Here’s an interesting Q&A about the thinking behind an ad campaign designed, to, well I’m not exactly sure what the point is.

Stepping Stones, the group behind the ads, denies that it’s normalizing prostitution, and wants to draw attention to violent crimes against prostitutes.  That’s a worthy goal; killing or raping a prostitute is not less of a crime than killing or raping anybody else, and police and the courts should behave accordingly.

But by portraying prostitutes as daughters, sisters and mothers, which to be sure many of them are, it seems to me that the ads try to paint prostitution as a wacky, unorthodox but entirely fine vocation for a woman – like becoming a monster truck driver, or working on an oil rig.  Not for me, but who am I to judge, right?

The problem is that prostitution isn’t like other unusual jobs, and pretending that prostitutes have made this their life’s work and that we should respect that only makes things worse.  For one thing, it turns a blind eye to the abuse, violence and misogyny that are integral to the business of selling women’s bodies, not unfortunate side effects.  For another, it’s redolent of Anatole France’s biting observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges.”  The libertarian take on the flesh trade would have us believe that, if only we got rid of outdated beliefs and gave people more autonomy, we would permit both strong women in thriving communities, as well as marginalized, victimized and frequently badly abused women, to sell themselves on the street.

This would be a victory neither for women, nor for Canadian society.  Compassion and kindness towards prostitutes doesn’t mean destigmatizing what they do, and what is done to them.  On the contrary: prostitutes are people too, as the ad campaign wants to remind us, and people should never be allowed by their families, communities or social safety nets to be so degraded.

Because I have too much spare time, I’m taking a couple of MBA courses this year.  One of them is marketing.  I went into this with no expectations whatsoever – didn’t really know what the content would be, how it would be taught, or anything other than it’s a core course for the program.  And it’s fascinating. One of the ideas that I found particularly resonant was the argument that really good marketing makes selling obsolete.  If you have identified a need, developed the right product, priced it and promoted it properly, it will sell itself.  (Example: Apple’s new gadgets which are sold out within about twenty minutes of release. If you think Steve Jobs is the devil, choose a different example.)

This goes to the heart of why I don’t think criminalizing abortion is the way for pro-lifers to spend their time, money and influence.  Yes, it might well reduce the number of abortions that happen in Canada (or it might increase the number of Canadians who drive to the nearest US state that allows abortion on demand, or the number of doctors doing stealth abortions.  Probably a combination of all three.)  But why not eliminate the need for legislation, the way good marketing of products obviates heavy-handed sales?

I’m convinced that if we could have an honest discussion about what abortion is, how a fetus develops, the short and long term effects on women who abort their pregnancies, even if they think it’s a positive choice or an exercise of freedom, or how sexual politics have changed to the detriment of almost everyone in an abortion-on-demand culture, we wouldn’t need laws – the vast majority of decent people would no more consider abortion to be a solution to an unplanned pregnancy than they would consider murdering their spouse to be the solution to a marriage hitting a bad patch.  Let’s work on the message – the substance but also the packaging and the distribution method.  If it helps the pro-life cause to sell itself, it will have been worth it.

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Andrea adds: Don’t forget cutting government funding for abortion and abortion-promoting groups.

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Andrea adds again: Was at an interesting talk last night and conversation turned to how to market the pro-life message. The difference between marketing in the world (Coke versus Pepsi, for example) is that this type of marketing capitalizes on self-interest. So too does the pro-abortion mindset. Where pro-lifers are marketing an “other-focussed” view–also a long term one. And so I wonder whether Rebecca’s course addresses those factors at all. Marketing the pro-life message comes down to a civilizational shift.

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Back to Rebecca: To Andrea’s point: actually this sort of did come up in the discussion, as when the prof was (introductory seminar) outlining what marketing was (and what it’s not – which is simply advertising.) Briefly, there are short term marketing tactics, which involve attempts to boost sales, usually of a specific product, through flash and gimmickry.  And then there’s a long term approach where you want to change how people think and live for years down the road.

Governments and lobby groups do this a lot – think recycling ad campaigns, public health campaigns involving cancer prevention and detection – but so did Apple, which foresaw and helped bring about a world in which computer were everywhere and in everything, and Microsoft, which saw a chance to give people far more control over the inner workings of these machines.

The point of much political, cultural and religious discussion is ultimately people’s choices and behaviours.  So looking at pro-life (and, as commenters have pointed out, the culture of promiscuity) messages as part of that discussion is interesting.  But what I really found intriguing was this idea that if your strategy consists of loudly and obviously exhorting people to do something at the final stage of the decision-making process, whether it’s waving placards in front of a clinic or having giant balloons outside a car dealership trying to get people in the doors, you’re missing the bigger and better window of opportunity – to shape people’s perceptions and beliefs so that they don’t consider going into the clinic, or the Ford dealership, because they believe deep down that abortions are wrong and harmful, or imports are more efficient and safer.

I’m not saying there is no place for other strategies in trying to change how Canadians perceive abortion.  But one thing business does extremely well is figure out how to get the most bang for their buck.

If the marketing industry has concluded that the best way to sell something is to understand your market and tailor your message so the product sells itself, maybe we should give it a shot in the abortion discussion.

I don’t see that many movies these days.  Whether it’s because movies have gotten dumber or my free time has gotten more scarce, I’m not sure.  But more than movies themselves, reactions to movies tell us a lot about the zeitgeist.  They can also highlight great gulfs between the chattering classes and, you know, normal people.

Greenberg, an indifferent movie starring Ben Stiller, isn’t particularly worthy of note. This essay on it, though, is fascinating, at least for those of us who don’t buy the party line that abortion is the gynecological equivalent of having an ingrown toenail excised.  The writer’s point seems to be that Greenberg is subversive because it shows a character having an abortion without much reflection or angst.  It’s subversive, he implies, because the Powers That Be don’t like depictions of abortion because they stir up controversy.

But there’s a much simpler explanation why protagonists in movies and TV don’t have abortions: most people, including many who self-identify as pro-choice, find abortion to be distasteful, immoral, and less than admirable.  It’s hard to care about fictional characters who can be described this way.  It’s also, despite attempts to portray it as something less, a life-changing experience – a character whose abortion is part of their story arc will be identified with that abortion rather than with other traits.

In short, movies and TV don’t refrain from portraying abortion because their advertising overlords tell them not to.  They avoid it for the same reason they don’t create protagonists who drive while drunk, or adult siblings involved in a romantic relationship.  It’s repugnant, on a visceral level, and people aren’t entertained, diverted or edified by things they find repugnant.  Given how liberal the coasts skew, the absence of abortion from mainstream entertainment isn’t the triumph of a clique of prudes over the masses; on the contrary, it’s a concession to the sensibilities of the great majority of the population on the part of those who hold radically different views.

Greenberg grossed $4 million.  Gigli grossed $6 million.  I’m not sure if it’s good or bad that people are more likely to watch Jennifer Lopez’s and Ben Affleck’s single biggest embarrassment than yet another self-indulgent movie about shiftless underachievers.

I got to review Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, and as highbrow easy reading goes, he’s pretty hard to beat. One of his essays, on the creator of the Pill, provides much food for thought from a pro-woman perspective.

He identifies Dr. Rook’s major error in being maintaining a 28 day cycle for contraceptive pills, which he did in the belief that, by mimicking nature, this method would gain approval amongst Catholics (being one himself). What’s especially fascinating, though, is his look at the research into menstruation in pre-industrial societies.

What he demonstrates is that, in a state of nature, women would have perhaps 100 menstrual cycles in their lifetime, while for women in the developed world today, it can be as high as 500 cycles. Since each cycle involved changes to breast, endometrial and ovarian tissue, and since malignant growths are often found when cells must repeatedly regenerate (why sunburns are linked to skin cancer, and smoking to lung cancer), reducing the number of menstrual cycles a woman experiences should in theory reduce their risk of reproductive cancers. And what evidence there is in this area bears the theory out. The factors in nature that reduce the number of cycles aren’t ones we would like to recreate: late onset of puberty caused by malnutrition, for instance, or a high infant mortality rate. At least one of them, we can influence: breastfeeding reduces these risks, in part because it suppresses ovulation for a time after birth. This is why reproductive cancers have long been known to be less common among women who carry multiple children to term and breastfeed them: each birth would represent anywhere from 12 to 24 months without ovulation.

Now my two major concerns with the Pill are that it sometimes (we don’t know how much) acts as an abortifacient, and that its effects on women’s health are mixed – while it reduces risk of ovarian cancer, the benefits it confers with respect to breast cancer are cancelled by the risks it carries due to, it seems, synthetic hormones. The current Holy Grail of researchers, according to Gladwell, would be a birth control pill that suppresses ovulation all the time, thus reducing the repeated changes that can lead to cancer, as well as preventing the fertilization of an egg, since no egg would be released; and to do this with hormones that would have no adverse effects on risk of breast cancer, or anything else.

So, since I have no philosophical objection to birth control, I find myself thinking that such a Pill would be a very good thing. This is despite my general aversion to medical intervention without a good reason. The impression I got from Gladwell’s essay is that this may be just around the corner.

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Andrea adds: Rebecca’s full review is here.

Artificial insemination by anonymous donors has always had a whiff of hubris about it – the notion that you can specify physical and mental traits you’d like in your child’s biological father, as if ordering clothes online (albeit with a worse returns policy) is jarring, as is the fact that it amounts to eliminating fatherhood in all but the most basic biological sense. I don’t have any strong views on the use of donor sperm for married couples wanting a child that is (half) biologically theirs; using sperm from a relative makes a certain visceral sense, although it would complicate relations with the in-laws and extended family immensely.
But whether the procedure is used for frivolous or profoundly well thought out reasons, there are a number of risks implicit in the whole concept. And one of them is that we’re not yet capable of knowing exactly what someone’s genes have in store for them, or how the genes of both parents will combine in any given instance. But this story, about a sperm donor with congenital heart trouble, who fathered 24 children, 9 of whom have this problem as well, should be sobering.
Now of course, this man may well have fathered children “naturally,” and those children would also have a high risk of carrying this gene; a sperm bank is no guarantee of a perfect child, and neither is natural conception. But one of the things fertility clinics sell is the idea that you can choose your baby. And it’s highly improbable that one man would father 24 children the old-fashioned way.

Someone here had to say something, but nothing apt came to mind. So I find myself quoting someone unlikely (although I did like Rush Hour):

People are defending Roman Polanski because he made good movies 30 years ago? Are you kidding me? Even Johnny Cochran didn’t have the nerve to go, ‘Well did you see OJ play against New England?’”

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Andrea adds: Indeed. However, I did not realize that The Pianist (2002) is Roman Polanski. Most unfortunate, as I love that movie. It’s not a reason for Polanski to be acquited or to go unpunished or to justify his actions, though, which seemed to be lost on many in Hollywood.

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Brigitte chimes in: I must admit I never really knew what had happened, until now. Yesterday I saw a clip of Dennis Miller and he said something to the effect that you shouldn’t really say anything about the case unless you’d read the transcript of the victim’s testimony. I found this excerpt here and a longer version here. You know what I don’t understand? Why just about all the news stories you see about this case these days talk about the girl he’s accused of “having sex with”? If her 1977 testimony is true (and as far as I can tell nobody says it isn’t), “having sex” is not what happened. When a girl says NO and sex (both vaginal and anal) happens anyway it’s called rape. She was 13 and he was 43 (or 44; I’ve seen both, not that the difference matters). He belongs in jail.

This blog on women’s issues isn’t one I agree with a whole lot, but by asking if women are less happy when they wear less clothes, I think they’re on to something. I’m not sure that anorexia, bulimia and low self-esteem exist because models are thinner than a generation ago, though. Sure, there are women thinner and more beautiful than any of us out there (unless, apparently, you’re Megan Fox – but there are people out there who are smarter, richer, healthier, or better at karate than all of us, too, and the fact of their existence doesn’t drive us to despair, let alone mental illness.

The Jewish conception of modesty is, like all things Jewish, complicated, occasionally hard to understand and sometimes downright weird. (Gefilte fish, I’m looking at you.) But the basic concept of physical modesty, which applies to men too, is that we cover our bodies because they are sacred and not for public enjoyment, and is often expressed by the phrase “The glory of the king’s daughter is within.” What this means is that the things that matter – virtue, kindness, honesty, integrity, courage, humility – aren’t what show on the outside; inner beauty, in other words, however trite that phrase has become.

I think what’s really pernicious about our culture’s obsession with mostly naked women, however beautiful or thin they are, is the message that it sends about worth. “You’re worthless unless you’re thin” is the lesson some people take from it, sure, but it’s also a message that we publicly talk about and deconstruct. “Your value and your identity resides in your physical body” is the less obvious but no less pervasive message they convey. And when desirability as a friend or wife is also bound up in prettiness, it reinforces that message. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t worry so much about magazine covers that say “you should look like Angelina/Kate Moss/Lindsay Lohan” as about the broader message that “all that matters is how you look.”

Certainly, you can dress scrupulously modestly and still be shallow. And you can insist on modest clothing for your chidlren without valuing their character and moral code. But as Wendy Shalit points out, by striving for a certain modesty in our dress and behaviour, we have the opportunity not only to say “I’m not on public display” but also “I will not be judged by your criteria.” Which is actually the sort of subversive, iconoclastic sentiment feminists celebrate. Right?

At sundown, Rosh Hashanah begins. It’s the Jewish New Year, but more broadly it’s the anniversary of the creation of Adam and Eve. Tradition holds that the entire universe was created so that God could then create mankind to occupy it.
If the world exists so that we may live in it, we must surely be accountable for how we live in it, how we treat ourselves and each other and our surroundings. This too is part of Rosh Hashanah. The two most common images used to describe our relationship to God portray him as a king ruling over us, and as a shepherd tending to us. Shepherds and kings both hold the power of life and death over their charges.

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time.”

So says one of the holiday prayers, in which we acknowledge this aspect of our relationship with the Creator.
I certainly don’t think we’re meant to see God as the Grim Reaper, or an actuary, tallying our merits and marking the errant for death. There is equally an emphasis in the liturgy on repentance and atonement, and God’s forgiveness, and his boundless love for us. But what most of the world has forgotten is not that we are mortal, but that our mortality is within the domain of a greater power.

It is a mark of our decadence and arrogance that we have written God out of the equation. When doctors decline to care for a premature baby because they’ve decided his life isn’t worth living; when the elderly are denied care because their quality of life calculation is too low; when babies are aborted because their arrival doesn’t suit their parents’ schedules; when patients are euthanized, even with their consent, because the care they are getting doesn’t ameliorate their suffering – we are not only taking it upon ourselves to end another’s life, harming them, we are perverting our relationships with God, society, and ourselves.
May we all learn to hold life as dear as God did when He created a glorious world for us to inhabit, replete with smoked salmon, apple challah, flannel sheets on a cold night, bonfires in the fall, and the giggle of a toddler. Shana tova!

Here’s a blog entry from SciFi site io9.com, about anti-TV messages in new and old TV shows. It touches on a lot of issues, including reality TV:

Network also raises an important question that many other anti-TV stories deal with. Why is reality TV so evil? It’s partly because reality TV turns surveillance into entertainment, but also because it encourages people to look at each other as fictional characters. Either way, human life is devalued.”

I don’t watch pulpy TV for guilty enjoyment as much as I used to; whether it’s gotten tawdrier, I’ve grown up, or I just don’t have the time to indulge, I don’t know.
It’s worth thinking about both of these points, though: reality TV erodes our ideas about the divide between public and private, even if the subjects give their consent, and it does have the effect of lending detachment to human experiences, positive and negative. Do people become more promiscuous, less committed, and callous towards others as a direct result of watching reality TV? Probably not. But do we become desensitized by treating as entertainment such things as marriages unravelling (Newlyweds, Jon and Kate), the quest for love and/or Jacuzzi sex (The Bachelor/ette franchise), parenting (Jon and Kate, Super Nanny), back stabbing competition (The Apprentice) or the quest for fame and fortune (American Idol)? It’s hard to imagine that we’re not influenced by it.