Pretty close, I’d say.
Here are my Top Ten ways it is unethical:
1. It’s full of lies. Women do NOT make only 77% of what men do in the same jobs. The fact that President Obama blithely quoted this infamous canard doesn’t make it any more respectable. This is the smoking gun of feminist activist hackery.
2. A close second is the completely unreliable “1 in 5 women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.” Yes, what President Obama did to a stranger after voting can add to that stat…or not, depending on what the woman being polled chooses to call “sexual assault.”
3. The stat about women who were A students earning as much as men who were C students is similarly bogus. The study apparently being fucking referred to was about high school grades, not college grades. It was also widely distorted in the media, which claimed that the finding was that “high-achieving female students still won’t earn as much as male counterparts who didn’t work quite as hard” [TIME], which explains nothing about what jobs we are talking about, or career choices. More female attorneys, for example, go into family law; more male attorneys go into tort litigation. Trial lawyers are famously non-academic–they are combative, aggressive and street smart, and the good ones become millionaires. What does this prove about gender discrimination? Not one thing.
The University of Miami study, published recently in the Eastern Economic Journal, show that a one-point increase in high school GPA raises annual earnings in adulthood by around 12 percent for men and 14 percent for women. It was not directed at gender bias issues at all, nor did it prove any.
4. Apart from substance, the ad is one more coarse and cheap bit of sensationalism employing assaultive vulgarity to get attention. This is cultural rot, nothing more. Gutter language doesn’t illuminate or explicate, and used as it is here, it doesn’t even convey genuine passion or emotion. This is the pseudo kiddie-porn equivalent of TV ads for Go Daddy.com featuring a busty actress making sexual innuendos to attract attention to a product having nothing to do with busty actresses. An ad currently running for a cable show has the host talking about the time he “got crabs” but how he’s going to go to an “orgy” anyway. HA! A crab orgy, get it! See, he made you think he was talking about sex, isn’t that clever? In a 7 PM commercial? No, it’s not clever. Just cheap and tawdry, like having a lot of little girls yelling “fuck” at you.
5. This isn’t even a genuine ad promoting feminist objectives. This is an ad exploiting feminists themes to sell T-Shirts.
6. This is child exploitation. How many of these girls understand what they are talking about? How many know what fuck means, or understand what rape means?Educational psychologist Lori Day noted in a comment thread about the video,
“The older girls probably understand, but the younger ones have gotten an acting gig. They probably have stage parents all too happy to put them on the internet. The ad could have been more effective without using the girls in this way and by letting their authentic voices shine through. Sometimes less is more, and this is one of those times. I found this ad to be clickbait on top of a vehicle for selling t-shirts, and that’s ok for adults if they want to do that, but 6-year-olds? I don’t think so. I’ve worked with kids that age for 26 years. They can understand some aspects of sexism, but much of this video is above their heads, the the f-bombs were more than provocative–they were exploitative.”
7. It’s child abuse too.
8. How many of these children gave meaningful consent to having their images on the web for life shouting “fuck”? My guess: none. Children should not be pushed by their parents to expose themselves like this. (Frankly, I think the girls will eventually be even more embarrassed by the assault, obnoxious personas they were made to portray. It was like Nickelodeon in Hell.
9. The video portrays the worst negative stereotypes regarding feminists-–filthy mouthed, in-your-face, humorless, extremist harpies, using little girls instead of women.
10. The entire concept of the video is based on the worst of all rationalizations, #22. Comparative Virtue, or “It’s Not The Worst Thing.” Yes, I agree that gender discrimination is worse than little girls saying fuck and talking about being raped. So is nuclear war, genital mutilation and having acid thrown in your face. That doesn’t excuse making this video.
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Sources: FCKH8, University of Miami, US News, Rebecca Haines, Bell Jar
Ethics Alarms 
Most unethical ever? No. For that, I’d nominate “Head-On – Apply Directly To the Forehead,” which convinced a considerable number of people to spend remarkable amounts of money on… wait for it… small tubes of wax.
In my view, big money campaigns promoting silly homeopathic remedies for conditions that gullible people have found untreatable are even MORE unethical, because those buying the ads are willing to take advantage of the pain of potential customers to their own profit.
But I’ll grant that this one is AWFULLY damned close, for the reasons you cite. The people driving the ad were concerned about their paychecks, I’ll grant you. But dollars to donuts they actually believe this shit, too.
Deery is sad proof that they do believe this shit.
I never considered buying that product, but I (naively) assumed it worked. You could make a wintergreen stick that would act as a local pain reliever. I never thought of trying it because I assumed that is what it was and it would be sticky and smell strongly of wintergreen (why not just take a couple of aspirin?).
So then explain why more men than women lost jobs in the last recession.
If a women is unemployed, she makes exactly the same as a man who is unemployed ($0).
Ah, but 0.77(0) is also equal to 0, so you can argue that unemployed women are only paid 77% of unemployed men (or any other percentage you want to use.
You could, but you would be wrong. For a year after being laid-off (or fired, if you prefer) both men and women are eligible for unemployment insurance payments, unless they were fired for cause (embezzlement would qualify). How much that payment is, is determined by a formula based on rate of pay prior to termination. Thus, assuming women were paid less to begin with, they would also receive less in terms of unemployment insurance payments. I don’t know if anybody has done such a study, but it might be an interesting refutation of the 77% lie.
Also, and just to pull your leg a little, 0 times any variable is still 0, as you noted. However, this renders the variable irrelevant.
If it is true that more women lost more than men, then construct a meaningful argument around that statistic, but not around a thoroughly discredited statistic.
huh????
I can only think of, let me count…1,..2…a zilion reasons. More men in the sectors hardest hit by the recession. More women working part time. I’d say the biggest reason is that more men are in the job market than women to begin with.
So… in the last (current) recession, more men than women lost their jobs and sources of income… so this proves that women are discriminated against and held down?
Perhaps women worked in fields that were not as badly hit in the recession – construction (a male-dominated industry) still hasn’t fully bounced back, while nursing (a female-dominated industry) is still doing fine.
Perhaps companies are more reluctant to fire women, seeing as they are a protected class these days.
Perhaps rural areas got hit harder, where men are more likely to hold a job than in an urban setting.
Perhaps you’re correct, and men do tend to make more (for reasons having nothing to do with sexism) and thus WERE the first ones fired as a cost-saving measure. If she’s got a job, and he doesn’t, he may (theoretically) have been making more before, but he isn’t anymore.
There are any number of plausible reasons for the accurate stat you mentioned, but none of them come anywhere close to accounting for the fact that the studies which generated that number (and the 1 in 5 women number) were a rigged game at the outset, and spun into a nightmare of epic proportions by simply repeating the false findings again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again…
No, the prize winner is still the 10:10 climate change “No Pressure” ad. But this is definitely up there.
This is just Donald Silverman’s “Hey, asshole” letter and Dan Savage’s constant f-bombing taken to the next level. I don’t want to hear another word criticizing me for my own foul language or truth-telling concerning the current administration’s pet demographics. The other side just forfeited all claim to the moral high ground.
Steve, they never HAD any claim to the moral high ground.
I always wondered what kind of exhaustive statistics work you would need to do in order to actually prove gender discrimination in pay. In my workplace, it is roughly 50% women/50% men. Everyone has a Ph.D. The men make about 15% more (average) than the women. So, you could say that there is gender discrimination in my workplace. However, our pay is determined solely by education level, rank, and longevity/experience. Women have been promoted in rank at the same rate as men. What is the difference? The men in the group have more experience/longevity than the women (on average), but in a casual ranking, that would be invisible. More of the women got their Ph.D. after being hired (which affects pay). So it looks like they are being paid less than a man with the same amount of experience, but the earlier Ph.D. results in higher pay based on the formula. What study has actually looked that closely to discover the cause of pay inequity?
Women seem to choose life paths that lead to lower pay at a higher rate than men (take longer to graduate, go into teaching fields, take a job that requires less travel). To eliminate this would require the elimination of women’s free will.
The big issue here is that people can exploit children in ads, TV and film to obscene degrees and get away with it. When Samuel L. Jackson did this during the last election for a political ad, there was loud condemnation- but no consequences. When, in 2006, a 12 year old Dakota Fanning was led to enact a graphic child molestation in a movie, there was also a great outcry. Yet, not one of the principals involved was even indicted. This ad is only one step below that. These things won’t go away by themselves. When producers see that this sort of thing can be done with impunity, some will use it for their own projects. Then one will try to take it to an even lower level. As I’ve often said, a society can ultimately be judged by the regard it holds for its children.
Just remember, everybody: If any of the problems alluded to in the video change for the better (in the producers’ eyes), this stinky-pinky video will be extolled in goodthinkers’ history books as a “watershed moment.” Since things got better, obviously, such means were justified.
But, I do wish I had awakened this morning to news that (among other developments):
(1) The states’ Child Protective Services departments (or their equivalents), with responsibility for each of the respective children in that video, had taken each of the kids into custody and placed them in temporary foster homes, pending courts’ (assured) determinations of the unfitness of their current parents or guardians for any further contact with the children;
(2) The organization(s) which funded production of the video had their tax-exempt status revoked, and their operations suspended by court orders, while the IRS and FBI are rigorously investigating the organizations’ activities, including arresting and detaining suspects; and
(3) A group of fathers, including several who are fathers of children in the video, pledged to donate, for the remainder of their lifetimes, a significant portion of their take-home pay (or jobless or pension benefits) – leaving only at maximum, at any time, 77 percent of such received pay and benefits available to themselves – to a privately run fund for housing, health care, education, job training/re-training/placement, and legal defense for the children exploited in the video.
That video illustrates, perhaps as vividly and succinctly as any video intended to illustrate the opposite, that there is a sect of so-called feminists which prides itself on saying more about its own bigoted, hateful, amoral anarchism; more about its culpable members, and more about the harm such sociopaths as those members are capable of (we can now add hate crimes against their own, ostensible intended beneficiaries [“PRETTY?!”]), than anything it could ever say (right or wrong, for better or worse) about rape, equality, or any other real or imaginary issue.
So now we have Kiddie Mini-Vagina Monologues, with their “high”lights all conveniently spliced together to shock, “cleanse” and otherwise influence us, the unwashed, numbed Republic of Negligence. So behind-the-times, so quaint, that little video: Shock=none. “Cleansing?” Certainly, by the perverse standards of the producers. Influenced? Only in the sense of being entertained by advocates who could not be more successfully self-discrediting and self-defeating.
What we have in plain sight, in that video, is straight-from-their-heartlessness, pure-as-possible reflection of the character of the so-called feminists who are deluded enough to insist the piece makes any fair point for their “side:” Absolutely self-absorbed, filth- and perversion-obsessed little girls who will never grow up. Fools who deem themselves wise.
Lucky, perhaps I am too cynical. While I agree with your every point, I view this, or something like this, as inevitable ever since PETA started using nudity to get us to avoid eating chickens. PETA not only got away with it, but apparently vastly amused the news organs reporting it.
A lot of people across the country, Lucky (myself included) have echoed your sentiments. In a healthy society, the entire production would have been nipped in the bud with the set staffers walking out and reporting it to the police.
Organs are always amused by nudity, in my experience.
Would you believe I was trying for “organizations”? Stuypid computer…doesn’t proofread this stuff for me.
Never mind, it gave me a straightline, and I’m grateful.
Speak sternly to your computer, Dragon! It works for me.
It has voice recognition software…I’m actually kind of afraid of it….No, no…get back!!!
Jack:
While I hardly know where to start about that ad, I am curious as to why you maintain that the statistic coming out of our own CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/sv-datasheet-a.pdf) is wildly in error. Rape is one of the most under-reported of crimes. Many women have difficulty telling even their husbands. One woman whom I know didn’t tell anyone about her having been raped repeatedly as a child for almost fifty years. She became a lesbian, and that experience may have had a lot of influence on her.
Everyone knows of someone who has been sexually assaulted, and of two who haven’t told you. We can fudge the numbers with “Kobe Bryant rape” and “Julian Assange assault,” or discount groping on the subway, but that number does not seem out of line.
Even if the real number is 10%, it is not acceptable. Not even close. And a good reason for women to complain.
And because it is unacceptable, which nobody disagrees with at all, it is acceptable to state unequivocally dubious stats, estimates based on vague definitions and political objectives, as facts, like this video does? Nonsense.
Nothing in my post disputes the validity of the problem or the issue. Your last statement proves my point completely. We don’t know the number. Stop saying we do. Especially stop popping your head at me, little girl, and screaming a fake stat like we’re ignoring it. I’m not ignoring it—check my posts. But lying, hyping and exaggerating is unethical, and is one more strike against this despicable video.
In a one-minute ad, you don’t have the luxury of specifying a definition of terms. It would be like one of those comical drug ads, where they have to list every side-effect known to Man. Thirty-second political ads would last ten minutes, and no one would bother listening to them.
Standards need to be practical. If a statement is materially correct under a reasonable set of assumptions, I fail to see why making it in a forum which does not allow for copious footnotes is per se unethical.
The issue is whether it is misleading, and intentionally so. Stating a flat statistic that is misleading is per se wrong. Too bad that you don’t have time to use it ethically…use it ethically, or don’t use it. If there isn’t clear proof that a problem is so obvious and easily addressed that it justifies yelling “fuck” about it and treating the audience as stupid for not seeing the problem,then it doesn’t belong in the ad.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6308a1.htm?s_cid=ss6308a1_e
The issue: rape is defined too broadly as “completed or attempted forced penetration or alcohol- or drug-facilitated penetration”. Not all drug/alcohol facilitated sex is rape. There is an infamous study by Mary Koss which used the same broad definition. About 3/4 of those who were supposedly raped did NOT think they were raped. http://brown-spectator.com/2013/04/lies-damn-lies-and-rape-statistics/
The CDC study is the same study that defines away most male victims of rape, by classified “being made to penetrate” as other sexual assault. I’m not exactly confident in their objectivity. Too broad in one way, too narrow in another.
I suspect there are issues with the randomness of their sample, since it’s phone based. Someone with a burning resentment about something that happened to them is certainly going to be more likely to respond than the average person.
Yes…the alcohol provision makes it possible for there to be lots of rapes in the stats that neither participant regarded as rape at the time.
Going over some of your old stuff, it would be like you saying that “acts of judicial misconduct are extremely rare.” Everything depends on how you define “judicial misconduct,” and reasonable people can say that they are far more common. Does that make your claim per se unethical?
I would say that it doesn’t, and using that standard here, I would say the same with respect to this claim. I would say that if you can point to a CDC study supporting your claim, your reliance was presumptively reasonable. It is incumbent upon the critic not only to rebut this presumption, but show that the speaker’s reliance was manifestly unreasonable. That we don’t know the number with excruciating precision for entirely understandable reasons is not a valid ground for using the best data we have.
When I say that, I mean that based on the professional definition of misconduct, it’s rare, and that making a mistake is not the same as misconduct. If you want me to discuss your definition, make the case. Judicial misconduct is not a multi-faceted issue, and we are not talking about causation, as with pay disparity. If the girls said “Pay disparity is too common,” that’s obviously an opinion. I didn’t say “Judicial misconduct only occurs in every 10,000 decisions.” And I wouldn’t, because the definition isn’t clear.
The fake stat is unethical. The debatable opinion my be wrong, but it is clearly and opinion.
There was huge selection bias too. They only counted students at two post secondary educational facilities, they excluded the students least likely to engage in risky behavior (or sex in general) by removing students under 18, over 25, or enrolled in full time studies.
I mean really…. You plan to designate sex performed with any amount of alcohol as sexual assault, then count numbers only in places where alcohol fueled sex is most common, not include the people least likely to have drunken sex, and then extrapolate those numbers to the general population. And then we wonder why on Earth only 4% of post secondary institutions actually have to deal with reported rapes in any calendar year, when we have stats that say a full fifth of women are sexually assaulted during their lifetimes. The rape stats on geriatrics must be amazing.
As a geriatric myself, let me assure you that we simply do not have the required energy. Let me also assure you that the reason only 4% of post secondary schools have to deal with reported rapes is because 96% of post secondary schools have Deans whose sole job is to convince the victim that 1) he/she wasn’t actually raped or 2) it isn’t worth the hassle to actually report it. Can I prove this with a published study, no. Do I know it to be a fact, yes. I refer you to Penn State.
Well… Penn State had a 2013 enrollment of 94,000 students. Napkin math time! 94,000/2 is 47,000 female divided by 5 is 9400 women who will be raped in their lifetime. Because of the way the survey was performed, we can assume that women will only be raped between the ages of 18 and 25 (I realize this is ridiculous, but so was their methodology) so 9400 divided by 8 is 1,175 rapes per year. I have serious doubts that something like three rapes a day could be swept under the rug. I’m just saying.
But Penn state was a horrible example though, because the stat is “post secondary institutions”, so your 10 person local community college carries just as much weight as Penn State. Although, I should note, that with the above math, every institution with 16 people or more should see a rape per year. Not only one rape come to think of it, one UNIQUE person, plus supplemental rapes to women already victimized.
Rape is horrible. Vile. But I think in our rampage to fix a very legitimate problem, we trample a whole lot of rights and freedoms, and we lose a measure of common sense.
Agree completely with your last paragraph. Your math in the earlier paragraphs is not only accurate, but reinforces my contention.
Technically, that was the Mary Koss study, which got to 1 in 4 on campus. The CDC numbers weren’t selected in the same way, although I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised to see other selection biases at work.
Mary Koss worked with the CDC. There was some obvious overlap. But you’re right, I got my studies crossed.
I suppose it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. How much alcohol is too much? And that is my point: that one could dicker over what is or is not “rape” does not make the statement per se unethical.
I don’t know why people complain that women earn more than men. For the last 15 years, at 7 different companies (I’m a contractor) I’ve always had a female boss, who in turn has had female bosses above her. – And I’m in senior management!
You do know that this proves nothing in the larger context of the business and employment structure, right?