Addendums

When I do my HTML and css work, I often have episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report streaming on my laptop. Typically the design has already been done for me, so putting it into code doesn’t require a lot of active thought - perfect chance to catch up on last night’s episodes. I’m a fan of both shows, but since Hulu stopped co-streaming them and they moved exclusively back to Comedy Central’s domain, watching the episodes online has become increasingly painful. Core problem? Comedy Central’s horrible online advertising. The ad content is so male-centric that I feel like Comedy Central is telling me to stop watching their programs, even though The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, while suffering from some of the same problems as most of the entertainment industry, aren’t particularly gendered shows. I understand market demographics, but it’s almost as if, in their choice of advertising, the network is operating like women don’t understand humor and therefore have no interest in Comedy Central’s content.

I remember the first week after switching from Hulu back to the Comedy-Central hosted streaming that I was bombarded with tacky Axe ads. The one that repelled me the most was the Clean Your Balls ad. Axe has taken this line with their advertising from the get-go, and has continued to cross new lines over the years. I suppose that’s been a successful tactic because it’s gotten them brand recognition (I’ve bought Axe products as a joke for male friends and family a couple times just because the ads are so ridiculous: “Let’s see the ladies throw themselves at you.”) That said, their ads have left no ambiguity about their intended audience, which sends the message to me as a woman that even if I were capable of appreciating the humor, I’m not welcome. And I am capable of appreciating the humor - I can be as immature as the best of them about sexual humor, from double entendres to taking statements out of context to inadvertent phallic / vulvic imagery - but if I’m being sent the message that “You, as a woman, aren’t supposed to be in on the joke” from the get-go, it stops being funny right there. That’s pretty much the gist of the Comedy Central’s streaming ads. There are exceptions, but the onslaught of the gendered stuff, when it comes on (if I’m watching a week’s worth of episodes at once, they’ll typically all have the same sponsor and set of ads), is so strong that it’s hard to bear.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Intel ads on both The Daily Show and Comedy Central’s streams lately, and for the most part their ads are gender-inclusive, whimsical, and paint the company as a futuristic innovator, where robots and 3D creatures work amongst the humans (two examples.) Among those ads, though, is the “Generations” ad, which takes an entirely different tone. Here it is:

On its own, an ad with two stereotypical geeks getting rhapsodic over the latest technology seems totally harmless, but it’s the clearly intentional placement of a woman walking by in the background in each case that started to bother me. I remember my reaction the first time watching the ad - the consistent placement of the woman struck so oddly that I thought I hadn’t watched closely enough and she must have been placed there to react to the guys in a “your enthusiasm is abnormal” way - because why else would they put her there every time, moving exactly the same way, except to provide some sort of contrast? It turns out, she’s not participating at all, whether positively or negatively, and to me this is even worse than her portraying the stereotypical “I don’t understand you geeks” that I was obviously expecting the first time through.

Grabbing this video off of YouTube, I noticed just in the first few pages of comments that this gender weirdness was a huge part of the discussion. And the comments affirmed all the problematic societal assumptions and attitudes that this ad only served to reinforce:

Commenter inflorire captures my sentiments pretty well:

Does anybody else find it weird/annoying that the little sister/girl/hot girl is always walking behind the guys who are talking about TECH STUFF. It’s like the dudes are involved in all the advancements in technology while the girls just hang around in the background passively absorbing the change.. I liked the other commercials alright, but this bugged me.

But these are YouTube comments, and Kohltonc responds to inflorire in a way that reaffirms exactly why ads like this are such a problem:

nahh its like your two typical nerdy guys who are more interested in technology than girls lol

And holmap009 inadvertently reveals the only reason these women were probably even included:

the girl grows up with them……..and get’s hotter!

To round out how the comments summed up everything for me, here’s LaurLive:

This video relates well to all of us geeks out here.

All of us geeks? Because I’m a geek, and I was getting a strong “THIS IS NOT YOU” vibe from the ad (see also: any incidents in the tech community where a guy tries to make a joke by calling on a shared experience that he does not realize reflects only a subset of the community - something that usually says “we’re all dudes here” when we, in fact, are not). I suspect a lot of female geeks - and probably some male geeks, too - would feel the same when watching this. I’m sure not all - some probably saw no issue with it or did relate based on the stereotyped portrayal - but if you have the ad on in the background often enough, like I have lately, it just gets to be too much. Thus this blog post.

Intel has another recent ad with two stereotypically geeky males that I can actually relate to a lot and really love. There are no women in the ad, but that’s not a problem here because the message of the ad isn’t gendered. It’s one of those cases where lack of portrayal leaves room for possibility, versus “Generations” where the women are merely background scenery for the shared experience of geeky friends.

Problematic media, like “Generations”, isn’t unique to Intel and certainly isn’t unique to advertising, which as a rule seems to get great pleasure out of grabbing hold of unpleasant stereotypes in character portrayals and running wild with them. I actually get a huge kick out of analyzing the enormous societal problems that seep into pretty much all of the entertainment we ingest (s.e. smith and my good friend Mindy are two favorites to read for this kind of critical analysis). But an ad like “Generations”, which portrays a major part of my own identity in a way that actively excludes me, stops being entertaining food for thought and really starts to piss me off, especially after the nth run.

A small postscript - these ads heavily rely on the fictional experiences of Intel employees as a storytelling device. When I think “Intel employees” I think about my fellow Code-N-Sploder Sarah Sharp, who does Linux kernel work for the company. She’s a classic example of how interesting and well-rounded geeks can be, and as a real-life example she would fit the “our employees are doing great, geeky stuff” theme of these ads. So, lucky for me, I have a real-life example of what an Intel technologist (and by proxy, any modern technologist) looks like, but for anybody who doesn’t spend their days reading Geek Feminism, and trying to surround themselves with these sort of awesome people, they’re absorbing a far more problematic portrayal.

This post is intended as a one-off that ties up some of the things I’ve been thinking about over the past week semi-nicely (although certainly not conclusively or totally coherently!).  I thought I’d think it out loud for a few paragraphs.

My weekly catharsis for over a year now has been Baby Ketten Karaoke, which presently hosts a karaoke evening on Tuesdays at Mississippi Pizza and Wednesdays at The Woods (both in Portland, Oregon). This week I had the privilege to sing the KJ’s (Karaoke Jockey’s) daughter’s debut track, for Fever Ray’s “Triangle Walks”. The girl who put together this track is only eight, and already cooler than most people I know. Post-singing, I was talking to her dad about the cute visual effects she’d added to the track, and he mentioned how she’d suggest something crazy to him for it, he’d say “No, that’s not realistic”, and then after a few moments realize it was doable. And what a refreshing take to have on the process, to have a kid with no sense of the boundaries to stop her creatively.

It reminded me of a conversation I had quite often in the year or so surrounding my graduation from college and entry into the workforce, specifically with recruiter-types from Google. The idea in hiring good developers is that you want to hire for talent over experience (and I agree with this premise; Code Anthem’s recent post How to Find Crappy Programmers really drove that home just this weekend). I was really good at injecting my insecurity into a lot of my discussions about future jobs back then, to the degree where I got used to the “we value talent over experience” sound bite as a response. The touted perks of the talented but inexperienced developer were similar to that of my KJ’s daughter - that they (although I hate the term) “think outside the box” and will be creative in certain ways simply because, by being inexperienced, they can’t conceive of the limitations in any given project, and in that occasionally blooms magic.

I’d hear this explanation of the value of the talented and inexperienced, which I knew to some degree was being provided as a reassurance of my own potential as a developer, and yet I knew this was firmly not the case for me. I prematurely plunged myself into the world of adult realism and all the depressing limitations that come with it as a high schooler, most likely as a result of a teenaged romance with someone far more disciplined and achievement-oriented than myself (and that was saying something - as a couple, we were old and boring before our time). That romance, and my observations of the world tending to end up on the cynical side of things more often than not, quickly sucked the room for play out of my life, with regards to all of my creative interests - not just programming. (Many adults who knew me as a child would have said back then that my future was in creative writing. Since age fifteen the idea of writing fiction for fun hits an immediate mental block. It’s laughable! Classic creativity sap of adulthood!) I was aware of how quickly and suddenly it disappeared for me (adolescence is good for that), and have spent the last ten years or so trying to reclaim bits of that ambition towards creativity that flies in the face of the boundaries of reality. (It should be mentioned that karaoke nights have been great for this too - I’m surrounded by dreamers and creative types who may be poorer and less gainfully employed than me but provide a world of inspiration and insight.)

I speak of this in terms of creativity because programming - especially on one’s own time - is such a creative outlet. I could tell that I lost that “spark” for creative work long before I became a self-identified programmer, but the lack of that push to create simply for the sake of creating has been most glaringly obvious in my programming work. For years I haven’t bothered to jump into a project because “surely someone’s already done it, and better than I could.” I quickly learned that such timidity doesn’t just hurt me creatively, but it also hurts me professionally, because being firmly oriented in the reality of one’s abilities (”someone else could easily do this far better than me”) has a paralyzing effect that impacts overall productivity far worse than “reinventing the wheel”. I’ve had many programmer friends who I have admired for not facing this mental boundary, and I’ve tried to tap into their minds to understand why they aren’t held back in the same way I am.

I think I’m making progress. My mental queue of personal projects is growing, and I’m happy to feed it, even when I know that half of what I’m doing has been the personal project of countless others. I can find justification for “re-inventing the wheel” on these projects lately because (1) the project will help me develop my skills far more than extending a pre-existing product and (2) a product written by me molds perfectly to my own functional requirements. I also think I’ll have less reticence about sharing these projects with the public: although the Internet can be the source of incredibly toxic feedback, I’ve actually been surprised at the niches one can inadverently fill (like finding one of my own posts when doing a Google query on Virtualbox recently).

I’m a far cry from the sense of infinite magic that programming presented itself as when I first ran into it at around age 12, though. I became aware of the learning curve ahead of me pretty quickly, which fizzled out the sense of potential almost as soon as it had appeared. Being keenly aware of the world around me has been an incredibly helpful personal strength, but in terms of jumping into new things with abandon, my sense of the big picture has been paralyzing. Tonight’s conversation with the KJ reinforced the need to reacquaint myself with that sense of magic. Even if most of what I do is a repeat, niche knowledge introduces itself in the most unpredictable of places.

I write this mostly with the people like me in mind; those of us who feel paralyzed by a network of self-constructed boundaries. Sure, many of these boundaries have a basis in reality, and the viciousness of the Internet does a good job of reinforcing, and then skewing, our doubts. But paralysis only hurts us. As my KJ’s daughter reminded him, our perceptions of what is realistic are really just that - our perceptions - and not fact. For those of us held back by our own restraints, may we continue to challenge those self-imposed boundaries and discover the true scope of our potential.

/end ramble!

Funny: I mention a post from Code Anthem in this entry; after writing, I went to said blog and discovered today’s entry: Old Programmers vs Young Programmers. Very ironic given that this post was about how I lack the supposed key trait of a young programmer