Yes, yes, and yes. Jenny Davis’ analysis of the gendering of Siri is spot on and of definite interest to Spiral Dance readers. Of particular interest is the comparison between the prominence of sexual references to Siri in the U.S. in comparison to Europe, where Siri has a masculine voice.

The list of speakers alone would make this conference worth attending.

As a result of this project, I have been thinking a lot about fashion magazines, including men’s magazines. So when someone on Facebook shared this video, it immediately caught my eye. It is a GQ.com post about Ken Jeong photobombing Kate Upton. Before I’ve even had my morning coffee, I find myself contemplating raced and aged bodies, the artificiality of photoshoots, and all sorts of other things.

http://www.gq.com/video/videos/ken-jeong-kate-upton-photobomb-video

Jeong is clearly leading us on, asking us to believe that he was not invited. In fact, the multiple takes of his jump into the pool, wearing different shorts each time, suggest that the folks at GQ are having a laugh.

But what is it about the video that makes it funny? Pulling from Naomi Woolf’s The Beauty Myth, the main source of yuks is that Jeong is intruding into the creation of beauty pornography, causing a humorous disjunction. He is not supposed to be there. But why does his intrusion cause laughs rather than ramping up the sexual tension? For instance, even when Jeong is in bed with the couple, the viewer is never led to believe that this could turn into a menage à trois. If you think I am making too much of it, consider how the screen capture below would be different if it were the male model posing as Jeong does

Ken Jeong Photobombs Kate Upton

There are two factors that account for the humor in the video. The first, and less insidious of the two, is that he calls our attention to the absurdity of this type of image. Note the moment at around 01:00 when Jeong playfully bites his own bra strap. It looks ridiculous on him, but it is not at all inconceivable that we might see a shot of a woman doing this in any number of men’s or fashion magazines (commentary about a woman consuming the accoutrements of her own sexuality will have to be saved for another post).

So why does it look ridiculous on him? Setting aside the issue of him being a man wearing a woman’s undergarments, it looks absurd because we are supposed to assume that he is disrupting the sexiness of the photos. Because he is not sexy. The incongruity of his raced and aged body is so far outside of pop culture’s sexual ideal, that his intrusion is assumed to be humorous. His actions with the pool noodle are coded as playful and silly when in fact they are quite lewd and suggestive. There is a long history of the desexualized Asian man in American popular culture (think Long Duc Dong, any Jackie Chan character, Jeong’s own role in The Hangover movies, etc), which allows Jeong to act suggestively to humorous effect. The additional layering of the realities of an aging body additionally obscure his sexuality and add to the humor. He is not supposed to be there because he was not invited, but also because he is not conventionally sexy.

I find it interesting that though the post at GQ is over a month old, there is just one comment. It is someone who thinks the video is hilarious. My intention here is not to deny that the video is humorous. I laughed. But I had barely caught my breath before I was thinking about how the humor was operating and wondering what this representation of middle-aged Asian male sexuality is doing as it circulates, particularly in juxtaposition with Upton and the male model. Though the humor draws upon certain stereotypes, there is an opportunity here. The opportunity is for us to reflect on Jeong’s disruption as calling our attention to the narrow definition of sexually desirable bodies as articulated by pop culture.

The video itself is interesting because it places Jeong in the position of the speaking subject. He is the narrator and is positioned as being in power because he is engaging in mischievous disruption of the photo shoot. It will be interesting to see how the still images compare. For all I know, they are for a feature about Jeong. We are seeing more and more of this trend in magazine photoshoots – the pre-release of a video while we wait for the still photo spread to hit news stands. Just one of the ways in which print publications are leveraging emerging media forms. The still photos and any accompanying commentary have the possibility of taking this story in multiple directions. We just have to wait and see.

For more reading on representations of Asian men in popular culture, see Karen Chau’s guest post at Racialicious.

This conference sounds really interesting. It makes me wish I did work on photography!

Read this. Now.

This issue and the blog response were brought to my attention by my friend and colleague Amanda Phillips.

And if you’ve any doubts about the pervasiveness of these attitudes and the need for ongoing, thoughtful discussion about gender, just take a gander at the comments.

One of my favorite moments, in response to a commenter who insists that nobody would be upset if the gender-roles were reversed, is by the original post author, Arinn Dembo:

“Since offensive terms were not applied equally, since we aren’t working in an industry with gender equality in the workplace, and since we’re not getting into what characters deserve to be called (only what they are called) we’re having the discussion.”

Engage in hypothetical response all you want, the reality is this is the thing that happened and that needs to be addressed.

(11/01/11; ACCUTE, 05/28/12- 05/31/12)

This call seems to allow for all sorts of possibilities: from the representational to the robot actualized in our media ecology.

(May 2012: Prague, Czech Republic)

2nd Global Conference:Femininities & Masculinities (May 2012: Prague, Czech Republic) | cfp.english.upenn.edu.

Note the inclusion of “cyberfeminism” in the list of appropriate topics.

Upon hearing news of the Bliss a few months ago, I was immediately reminded of an experience I had while preparing to move into my first apartment. Recognizing that I would need some basic household tools, I added a tool kit to my shopping list. When out and about, I was dismayed to find special tool kits developed for, and directed at, women. The tools were smaller and more expensive than those included in your run-of-the-mill tool kit. And they were pink.

The "Little Pink Tool Kit', available at Amazon.com

But wait, you might ask, might not smaller tools, crafted for the feeble limbs and tiny appendages of women, be appropriate? Look. We aren’t talking about a jackhammer here. If there is anyone out there who can’t heft the weight of a standard household hammer, they are unlikely to be undertaking furniture-repair or even picture-hanging. And the pink? This was not breast-cancer-awareness pink. This was shortly after the pink ribbon began to be used and long before it became a prominent symbol in cause marketing. Nor was it something I call, “eff you! pink.” You know, the pink that you might wear despite the fact that you reject oppressive gender norms, but you also recognize that pink is a nice color. No, this was Barbie pink. And of course the real rub was these tools were more expensive than the standard set. Oh yes, this was patronizing pink.

To be fair, the Bliss is not being released in pink. So I guess we should applaud HTC for that. It is being released in green, both pale (alternatively described as “seafoam”) and forest. Molly McHugh over at Digital Trends notes that the color was selected because it is supposed to be calming. In truth, the calming color of the handset, and its accompanying calming wallpaper, could come in handy if I were to turn it on and find that it comes pre-loaded with applications that perpetuate stereotypes of women as calorie-counting, shopping maniacs.

And is it just me, or is it fairly naive to want to hang a charm on your purse (assuming you have a purse) that blinks to advertise that inside this bag is one fancy ladyphone? Or am I just paranoid?

To add insult to injury, the phone’s technical specs, from all reports, are fairly middle of the road. The assumption is that I will settle for mediocre specs in exchange for not having to find and install my own calorie-counting app? Puhleeze.

HTC, if you want to make a real female friendly phone, consider adding a feature that emits an electrical buzzing sound when it detects gender stereotypes in play. But be sure that it is fast and sleek, with a high quality display and intuitive interface. That’s my idea of [phone-related] bliss.

If you are noticing that my tone in this post is more snarky than usual, you’re not wrong. It has been almost twenty years since I encountered that first pink tool set. A search for “pink tools” on Amazon returns over 39.000 hits and the suggestion for “sparkly tools” as a related search. As available smartphone options continue to expand, and high-speed connections grow into ubiquity, the only thing that will have changed is that companies will find new things to slap a coat of pink paint on and market to women. That is, unless of course, we refuse to buy them.

Notes:

1. To be fair, the hosts of the show seem fairly skeptical about the Bliss. One of the hosts even declared that if a women were savvy enough to be looking at an Android phone, it will be because she wants specs and performance. We will go with the generous reading and assume that he meant savvy in comparison to other tech consumers, and not in comparison to other female consumers. Of course, it didn’t seem to occur to the three male hosts of the show to invite in a woman to ask her opinion. Given that the weekly podcast episode is entitled “An Android Phone for the Fairer Sex,” one might have expected some participation from women other than one chat room comment read aloud, or that more than five minutes of the hour-long show might be devoted to the topic.

Further Reading About the HTC Bliss:

• Why the HTC Bliss is Already Annoying
• HTC Bliss – 5 Things You Need to Know
• New Details Emerge for Female-focused HTC Bliss
• Android Atlas Weekly 47: An Android Phone for the Fairer Sex [video; The discussion of the HTC Bliss begins around 36:00]

Deadline October 17, 2011

This looks like a great grad conference where a variety of work is welcome. There seem to be a number of ways in which a paper on gender and digital culture could fit and the registration fee is reasonable.

Otherwise I would be trying very hard to make my way to GeekGirlCon, if for no other reason than the chance to meet Trina Robbins!

You see, I need this. In academia, I never doubt that we women are in it together, fighting the same battles. But when it comes to general geek and fan culture, I find that I am much more skeptical.

I recently attended the 2011 Comic Arts Conference at San Diego Comic-Con (update on our panel coming soon…) and a friend invited me to attend the GeekGirlsNetwork 2nd Annual Geek-Out. Despite a reasonable ticket price and the promise of many cool guests and giveaways, I found myself reluctant. Was I being lured into a metal-bikini-shaped trap?

I’ll never know because I didn’t go.  Which is a shame, because by all accounts, it was a great party. I suspect this distrust stems from repeatedly having seen geek women be objectified, or worse, objectify themselves in an attempt to appeal to men (*cough* G4 *cough*).

But reading the “FAQ” page of GeekGirlCon, they really seem to have the right idea: supportive of women in science, technology, and general geekery, and welcoming of male allies.

But sadly, other responsibilities keep me from going.

So for now I’ll read the GeekGirlsNetwork blog and listen to the podcasts in an attempt to get to know them. Maybe next year I’ll make it to their party.

And I’ll daydream about GeekGirlCon and be looking for twitter and blog updates during the event. Will someone who is going please tell Trina Robbins I said, “hi!”? Thanks!

GeekGirlCon. October 8 & 9, 2011. Seattle, WA.