woman and this is her fifth baby. She has a good heart.”
Fifth baby, I thought. Holy shit. All I could think of was five orphans.
“C’mon, cmon,” I said to no one in particular, “this cannot go down like this.”
As I pumped on her chest I saw Dr. M working inside her belly with his one good hand. With her body heaving back and forth from the chest compressions it must have been like trying to do a tattoo in a car on a bumpy road.
“How’s she doing down there, Daktari?” I asked.
“Fine. I am tying her tubes. I think she does not need another baby after this.” Dr. M was a cool character. I was wondering if she was going to survive the next five minutes and he was already doing family planning.
“Cmon, cmonnnnnnnnnnn…………..”

Suddenly her eyes opened up and she gasped loudly like someone inhaling a first breath after nearly drowning. I felt her heart. It was beating again. I”m a Buddhhist, but I reflexively said: Jesus.

“Daktari, she’s back,” I said, “She’s back.”
“Excellent work, Daktari. It is good that you were here tonight. It is good that I hurt my wrist.” His version of Tanzanian karma, I suppose. “Daktari, I think we should finish quickly.”

I quickly washed my hands again and we finished up. I even closed the incision on her skin with a neat plastic surgery closure. This point of finesse would ultimately never be noticed through the stretchmarks and redundant skin of five babies, but it was the right thing to do. The patient didn’t remember anything that had happened. It was like she went away and then came back. We told her she had a baby boy. She asked why her chest was hurting. Dr. M told her not to worry about it. She was wheeled into the recovery room. Dr. M. told me to go home. He would handle it from here.

The post has been taken down, but it’s cached here if you want to read it.

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What is a representative sex worker?

This is a guest post by Wendy Lyon.

This is a cliché that anyone who advocates for sex workers’ rights will be familiar with. Faced with a sex worker who defies the abolitionist stereotype of a person physically or economically coerced into prostitution, who thinks their job is ok and isn’t desperate to leave it (but could if s/he wanted to), and who argues that the solution to the negative aspects of sex work is decriminalisation and enforceable rights, the inevitable response is: You’re not representative. Why should the law be made for you?

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

Post a short description of something you’ve written this week, along with a link. Make it specific — don’t just link your whole blog.

The manliest manly-man soda known to man

Have you ever hit “pause” on your romantic comedy, set your Diet Dr. Pepper down on the coffee table (cautiously, so as not to smudge your nail polish), and said to your vacuous, tittering girlfriends, “This diet drink isn’t doing it for me. I think I need a Dr. Pepper TEN”? And then a guy on a four-wheeler busts through the wall and slaps the Dr. Pepper TEN can out of your hand, because that drink is for men? Probably not, because the very can containing a Dr. Pepper TEN is so overtly manly that your hand would tremble too much to pick it up. It’s a man’s drink. For men. Who are manly. And not women.

And what does this magical elixir of manliness have in it? Battery acid, certainly. Bear sweat. Live scorpions. Just a hint of teargas.

Alternately: Ten calories.

Hey, that’s ten manly calories. (Transcript below the jump.)

So yeah, the ad is over-the-top macho and misogynistic, such that analysis will have to follow in a future post because a) the ad is so very self-aware, and b) I wouldn’t freaking know where to start. But here’s one place: This is your manly super-dude beverage, Dr. Pepper TEN, now with ten calories. As opposed to your girly-girl Diet Dr. Pepper, which has no calories. Same formula, same “23 flavors.” Just… ten calories. Instead of no calories. And a gunmetal-gray can. So the difference between romantic-comedy wussy girl drinks and mountain-man alligator-wrassler drinks is… ten calories.

Which I guess explains all the chest hair I’ve been growing. Thanks a ton, regular, 150-calorie Dr. Pepper.

Also: The competitors in the Dr. Pepper Tuition Throw at today’s SEC championship game? Two women. What’s next, the 2011 Aflac Pedicure-off? Good lord.

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Yes, Emma Sullivan is definitely lucky she’s not Ruth Marcus’s daughter.

As are we all.

If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smartalecky [She actually said “smartalecky.” I didn’t just add that. -Ed.], potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.

Also, that smartphone? The one you posed with, proudly displaying the tweet in which you announced that Brownback “sucked” and added the lovely hashtag #heblowsalot? Turned off until you learn to use it responsibly.

I have to make one note about all of the pearl-clutching over Emma Sullivan’s “#heblowsalot” tweet: She didn’t actually say it to Governor Brownback. That part was a joke. The reactions to her “rudeness” and “potty-mouthedness” are of such a scale you’d think she’d run up to him and yelled, “You blow! A lot!” before running away, cackling gleefully, but she just said it to her friends using the language teenagers use when they talk to each other. Rude? Maybe. I myself will cop to being a little bit rude when I tweet about TV or politics or football, but I’ve never been ordered to write a letter of apology to Robert Kirkman, Robert Bentley*, or Tim Tebow. Crude? Sullivan’s derisive teenage tweetspeak is hardly the crudest thing ever said about the governor, online or off. Knowing Brownback, it probably wasn’t the crudest thing said about him that day.

There seems to be this belief, perhaps promulgated by a generation that passed most of its social media around in folded notes when the teacher’s back was turned, that Twitter is a bullhorn that draws attention and raises one’s voice above the fray. Folks, Twitter is the fray. While it’s true that what you put out on the Internet lives there forever, it’s also true that in a world where Kanye West ALL CAPS TWEETS to an audience of more than five million, an 18-year-old sending out a tweet to her 60 followers is the digital age’s equivalent of joking around in the food court at the mall. By raising a fuss over Sullivan’s tweet, Brownback’s aide was basically standing up on a table and yelling, “Did you hear what she just said about the governor?!” drawing the attention of a mall full of people who wouldn’t have known a thing about it otherwise.

(In this analog, Ruth Marcus is following her own daughters from Sbarro to Dippin’ Dots, listening to their conversations and ready to step in with a wrist-slap for “potty-mouthed”ness.)

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Jaclyn Friedman on What You Really Really Want, Plus Live Chat Next Week

Two weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of interviewing author, activist, speaker, former Feministe guest-blogger and my friend Jaclyn Friedman. Jaclyn’s latest book, What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety is out now, and should go on every Smart Girl’s reading list (it also makes for a great gift). It’s a feminist-minded guide to relationships, sex and love without judgment and with lots of exercises to help you figure out what you’re actually looking for. It is fantastic and everyone should read it.

It’s also incredibly rich and complex, and there’s a lot to cover. I asked Jaclyn about a few parts of the book that I found particularly interesting, and our conversation is below. She has some pretty incredible things to say, so I would really recommend checking out the video (transcript is below the fold). And a million thank-yous to Marc Faletti for shooting and editing the thing.

And to make this even more fun, Jaclyn and I are going to speak again, live on video, on Wednesday December 7th at 2pm EST — just come to Feministe for details on how to watch. The purpose of that chat will be to answer reader follow-up questions. So of course feel free to discuss the book and this video in the comments, but also email any follow-up questions to feministe@gmail.com, or tweet at me (@jillfilipovic) with the hashtag #WhatYouWant. I’ll pick a handful of Q’s and address them to Ms. Friedman live. Now, the interview!

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Wait, is it 2005 again?

“Back Off, Angry Commenters: Has the Internet unleashed new levels of bile?” by Katie Roiphe:

A new species has risen from the shallows of the Internet: the angry commenter. Sure, there is a long tradition of inspired cranks and interested retirees who have always written letters to the editor, but something in the anonymity and speed and stamplessness of the Internet has unleashed a more powerful and uncontrolled vitriol. I am not here talking about the thoughtful, intelligent comments, which also abound, but rather the bile unloosed, flashes of fury and unexamined rage that pass as “comment.”

BREAKING: People are mean on the internet.

Seriously, people who write asinine, been-done-ten-years-ago pieces like this should not have jobs at major media outlets.

It is possible to write something new and interesting about internet comment dynamics, and online abuse. That does happen, with some regularity. But “OMG commenters can be so MEAN!” is not it. And considering her entire history and basically everything she has ever written, I am genuinely confused as to why Katie Roiphe maintains a job as a “writer.”

Siri: Total Misogynist.

The big news of the week is that Siri, the iPhone 4s’s virtual assistant, is apparently unable to find anything related to women’s health. Ask her to find an abortion clinic in New York City — a place with a few abortion clinics — and she can’t locate a single one. She can, however, direct you to several pro-life Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Ask for contraception, and she doesn’t understand the term “contraception.” And as Amanda figured out, it’s not just reproductive health stuff that she can’t get right — it’s anything related to female sexuality at all (she’s great, though, when it comes to male sexual needs):

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice. And if you should you need erection drugs to help you through your encounter with one of the escorts, Siri is super-helpful. She produced twenty nearby drugstores where Viagra could be purchased, though how — without a prescription — is hard to imagine. But no matter how many ways I arranged mouth-based words — such as “lick” or “eat” — with the word “pussy,” Siri was confused and kept coming up with a name of a friend in contacts. Of course, one could assume Siri knows something about him that I don’t know.

I actually tested this out too, since I recently upgraded my 2005 flip phone to an iPhone 4s. I stood on a street corner in Brooklyn with my friend P, and we came up with all kinds of sex-related questions to ask Siri, and then we died laughing because we are children. Since the Siri story broke, Feministe Friend Nabiha also sent on some questions she asked Siri, which I recreated (thanks Nabiha!). My results:

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On World AIDS Day

A few things to read (snippets posted here; click the links for the full articles):

Fight AIDS with Family Planning.

The situation in Mityana in not unusual; in fact it is far too common. 215 million women worldwide are not using an effective method of contraception despite the fact that they want to avoid pregnancy. The largest segment of these women live in sub-Saharan Africa and many are at risk of HIV. Women account for 60 percent of people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, and young women between the ages of 15-24 are up to eight times more likely to be infected than men of the same age.

December 1st marks World AIDS Day and this year’s theme is “Getting to Zero.” Much of this day will be focused on a celebration of new technology and science that can help prevent HIV through daily treatment and male circumcision. And we should celebrate those advances — but we should also not lose sight of women who need both family planning and HIV services.

Does the Global Community Care?

This year, on World AIDS Day, the scientific promise for the end of HIV is the brightest it’s ever been. We’re seeing radical new uses for antiretroviral drugs – to prevent the transmission of HIV as well as treat its effects. We’re poised, medically, to bring this epidemic to its knees.

In the face of this great opportunity, the global community responded in one voice, “Forget it. We don’t care.” Things are hard all around, you know, and foreigners with HIV don’t vote in domestic elections. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria just canceled its next round of grants. The WHO is laying off staff. Bilateral donors are cutting aid to global health. Instead of breaking the cycle of HIV transmission, developing nations will be lucky if they can protect the people they already have on treatment.

That may sound dramatic, but look at the numbers. The Global Fund asked donors for $20 billion. It received $11.5. Everyone from Germany to the USA reneged on their pledges of support.

As Long as Homophobia Lives, AIDS Won’t Die.

MSM [Men who have sex with men] are among the most-at-risk populations in Zambia for HIV and AIDS, chiefly because they are “hidden,” unable to access or ask about health services freely due to prejudice and blatant homophobia in traditional African society. As a result, MSM have a high risk of dying of HIV/AIDS-related illness — a scandalous statistic in an era when many HIV-positive people are living productive and optimistic lives with free modern treatment.

No Retreat in the Fight Against AIDS [Ed: Why yes I am linking to an op/ed by George W. Bush. I can’t believe it either].

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