Daze Reader weekly archive: January 27, 2008 to Feb 2, 2008

Friday, February 1, 2008

Finally, a government agency story with a happy ending. "Consumer protection officials in Romania have upheld a complaint from a man who said his inflatable doll had lost its moan. A sex shop in Brasov, Transylvania, was fined £600 and ordered to provide the man, said to be in his 40s, with a new doll. The man had also complained that the rubber doll deflated too quickly." Not a happy ending if you own a Transylvanian sex shop, I suppose, especially since a refurbished inflatable doll has little resale value.

The Federal Communications Commission (a US government agency) has levied a $1.4 million fine against ABC and 52 affiliated stations over full dorsal female nudity in a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue. By comparison, Janet Jackson's stray nipple set CBS back just $550,000.

In a notice filed on Friday, the agency said 52 television ABC stations in the Central and Mountain time zones had aired the scene at 9 p.m. in violation of federal restrictions against broadcasting "obscene material" between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The agency said it received "numerous complaints" about the scene, in which a young boy walks in on a nude woman about to take a shower.

You can watch the offending scene at YouTube (but please, only after 10 pm).

Ryanair (a budget airline based in Ireland) and the Advertising Standards Authority (a British government agency) are on a collision course over a racy newspaper ad.

RYANAIR has refused to pull an ad showing a model in what looks like school uniform which has been banned by watchdogs.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled the “irresponsible” image appeared to link teenage girls with sexually provocative behaviour and feared it could offend readers.

Here's the irresponsible ad in question:

To their credit, Ryanair is not sitting down quietly, instead preparing to storm the watchdog's cockpit.

The airline hit back, saying the number of complaints was insignificant when compared to the newspapers’ combined readership [13 complaints out of 3.5 million readers].

It said the model’s short skirt and bare midriff reflected the type of clothing fashionable among young women in the UK.

He said: “It is remarkable that a picture of a fully clothed model is now claimed to cause ”serious or widespread offence“, when many of the UK’s leading daily newspapers regularly run pictures of topless or partially dressed females without causing any serious or widespread offence.

And this time, it's personal.

“This isn’t advertising regulation, it is simply censorship. This bunch of unelected self-appointed dimwits are clearly incapable of fairly and impartially ruling on advertising.”

Across the pond, Ryanair is also being sued by French president Nicolas Sarkozy (an elected dimwit, at least) and model/singer/girlfriend Carla Bruni.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Conservative pundit Anne Applebaum looks into a question I've often asked: Dude, what's with all these smoking hot Russian babes? Applebaum doesn't phrase it quite like that, but you get the gist.

Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.

Applebaum cites tennis players, fashion models and high-society arm candy as beneficiaries of this new "market for female beauty", but the same dynamic holds in the less glamorous field of pornography. Much of the hardcore pornography sold in western Europe and North America is shot in post-communist eastern Europe, home to multitudes of young, beautiful, sexually liberated (and just as importantly, let's be honest, white-skinned) women willing to work for relatively low pay.

Critics of the beauty industry and/or globalization might question whether joining this international "market for female beauty" represents progress. But Applebaum notes that the openness that gives us Maria Sharapova wallpapers also creates many other opportunities.

Ultimately, what goes for the fashion world goes for other spheres of human activity. In the past, you had to play chess or be a champion gymnast to come to international attention if you were born in the Eastern bloc—chess and competitive sports figuring among the few party-approved export industries. Nowadays, stars in fields previously unsanctioned by the party—crime novelists, conceptual artists, computer whizzes—from Russia, Hungary, or Uzbekistan have a shot at fame and fortune, too. As for talented entrepreneurs, the sky's the limit.

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table [or being dp-ed by uncircumcised thugs on your monitor — ed.]: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

Markets in everything, amen.