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“Cougars” out, “Sugardaddies” in

Jill

Google has made the decision to block ads for “cougar” dating sites, which advertise the ability to set up older women with younger men. If Google were taking a stand against quasi-pedophiliac advertising (if that’s what the cougar ads even were), that would be fine. But they still allow ads for “sugardaddy” websites, which set up older men with “sugarbabies.” The problem seems to be with older women behaving in a “predatory” manner. It’s ok if older men want to exchange money and gifts for sex with younger women, but women wanting to have sex with younger men for the sake of mutual pleasure? Family-un-friendly!

37 thoughts on “Cougars” out, “Sugardaddies” in

  1. Remember that this is coming from the same Google that returns ZERO results when you search for the word “clitoris” (you know, the anatomically-correct, medical term for a female body part, not a euphemism) in a “safe” search, yet returns well over 3 million results for the word “penis” under the same conditions.

    Penises = good, clitorises = bad, apparently in any form.

  2. I’ve been somewhat amused that virtually every story on this has explicitly mentioned cougar life dot com*. Of course, an article in the freaking NY Times explaining the cougar phenomena and how a site is being prevented from advertising is far better for them than being able to place the ad in the first place. And it didn’t even cost them anything! Google should start charging money to loudly and publicly refuse to place ads.

    *Spelled that way to avoid the spam filter/avoid giving them more pagerank.

  3. Alexa–never knew that, thanks for sharing! So stupid…

    Just the terms sugardaddy and sugarbabies gives me the creeps. So interesting, however, that the connotation in those terms is (supposed to be) warm and fuzzy, while cougar has that aggressive element to it. (Older women looking to date = desperate, you know.)

  4. Why am I not surprised? Sugardaddies and Sugarbabies are totes family friendly because the title has DADDIES in it, of course. Or it’s totes family friendly because it shows the usual, comfortable paradigm of older wealthy man, younger woman. Women aren’t supposed to have agency (other than using sex for power). Women aren’t supposed to want sex for the sake of sex/orgasm. Women aren’t supposed to feel lust, or want younger men.

    Mighty sexist and puritanical of you, googledumbfucks. Just more of the same old double-standard.

  6. I haven’t heard “sugarbabies” before. Thanks kinda gross.

    Cougar life is looking at filing discrimination suits. I hope they win.

  7. Cougar life is looking at filing discrimination suits. I hope they win.

    Me too. Especially since the Sugardaddies site talks about older men giving their younger dates money (and trying to get young women to use the site by promising connections to older men who could help them financially). I mean, since when is grey-area prostitution family friendly? Oh, wait, it’s totes fine if the menz does it. Silly me.

    Is Bing this hypocritical? If not, maybe I’ll use that from now on.

  8. Marle, I really hope that all cougar/cub dating sites will take Google to the cleaners over this blatant discrimination.

    I am one of the men who want to seek out older women. I am 26.

    I stopped using their search engine in October 2008. I stopped using their web browser last week because of the Vibrant ads that kept showing up on the Ning web pages. I have yet to find a way to get rid of them, and until there is a way to get rid of Vibrant ad links, I will no longer use Google Chrome.

    And this discrimination is one more reason why I don’t have ads on my Blogspot, either.

  9. Alexa 5.18.2010 at 12:19 pm

    Remember that this is coming from the same Google that returns ZERO results when you search for the word “clitoris”

    That sounded like an urban myth, so I Googled it to check. I got about 5,520,000 results. (I got 43,400,000 results for “penis,” FWIW.)

    http://www.google.com/search?q=clitoris

    You might be searching from behind a firewall or something, but there are plenty of results on Google, the first link of which is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitoris

    Google is still being sexist re the “cougars” thing, but it doesn’t hide “clitoris.”

  11. Ooooh. That was completely an accident; I read right past it.

    NOW that makes sense. Sorry.

    And I just checked it to see what would happen. that’s oddly fucked up. No Wikipedia on the clitoris, but plenty of penis enlargement stuff?

  12. “Sugardaddy/sugarbaby” sounds so much creeper to me than “cougar” — the first terms just sound like very poorly-veiled incest playacting (“Who’s your daddy?” “…uh, probably NOT the guy I’m fucking right now.”) while the latter at least sounds slightly empowerful*.

    *I won’t go so far as to say actually “empowering” though…

  14. I would be interested to see a gender-based breakdown of Google’s various departments. These look like the types of editorial decisions made by thirtysomething men who think anything related to female sexuality is taboo, while any form of male-dominant sexuality is just a target market. I know I’m making a generalization on top of an assumption, but it’s my best guess at explaining such a clear double standard.

    I wonder if a well-deserved workplace discrimination lawsuit is brewing. If this is what the company’s public policies are like, I shudder to think what their internal, “unofficial” policies are like.

  16. As someone who is:

    1) Deeply involved in this industry and this sort of field with lots of relevant experience (but I don’t work at Google itself; actually one of its big competitors).
    2) Male, so it’s true that I have some privilege-blindness.

    I have to say, I doubt this is Google’s fault, I think it’s the fault of the content itself. I doubt there’s any meeting where the result was a master list that says “Clitoris bad, Penis a-ok”, but probably after taking a bunch of known sample porn sites and known non-porn sites, and playing with a bunch of weightings of various words and on associations between adjacent words and so on and so forth, you come out with something that has 0 false negatives in the sample set and the minimum number of false positives, and clitoris maximizing on “Not OK” probably fell out of that little optimization problem. If you look hard enough I’ll bet you’ll find other head-scratchers.

    Plus, once you get to the millions Google search results counts are wildly inaccurate. You find cases where even expanding all similar clauses says 1000s of results and on page 2 you find out that oops, there’s only 11. The number of “a lot” of results is practically random, so what’s really important is things like 0 entries vs. more than 10 pages of entries.

    Coming up with an anti-porn filter (SafeSearch) is a Hard Problem, and I put that in capitals not for emphasis but as an actual technical term that means it’s inherently really really difficult to do well.

    The fact is, the way people use “clitoris” and “penis” on the Internet and in relation to pornography and non-pornography is not even remotely similar. Therefore you cannot reasonably expect an anti-porn filter to treat them similarly. I expect that the false-positive rate of detcting “penis” in a document is much much higher. This reflects not sexism in the filter algorithms, so much as it reflects sexism in the discourse used on the Internet. The one place where Google could exhibit sexism is in their choice of “known good” sites to run their filters against and in how important they rate them (eg. anything that says Google or one of Google’s direct competitors or any national government’s official website is porn definitely won’t work even if it’s otherwise perfect; if it says some random person’s blog is porn, then it’s probably too bad for the random person).

    That said, yes, the gender breakdown throughout the industry is extremely male-skewed. The current stats I’m aware of says 22% of software engineers at tech companies are women, and falling since the graduation rate out of Universities or American colleges is even more heavily male-skewed and the ingrained sexism in the industry as a whole is probably worse than average.

    FWIW, Yahoo! SafeSearch has entries with SafeSearch on for both penis and clitoris, and Bing SafeSearch filters out both at max settings (both default to only filtering images and videos). You obviously can get different results from Google. I’m not sure if a much broader survey of their results will prove that Bing or Yahoo! are any better on average.

  18. I also just realized that whole thing is getting to be a bit of a derail. I’ll shut up now. Sorry.

  19. Ens, there’s a short list of some of the “banned” words here. If I understand correctly, you’re saying that pages containing the word “clitoris” are more likely to be porn than pages containing the word “milf”? And that, for some reason, Safe Search can happily filter out most of the obvious porn results for “milf”, but can’t do the same for the word “clitoris” (which, btw, has no porn in the first few pages of results)? IME, it’s rare to see the word “clitoris” on a porn site; it seems to be used mostly in sex ed contexts. Porn sites tend to use more casual language, so those who even care about the clitoris (which are in the minority) are probably going to use “clit” instead. (Given that they ban other slang words for male & female genitalia, I’d be okay with that.) Honestly, I don’t have nearly the same amount of experience in search engine programming (by which I mean I have none at all), but I’ve seen plenty of sloppy and absurd code in supposedly “professional” apps. And to me, it looks as though “Google’s filter… checks keywords and phrases” means it’s at least starting from a set list of words that a dev just made up.

  20. I agree that the content for “penis” and “clitoris” would be different, but why couldn’t even the wikipedia page on clitoris make it? Also, do porn sites really use the word clitoris? In written porn, I’ve really only seen “clit” used, not the full, correct spelling. “Clitoris” seems mostly used in sex education sites, etc, which should make it through the porn filter. If they don’t, then what are all the sites that talk about penises getting through for?

  21. Ens: So your basic assertion is that “clitoris” is more porny than “penis,” which is why Google won’t have it! On their safe search! I’m laughing so hard right now. Yes, because all porn flicks are full of “Rub my clit! RUB IT! Harder! NOW!” scenes.

    HA. I think it’s not on safe search because the dudes who are in charge of this shit don’t know what a clitoris is, but they’ve heard of the word and it has to do with chicks ‘n’ shit, so let’s LEAVE IT OUT JUST IN CASE.

  22. This debate is practically pointless. For one, SafeSearch operates on three different settings: Off, Moderate, Strict. Not just On/Off.

    Google’s default setting is Moderate. So in order for someone to even get the results (Google not showing results for clitoris), you would have to actually change your settings. So in a way you are preemptively saying “I don’t want to get results that may be deemed profane, obscene or sexual in nature”.

    The problem isn’t even if Google is sexist. If you remove any filters on the search engine, it will spit out anything you want for results. One of the Google employees probably added as many “dirty” keywords as they could find and used that as a filter.

    In regards to the advertisements, Google takes a more proactive stance in what ads show up on their web pages. The recent media attention with “cougars” is probably causing more problems for Google’s ad screeners than “sugardaddies”. Google has done this in the past as well. Namely those “Google Pay Cash” scams.

    1. The problem isn’t even if Google is sexist. If you remove any filters on the search engine, it will spit out anything you want for results. One of the Google employees probably added as many “dirty” keywords as they could find and used that as a filter.

      Wow, thank you for explaining that to us, Brandon! I feel so enlightened about what is and is not sexist, now!

      Let me explain something back:

      THAT MEANS SOMEONE DECIDED THAT “CLITORIS” IS “DIRTY” AND “PENIS” IS NOT. THAT MEANS WOMEN’S BODIES ARE DIRTY AND MEN’S ARE NOT. THAT IS MISOGYNISTIC.

  23. It doesn’t look like “clitoris” just brings up sites that safesearch doesn’t like. It’s that “clitoris” has been specifically blocked from safesearch.

    Google says:
    “The word “clitoris” has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.”

    However, if you misspell it, you can pull up a number of websites like “pain in my clitoritis” or “Clitoritis pictures bakugan” or whatever you’re looking for.

  24. I’ve stopped using Google as my search engine now. First the cougars, then the clitoris. Headshake. This is beyond ridiculous.

  25. I’d like to give Cara an award for “Most Appropriate Use of All Caps in the History of the Internet.” Cara, we’ll hear your acceptance speech any time you’re ready.

  26. The article says that “many” feminists don’t like the term “cougar” because of its predatory overtones.

    Apparently Google doesn’t like the term for the same reason.

    They can’t win!

  27. @Cara: Thanks for being condescending!

    Anyways, I am sure that words like “cock” and “dick” are blocked by Google’s SafeSearch. In fact *pulls up google.com*….ya they are blocked or non-sexual links are shown (I got Dicks sporting goods for the first link)

    Also, do you realize how many words and phases can be sexually laced? I bet the keyword list Google uses to filter sites is thousands or hundreds of thousands words long. The fact that Google still shows something for “penis” is practically insignificant. Now, if you can establish a trend saying Google is systematically fudging their results, then I will give what you have to say more thought. Otherwise, you are complaining about one word in a “sea of words”.

    Also, there is no guarantee that an employee crafted that list personally and decided to keep “clitoris” on the list. I would bet that some programmer made a program to grab the most popular keywords from porn sites and add them to the SafeSearch filter..

    You can also just follow Dominique’s advice…stop using Google. There are other search engines out there.

    1. Brandon, clearly I was not being condescending enough, as you missed my overall point: how condescending you were being by coming in here as a man (which, from your name and previous comments at this site, I have gathered you are) and telling us women when we can and cannot be offended about having our body parts construed as dirty. We call that “mansplaining” around here. It’s a shitty thing to do, and it results in a shitty reaction. Because strangely enough, women who notice sexism don’t like being told by people who don’t experience that same sexism that we’re making it up.

      That you compare “clitoris” — an anatomical name for a body part — with slang phrases like “cock” just goes to show how clearly you don’t get it, while simultaneously feeling entitled to tell women to shut the fuck up.

      But you know what’s always fun? Telling someone who is upset about a particular instance of oppression — and no, it does not matter how relatively small it is — that if they don’t like the -ism in question, they should just avoid said -ism! Because that always makes it go away. And it’s not like it’s everywhere. Problem solved. Again, thanks for helping us ladies out here.

  28. Oh, and thank you, Lance! My speech is as follows:

    I would like to thank the mansplainers, without whom my urge to use the caps lock would have remained at far more minimal levels. And to Sady, who I hope is out there listening, I would just like to say: Haha, take THAT! 😛

  29. I did a bit of research and I am beginning to think this may be more of a stupidity thing than a sexism thing.

    For example, “clitoral” and “vagina” both search just fine. In fact, the top three links for “clitoral” involve sex-based issues (not surprising.) And all of those links from “clitoral” probably contain the word “clitoris.”

    Yes, it is certainly possible that someone at Google decided that company policy was to bar discussion of clitori. Lord know it would only fit the bill. But given all of the other things which are accessible, it seems at least feasible that some idiot didn’t know what a clitoris was, or thought it was French for “child porn.” I mean, why allow searches for “clitoral” and not for “clitoris?” Makes no sense.

    Anyway, the question of whether Google as a company is sexist can probably be tested, by writing an appropriate letter to Google and seeing if they change the setting.

  31. @Sailorman Numerous people, including many doctors and sex educators have written to Google about this over the past couple of years, to no avail. If you do a search for “clitoris” and “Google” you’ll find that several bloggers have written about this to one degree or another as well. Quite obviously, there is some issue at Google in fear of the clitoris.

    And lol @ Cara. I’m so glad you responded to that non-brainiac. <3

  32. “ya they are blocked or non-sexual links are shown (I got Dicks sporting goods for the first link)”

    But those two things — having the word itself blocked and having porn results for the word blocked — aren’t the same. Blocking the porn results for “clitoris” wouldn’t change the first several pages of results in the slightest, so long as a consistent definition of “sexual” is used. “Penis” safesearch brings up info on erectile dysfunction, penis enlargement and sexual intercourse on the first page. Why’s it okay for little kids to learn about those things, but not to know what the *definition* of “clitoris” is?

    “One of the Google employees probably added as many ‘dirty’ keywords as they could find and used that as a filter.”

    Yeah, that would be the problem. That employee was clearly one who didn’t think through his choices very well. Given the information that Google keeps about its searches, it shouldn’t be *that* difficult to find the search terms that drag up mostly porn. “Clitoris” is just not one of those words.

    “I would bet that some programmer made a program to grab the most popular keywords from porn sites and add them to the SafeSearch filter..”

    Again, no. “Clitoris” is NOT a common porn site keyword, as anyone who’s seen more than a few porn sites can attest to. Maybe “clit”, or some slang word or euphemism, but Google doesn’t run on synonyms, as we can see from the penis/dick differences. If that is what Google was attempting to do, then their program has some major bugs that need to be addressed. If this was done programmatically, and the program was written correctly, “milf”, “sex”, and “anal” would all show up way higher on the “to block” list than “clitoris”. NONE OF THOSE WORDS ARE BLOCKED. Only the porn RESULTS are blocked, and even then some of the SS results are iffy — certainly less kid-friendly than the sex ed sites that pop up for “clitoris”. The evidence here points to a manually-compiled keyword list which was never double-checked for accuracy or completeness, possibly with some obvious design flaws thrown in. (Really, they should be concerned with the percentage of results for a given word that contain porn, not the percentage of porn sites that contain a given word — if 95% of porn sites contain the word “big”, but so do hundreds of billions of safe sites, then would you block the word itself from Google? Hopefully not!) Given that the SafeSearch feature is not exactly a flagship Google technology, and given how poorly it works, I’m guessing it was developed either by interns or as an afterthought.

    I don’t think that TPTB at Google are sitting in a tower steepling their fingers and plotting how to best oppress women, but accidental or ignorant sexism is still sexism. Once Google was notified about the issue several years ago, and chose to do nothing about it, it became lazy or spiteful sexism, which is also still sexism.

  33. Sorry, I meant penis/cock differences. In that case, Google blocks the slang word that is likely to bring up porn but not the technical term that isn’t, so we know they’re not blocking words that commonly appear on porn sites AND their synonyms.

  34. For additional reference, these words got results in strict safesearch:
    vagina
    vulva
    penis
    glans
    labia
    breast
    testicle
    testes
    sex

    These returned no results (all returned ‘naughty’ results in moderate safe search):
    boobs
    cock
    tits
    twat
    pussy
    shit
    clitoris
    cunt
    fuck

    Clitoris is definitely out of place, although if you look at the image search unfiltered for both clitoral/clitoris, clitoris does get more pornographic pictures. The same doesn’t seem to hold for a regular web search, though.

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