Two words: Sailor Moon.
The boom-anime babes that make me think the wrong thing?
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This isnât about maximizing profits. If they wanted to maximize profits, theyâd use a mixed strategy. This is about control. Youâre talking about the entertainment industry. Do you remember the music industry which spent nearly a decade whining about MP3 piracy but wouldnât sell digital music. These are the same guys. Itâs not about the money.
P.S. Fathers tend to spoil their daughters while mothers spoil their sons. Who has more disposable income, fathers or mothers?
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o_0 - I guess it depends on the household, but most people draw upon the same pool of money.
Like by saying theyâre âpart of the PC crowdâ? âHow dare you respond to me belittling people with different views by belittling me for having a different view!â Not exactly a strong objection.
The next thing he is being shouted down and labeled a sexist. The concept of free speech is meaningless if you have to be on guard for your livelihood every time you say something that might often the PC crowd.
Free Larry Summers!
Oh wait, Larry Summers was never jailed?
So wait, since âfree speechâ is a legal concept implying no legal consequences for speech (since preventing social consequences for speech is neither possible nor desirable) youâŚseem to be whining about a concept that is completely irrelevant to the situation youâre describing.
People always say the âPC crowdâ need to grow thicker skin. It never seems to occur to such people that they might also grow a thicker skin with respect to criticism from the âPC crowdâ.
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Canât risk that Cootie contamination. Itâs like Kryptonite.
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I guess your one of the people that try to belittle somebody who doesnât necessarily hold the same view as your own?
Says the guy who refers to the shadowy evil âPC crowdâ 3 times in half a dozen paragraphs.
For what it is worth, I do not necessarily have a view on the issue. I merely raise the question of whether there are real differences between the sexes when it comes to buying preferences.
Your words: Despite what the PC crowd wants to sell us, there are real differences between the sexes. That doesnât sound like âmereâ healthy questioning, but an awful lot like youâve personally made up your mind about this a long time ago.
Re. Larry Summers: Studies are demonstrating more and more that gender may not be a binary but a complex spectrum. The black and white men v.s women/male v.s. female has been damaging to large subsets of people for a long time, neglecting to address nuances that are extremely important to the livelihoods and personhood of individuals. Thatâs why many people view an outdated, biased model with intense scrutiny, especially one that has ignored or failed so many people for so long (and that has been shown to be outright mistaken in many aspects). It is legitimate questioning, a lot more than barging in with a âWelp, men and women are different! The End!!â as if that ought to be received as an absolute, argument-winning fact.
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Yep. Joking aside, it was one of the first animated series (in North America) for girls that had a lot of fighting and violence on top of the romance and glitter. Boys ended up watching it as well. I still believe that manga/anime brought a huge number of girls to reading comic books in general. Suddenly, along with Sailor Moon, Inu Yasha, etc, the floodgates opened and there was an influx of original, kick-ass stories with girls as protagonists. And manga certainly arenât suffering in merchandising sales.
So I donât think that featuring girls as protagonists is entirely uncharted land and that much of a risk. There seems to be an enormous amount of laziness in North American kidâs cartoons.
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Free speech does not mean that you are free from people disagreeing with you or even free from being called silly or stupid (even though calling someone names is not polite). If you say something offensive, I do not see why a company (or a school in your example) should be restricted from firing you. They should be free to decide whether or not they want you representing them.
I distinctly remember when the Larry Summers thing happened. Shortly afterwards I was outside with another girl doing a physics lab experiment (focusing sunlight to a spectrometer). Two ladies in their 30s or 40s were walking by and stopped to ask what we were doing. One of them jokingly made the comment âI thought women couldnât do science.â We all knew what she was referring to.
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A few comments on the âPC crowdâ stuff:
In principle, Larry Summers didnât say anything particularly objectionable. Just to make it clear, what Summers said was that in IQ test data, males show a greater variance than females do even though the median is not necessarily distinguishable. From there, Summers suggests that occupations that select for high IQ will preferentially select men not because men have a higher IQ on average but because the IQ distribution for males has longer tails.
Ignoring context, such an argument is not particularly objectionable. And acknowledging the âanti-PCâ sideâs personal experiences of persecution for their views, I suspect a lot of the blowback Summers received is a result of the fact that for partisans, arguments are soldiers.
But let me try to articulate the importance of the context in which this debate occurs for the âPC crowd.â We can talk about equality in two senses: equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. Summersâ argument is an attempt to explain inequality of outcomes and indeed it might do so in part.
But inequality of outcomes can also be explained by inequality of opportunity. And thereâs lots of direct testimony from women who studied as scientists, engineers, and programmers that they ultimately gave up on their fields because they perceived that their colleagues and superiors were not giving them the same opportunities given to men.
The problem is that explanations for inequality of outcomes can be used to justify inequality of opportunity. (This isnât even necessarily done consciously in all cases where it occurs.) In that case, inequality of outcomes becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because of a feedback effect causing (or perpetuating) inequality of opportunity.
The upshot is that although inequality of outcomes is not necessarily immoral, inequality of opportunity is immoral and inasmuch as explanations for the former are used as justifications for the latter, such explanations are being used for immoral ends. (Again, not necessarily consciously.)
So some people will object strenuously to explanations of inequality as outcomes because, as I mentioned, arguments are soldiers and such arguments âhurt the causeâ because they can be (and often are) used as justifications for inequality of opportunity. However, to dismiss âthe PC crowdâ's position on the matter on the basis that some subset of âthe PC crowdâ object to what are in principle reasonable arguments is a sort of straw man fallacy, addressing only the most unreasonable forms of objection and dismissing the more nuanced articulations.
If both sides can accept the following then perhaps there would be less condescension and dismissal of the other sideâs point of view:
-inequality of opportunity is a fair target for moral objection
-an argument explaining inequality of outcome isnât necessarily immoral or sexist
-inequality of opportunity is real and explains at least some of the inequality of outcomes
-inequality of outcomes is not a valid justification for inequality of opportunity
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Citation needed. Freud died a long time ago.
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The best response I can think of is this: clearly these Evil Executives have not seen the ENORMOUS NUMBER of toys my girls own.
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Nothing self-fulfilling about that at all!
Free speech does not mean that you are free from people disagreeing with you or even free from being called silly or stupid (even though calling someone names is not polite). If you say something offensive, I do not see why a company (or a school in your example) should be restricted from firing you. They should be free to decide whether or not they want you representing them.
Sure I agree with you to an extent, but if you run everybody who says something unpopular out of town, other people may begin to feel intimidated in regards to sharing ideas. That kind of undermines the whole concept of free speech, and intellectual pursuits.
I distinctly remember when the Larry Summers thing happened. Shortly afterwards I was outside with another girl doing a physics lab experiment (focusing sunlight to a spectrometer). Two ladies in their 30s or 40s were walking by and stopped to ask what we were doing. One of them jokingly made the comment âI thought women couldnât do science.â We all knew what she was referring to.
Yes, accept that was not Summerâs view. To an intellectual crowd that he was invited to speak, he played the protagonist for a particular position that is supported by some scientific data and suggested more studies should be done in that area. In my view, the bar for running somebody out of dodge in an educational setting when discussing ideas should be quite high.
Itâs not that subtle. How do you make it in an established field? You impress the people who are already at the top. How do you do that? By emulating them. Repeat until basically everyone running things is a moron. It happens in a lot of fields, not just TV execs.
Iâm not denying that this is the actual reasoning used but it is deeply flawed. A person (usually) can only watch one show at a time, and they only have so much money to buy toys. Total toys bought = average toys per child x number of children. Total hours watched = average hours watched per child x number of children. Less children watching means less hours watched, less toys sold.
Being upset that girls are watching is pure insanity because the best you can hope for is that they are watching your show. If they are not watching that show the alternatives are: a) watch a different show you make (>0 toys sold); b) watch a show you didnât make (0 toys sold); c) not watch a show at all (0 toys sold and your industry is going down the toilet).
I completely believe it is profitable to have shows that appeal to certain niches. The idea, however, that it is a bad thing for a show to have broad appeal is insane.
Youâre spot on that inequality of outcome is often used as a false explanation and justification for inequality of opportunity, but I donât think the two can be actually disentangled in practice. An inequality of outcome very quickly turns into inequality of opportunity because it creates a situation where people are no longer on the same footing. Wealth inheritance is a classic example of this, where inequality of outcome is functionally indistinguishable from inequality of opportunity, because the outcome mostly determines future opportunity.
This means a criticism of inequality of outcome is totally valid in basically every case, and Iâd be surprised to see an explanation of unequal outcomes that can be separated from unequal opportunities. If the explanation of unequal outcomes as ânaturalâ is better explained by unequal opportunities, which it almost always is since outcomes determine opportunities, it is by definition morally offensive, because it reinforces structural discrimination. For example Summersâ sexist explanation fails because IQ scores cannot be convincingly separated from environmental factors (poverty, discrimination, etc) to be a useful measure of natural intelligence.
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No one was ârun out of townâ. Summers didnât even lose his job because of that. He resigned and his resignation seems to have more to do with this weird conflict of interest case involving an economist named Andrei Shleifer than with the furor over the lecture in question.
I think youâre vastly overstating the consequences for ânon-PCâ points of view. Again, to simply give you the same advice âPCâ folks get all the time: get a thicker skin.
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âIf they wanted to maximize profits, theyâd use a mixed strategy.â
Unfortunately, youâre wrong. It would be nice if the free market incentivized a âmixed strategyâ, but it doesnât. The advertising industry has thought about this question much more than you or I, and they have concluded that the most profitable strategy is aggressively maintaining the gender status quo.
I think we agree thatâs deeply messed up, but we shouldnât kid ourselves that itâs just a few incompetent/sexist CEOs who are causing it to be this way. It is built into the structure of our economy, and the society which sustains it. Capitalism perpetuates sexism because sexism is profitable.
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Says the guy who refers to the shadowy evil âPC crowdâ 3 times in half a dozen paragraphs.
The difference in my mind, is being PC is an actual term. Further, I donât think I actually placed anybody here in PC crowd. As far as being evil goes, I think the pressure to be politically correct is dangerous. It can stifle the fostering of ideas.
Your words: Despite what the PC crowd wants to sell us, there are real differences between the sexes. That doesnât sound like âmereâ healthy questioning, but an awful lot like youâve personally made up your mind about this a long time ago.
Sure, I made up my mind. There are difference between the sexes. Do you really deny that? What I have not made my mind up about is, âwhether there are real differences between the sexes when it comes to buying preferences /in the context of the article/ (quoting myself).â
When you talk about the âPC crowdâ peopleâs antennas go up because the idea that we are being held back or oppressed by people who are trying to get us not to offend other people seems mythical. You can express your views without bringing the PC crowd strawman into it and youâll get a much better discussion out of it.
With regard to your point, though, that there may be actual differences between the sexes, I canât see a reason to think that. A recent study of children confirmed what everyone who studies this has known for a long time: there is more variance within the sexes than between them. The idea that the sexes are very different gets exaggerated because we like to look at extremes. The fastest man in the world is faster than the fastest woman in the world, but not by as much as the fastest woman is faster than the average man. The idea that you can extrapolate a documented difference in the sexes to an individual case is not really founded and will get your coin-flip like results.
If boys really do buy more toys than girls then it is almost certainly because they are more heavily marketed to. âWe donât market to girls because girls donât buyâ sounds like a self-fulfilling claim. As someone noted above, Disney does quite well by marketing to girls, so I donât actually think that girls are less marketed to, but based on children I know, I also donât think they âbuyâ fewer toys.
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