Oh, no! More gendered cultural forms …

Lose argument == change subject eh Eliot?

Yahoo on Monday began wooing women with a Shine website focusing on subjects such as love, money, beauty, home and parenting.

A website launched at shine.yahoo.com features nine categories the California Internet pioneer believes appeal to the approximately 40 million women ages 25 through 54 that use Yahoo monthly.

Forty million! Well what do you know - a number that might be construed as statistically meaningful in some sense.

Can I just say to the contingent that immediately interpret every protest as “finger wagging / moralising / purse lipped” and maintain that it’s about OMG!FREESPEECH, if you sit down and have a good think I’m sure that you can think of a few instances where someone is being a complete arse and needs a right (verbal) hammering, not to mention distributed mockery. This is what is happening to young what’s his face who put up this web site. Can you get it that “freedom of speech” means that we may discuss at length and with great force why we think this site is not only worthless, but potentially damaging, as one incremental part of an avalanch of Pink-princessification / premature supermodelification of our girls. I completely get why some beneficiaries of the patriarchal social model might defend it to the death, but some of us use our freedom of speech to call you on it.

how utterly statistically inconsequential the data are

You need to get a clue about the difference between incidence and prevalence. See Fine about the trend.

That’s a huge increase. 978 - 3841 - in less than a decade.

Wow! 2,863! In only ten years!! What’s the population of the USA? Oh, yes, that’s right -301,000,000.

By comparison, the number of ten year old boys playing Billy Elliot in musicals by Si Relton John has doubled in just one year - from four to eight.

You supplied your own trend figurs, Eliot Ramsay. In 1998, 978 had breast augmentation surgery. Last year, (2007?), 3,841 had breast augmentation surgery. That’s a huge increase. 978 - 3841 - in less than a decade. That’s huge. And nothing there about reconstructive surgery, just augmentation.

BTW, no-one said anything about pre-teens. Wher did you get that from?

Eliot Ramsey — I could well be wrong, but my assumption about the most important and most frequent task of reconstructive surgeons in the above context, is to treat breast-cancer patients who have undergone mastectomies, in which case your outrage would be misplaced, to say the least. But someone please correct me if I’m mistaken.

Okay then, you’re mistaken. Because the tiny numbers of pre-teen girls allegedly having boob jobs for supposedly frivolous reasons:

a) obviously doesn’t impinge upon the literally hundreds of thousands of women having mastectomies and reconstructive surgery each year - any more than the men having gender reassignments impinges upon the demonstrably greater number of men having prostate cancer surgery. Does it?

b) the panicky claims are not backed by any qualitative indications showing the reasons why the tiny percentage of girls involved had the work done anyway.

Just finger-wagging and moralising about it is not beside the point - it is the the point of this obvious beat up.

What we have here is a moral panic attempt by some fringe feminist element that has deliberately sexualised teenaged girls then held them up as sanctified ritual sacrificial “victims” for a deliberate media beat up.

tigtog says;

Not all or even most MTF transfolk want to look like Barbie, Eliot.

Not all or even most teenaged girls want to look like Barbie either, do they?

su says;

You keep quoting your rubbery figure as representative of the proportion of under 18’s who have this surgery, which it is NOT.

Well, my “rubbery” figures suggesting how utterly statistically inconsequential the data are for some supposed (largely imaginary) America-wide surge in teenaged breast enhancements are still more empirically sound than the total lack of any evidence whatsoever coming from the Panic Station Imagineers driving this Furphy, hey?

If yoo want to provide some trend analyses demosntrating otherwise, go right ahead, because I’d love to see it.

cheers

It is of course quite possible that the idea of masses of parents giving their daughters breast implants for their Sweet 16 parties is simply an urban legend, and that most of the augmentations are to correct asymmetries etc. However, the rise of a new demographic for augmentations would seem to indicate more of a response to marketing pressures, because unless you know something I don’t know there hasn’t been a sudden rise in the number of young women with asymmetric or malformed breasts.

I also have no problem with coming down on the side that as far as 16 year olds of either gender are concerned, surgical procedures should be about their needs, not their wants. Let them take the couple more years to age 18 to evaluate the want.

Eliot Ramsey keeps on trying to lump reconstructive breast surgery in with augmentation surgery as if it’s a subcategory, whereas the very source he quoted points out that the two categories are entirely separate subcategories of breast implant surgery.

Contrast the passionate “concern” over the tiny numbers of young women having “cosmetic” surgery - if indeed that’s what we are even talking about here - with the ways transexual gender re-assignments are discussed on the “progressive” fringes of debates over sexual politics.

If it can be merely alleged that a woman somewhere in the world has surgery to look like Barbie, moral panic. If however a man has masses of surgery to look like Barbie, then instead he’s a courageous pioneer on the front line of transgender sexual liberation politics. Anyway…

tigtog, if reconstructive surgeons are an elite compared to everyday cosmetic surgeons, would that be because the field of cosmetic surgery is even larger than reconstructive? In which case, the absurdly tiny ratio of 16-18 year old women having any kind of breast augmentation surgery is even smaller than the absurdly minuscule 00.19705 per cent proportion of the whole we’ve already calculated?

You could be right, tigtog.

What could settle this discussion would be if those in the grip of the moral panic over the vast wave of 16-year-old American girls having breast enhancements (00.19705 per cent of the total - or less it seems) actually did a study of their reasons for doing so. I mean, if you can actually sift a statistically meaningful sample of informants from such a rare subcategory.

But that’s assuming this “debate” is about their wants…

Now, note this from the Our Bodies Ourselves website;

In 2005, more than 360,000 women and teenagers underwent breast implant surgery for augmentation and approximately 57,000 women underwent breast implant surgery for reconstruction after mastectomy.

Reconstructive surgery is simply not referred to as augmentation, mainly because the subset of Plastic Surgeons who are Reconstructive Surgeons view themselves as an elite compared to everyday Cosmetic Surgeons.

I’m generally keen to know about good games for girls - in fact, jst about any girl-related popular culture that isnt of the Barbie/ bimbo/ Paris H. airhead variety.

Best rule of thumb: avoid anything deliberately marketed exclusively for girls. That includes all the execrable Bratz playstation games and whatnot. Kids love puzzles and while initially some of the subject matter of the best puzzle games is very “male” centred, the gameplay is universal. While a lot of the imagery in male centred games is very unfortunate (every woman in Deus Ex has enormous breasts for example) it’s also easy to mock.

su wrote:

Also every single instance of modelling will seem minor when compared with the overall culture.

I didn’t make myself clear enough su, what is most obvious to me is that games are not standalone in kids experiences and shouldn’t be viewed as such - they don’t have special powers that TV doesn’t possess. Kids flip around between the TV, talking to their friends, playing games and the images and experiences are a bit of a continuum. What I was trying to say was that you should evaluate games in the same way as you evaluate TV or your kids friends parents: the sh*t filter is universally applicable.

I’m not a big one for boosting products - but I played Wii recently: how much fun is that?! Gotta get one!