100% more annoying
Thursday, 27 September 2007 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtThere's been a massive increase in spam from this LJ address over the last few weeks - I must be deleting 10-20 penis enlargement ads on a daily basis. Irritation value aside, this makes me obscurely grateful to be female and thus exempt from the insecurities which presumably give this kind of ad a fractional chance at success. (Although inevitable reflections arise on the kind of size insecurities to which women are prone. It says a lot about our state of contemporary culture that men worry that they're not big enough while women worry about not being small enough. See the Amazing Shrinking Woman! She fully internalises the sense of her own relative unimportance!)
Mostly, however, these ads make me worry for the status of science in our culture. A good half of them brandish subject lines which variously claim that 90% of women prefer a bigger dick! or 93% of women do not mention small penis size, for fear of upsetting their partner! or 85% of women will be 100% more satisfied by your 60% penis enlargement! This is one step further than the kind of wilful statistical misreading so ably pilloried by Language Log: instead of misrepresenting actual studies, often to say exactly the opposite to the statistical claim, these sorry examples of shamelessly unintelligent media exploitation follow the entirely new and original method of simply Making Shit Up. (Absolutely 100% of the women I have ever seen respond to the Size Matters issue firmly state that it doesn't, often while getting a sort of wistful, nostalgic gleam in their eye which suggests fond memories of a particularly memorable employment of technique).
Science, poor abused lady that she is, here takes on the status of a sort of shimmering chimera, what I would, were I being pretentious, call a Baudrillardian simulacrum. It suffices that the mere ideas of science, statistical analysis or actual research exist: the concept somehow legitimates the spurious numbers as if the reality of scientific method actually had anything to do with their generation. Look, these ads say. Shiny, reassuring numbers! Science is out there somewhere! Look how these gleaming percentages back up everything you were ever secretly afraid of anyway! You can trust us, we do Science. Not actual science, but its beguiling image.
Bleah. Also, pshaw and tchah!, and possibly phooey.
Last Night I Dreamed: things mercifully untainted by hallucinatory giant penises, for which I thank Morpheus. Instead, the family home of my high school days was under threat from a sort of creeping line of malevolent influence, which inched its way slowly up the garden leaving dried, charring vegetation in its wake. Panic ensued.
Mostly, however, these ads make me worry for the status of science in our culture. A good half of them brandish subject lines which variously claim that 90% of women prefer a bigger dick! or 93% of women do not mention small penis size, for fear of upsetting their partner! or 85% of women will be 100% more satisfied by your 60% penis enlargement! This is one step further than the kind of wilful statistical misreading so ably pilloried by Language Log: instead of misrepresenting actual studies, often to say exactly the opposite to the statistical claim, these sorry examples of shamelessly unintelligent media exploitation follow the entirely new and original method of simply Making Shit Up. (Absolutely 100% of the women I have ever seen respond to the Size Matters issue firmly state that it doesn't, often while getting a sort of wistful, nostalgic gleam in their eye which suggests fond memories of a particularly memorable employment of technique).
Science, poor abused lady that she is, here takes on the status of a sort of shimmering chimera, what I would, were I being pretentious, call a Baudrillardian simulacrum. It suffices that the mere ideas of science, statistical analysis or actual research exist: the concept somehow legitimates the spurious numbers as if the reality of scientific method actually had anything to do with their generation. Look, these ads say. Shiny, reassuring numbers! Science is out there somewhere! Look how these gleaming percentages back up everything you were ever secretly afraid of anyway! You can trust us, we do Science. Not actual science, but its beguiling image.
Bleah. Also, pshaw and tchah!, and possibly phooey.
Last Night I Dreamed: things mercifully untainted by hallucinatory giant penises, for which I thank Morpheus. Instead, the family home of my high school days was under threat from a sort of creeping line of malevolent influence, which inched its way slowly up the garden leaving dried, charring vegetation in its wake. Panic ensued.
