I’m not sure what’s more sad and predictable: That RadioShack is telling its remaining female customers to talk a long walk on a short pier or that the rest of their customers have bought into it.
RadioShack, a company that is in serious trouble, has become exceedingly desperate and decided that the very real problems their company faces can be solved with a large serving of t&a. I think RadioShack could take a more honest approach, however. They could simply play this great classic by DJ Assault and gather a few models together for a car wash scene. Maybe the car would be covered in RadioShack logos. They could try to incorporate the image of electronics in there somehow, but why don’t RadioShack executives take a bold, Mad Men-like strategy and forgo the image of the product entirely?
Here is the real ad if you’d like to take a gander:
As Wall Street Journal writer Ann Zimmerman put it, “Not subtle.”
My biggest problem with advertisements like these is not that I think it’s never okay to sell sex, but that companies selling products that aren’t inherently gendered always chose to favor the male gaze. The female gaze doesn’t exist to RadioShack, or beer companies, or car companies. I don’t have time to list how many companies ignore women and our perspective in these advertisements on a regular basis. The only companies vying for straight women’s attention are Oikos, H&M (though I think gay men are also a target in that ad) and Kraft. Read More
Skewed sex ratios: An analysis of missing women
Cross posted from The Smoke-Filled Room
In 1990, Amartya Sen coined the term ‘missing women’ to denote the shortage of women contributing to the skewed sex ratios in Asia and Africa, where men outnumber women, in stark contrast to North America and Europe, where women outnumber men. Estimates of missing women were originally meant to represent some measure of the degree of gender discrimination. This discrimination was attributed to three main causes causes: sex-selective abortions, female infanticide, and the comparative neglect of female health and nutrition during childhood, which led to their deaths early in life.
In 2010, Anderson and Ray, used the Sen-Coale counterfactual, which compares birth and death ratios of men and women in developing countries to similar populations in developed countries, in order to examine the ratio of these missing women across both age and diseases levels. They found a wide variation in the pattern of these missing women between India and China.
In a more recent work in 2012, they further explore the unlikely distribution of missing women across India, and find that
They also find a great deal of variation in the distribution of missing women by age group across the states: Punjab is the only state where the majority of missing women are found at birth, while Haryana and Rajasthan are the only two states where a majority of these missing women are either never born or die in childhood. Read More »