Hey Raena

At CeBIT this week there was a booth from NetRegistry staffed with guys and girls dressed up as nurses. There were also some posters and brochures (PDF), including one play on that well-known male impotence ad. Apparently some people were quite offended, according to this article, while others think it’s all a big load of femmo leftie PC bullshit (see the comments on that article).

I missed a whole bunch of righteous fury and other assorted twittercrap about this while it was happening (I was kind of preoccupied by what I was there to do), and only found out there was some excitement about it when my housemate mentioned it Saturday morning. But I’d visited the booth on Tuesday, and spoke to one of the male nurse dudes, and I’ll tell you I honestly did have a sense of feeling a bit icked out at the booth. I wasn’t morally outraged enough to go write my MP or anything like that, but I didn’t like it.

The booth had a website health check theme, which meant that there was a kind reason for the dress-ups (probably more than can be said for some of the other ones), and the girl nurses weren’t putting on the trout-pout-tits-out act — in fact they seemed pretty poised and articulate to me. Here’s a picture of the gang from Flickr, presumably courtesy of somebody carrying a really small cameraphone.

In fact, the observant viewer will note the girls’ outfits include leggings and sleeves which do some way towards toning down the skank factor from those weeny little dresses. They’re still obviously wearing “naughty” outfits (noticably distinct from the male nurses’ professional-looking scrubs), but at least they weren’t completely trampy.

I get the joke, ha ha, and honestly I got over it as soon as I’d left the booth. But I still didn’t feel especially good about this, cause there’s a little more to it than the nurses. Here, I’ll show you what I mean.

What’s wrong with this picture?

These are three of the four brochures in their “health kit” giveaway, which were also posters on the wall. (There’s a fourth brochure of a man covering his eyes — “Can’t see yourself on Google?” — which I’ll mention for completeness, but it’s not relevant to the point I want to make here.)

Visuals are powerful. In Blink, there’s a passage where a market researcher says that adding more yellow to a can of 7-Up made people truly believe that the product tasted more citrusy. And perception is reality, right? So, ignoring the text for a moment, what’s the visual message we have here?

First is a protruding belly, completely depersonalised by the fact that the woman’s face is totally excluded. I may well be in a minority here, but I’ve always seen these kinds of photos as visual shorthand for the idea that a pregnant woman has nothing more interesting to do than sit about and be up the duff — much as a close-up of a woman’s chest reduces her to a sweet set of jugs.

Then we have a woman with absolutely nothing wrong with her face undergoing surgery. What’s wrong with her? She looks great. I feel as if someone’s trying to tell me that she’s not pretty enough, which doesn’t seem like a positive message. I know this one really struck me as confusing when I saw it on the wall — more so than the other two.

Finally we have the cheesy old bimbo-and-sugar daddy trope—whether she’s a sugar babe or a trophy wife, this is an image of a woman as a sexual accessory, and daddy here looks extremely pleased with the way his bit of fluff is fondling his big red tie there. Oh yeah.

Or, the short version: Breeding, beauty, booby blondes. And don’t forget the “naughty” nurses, which might be innocently saucy in isolation, but here… well, in combination it’s got a vaguely unwelcoming undertone that was obviously quite unintended, but it still doesn’t sit right with me.

That said, it’s certainly not the worst thing I’ve seen, and I feel like it was a more thoughtless than malicious. Whatever, right?

Still…

What’s more concerning to me, though, is reading some of the NetRegistry folks’ responses to their detractors.

Jonathan Crossfield, NetRegistry’s marketing manager, seems to acknowledge that there’s a certain kind of stereotyping involved in this campaign, but he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it:

There is no doubt that gender stereotyping is an issue, but it is still rife throughout media and marketing. That isn’t to excuse our stand (as I don’t particularly feel it needs excusing), but to explain how gender stereotyping is still a commonly used shorthand to achieve a fast message. In TV commercials, business people are still predominantly men - particularly if they are either bumbling or corrupt. Housewife ads still proliferate, despite the shift in men sharing more household duties and women now more commonly having careers. The marketing shorthand remains. Yes, it’s lazy and yes, it’s unfortunate but, on a certain level, it’s understandable when conveying a specific marketing message in an easily recognisable way. What is interesting is that the male nurses were ignored, demonstrating that the high recognition of a female nurse outweighs the low recognition of a male nurse in scrubs, suggesting public perception still contributes greatly to this stereotyping in a feedback loop of attitudes.

Jonathan, if you happen to be reading this, that feedback loop of laziness and assumption will continue to be a problem as long as that marketing shorthand continues to be used. If you think it’s lazy and unfortunate then you shouldn’t wait for the mob to change their attitudes, because the mob is a fuckwit.

I also think that if your best-intentioned message had, instead, inadvertently implied something about a particular race or sexuality, you’d be whistling a completely different tune about what should or shouldn’t need to be excused.

I’m also extremely unimpressed with how NetRegistry’s Aaron Darc chose to characterise the reaction. He’s got a long and detailed post, which is quite interesting and perfectly fine — except for the part where he characterises those people who had a problem with the booth as “a handful of hardcore feminists”, and says:

One of them, Kate Carruthers, had the audacity to relate the campaign to the NRL scandal! I wonder if she realised she was actiually helping the brand with her far too obvious extremism that resulted in a weaker argument because of the extremity of some of her associations and assertions. Another, Kathy Reid (who refused to publish any comments on her forumboard that didn’t concur with her own view), admitted she had not actually seen the stand!

… they could have bothered to read the material properly - or perhaps even to see the actual campaign, before they opened their mouths. They could have talked, instead, about the real use of sexism that occurred at that show (not by us). But no, no, quick, everybody! Let’s band together and jump on this train and see if we can ride ourselves into the press! We didn’t create the PR. They did (quite deliberately). Thanks to it, all that occurred was the raising of our profile, and the endearment of the brand to a large core of its demographic.

Then again, I know their world enough to know that they would have also endeared themselves more to their own demographic. Theirs means a lot to their aspirations, and little to ours. Ours means little to theirs, nor do their brigade (who will certainly never purchase anything with Netregistry) mean anything to us (we certainly don’t make our business off feminist IT bloggers and Twitterers).

Aaron, on the off chance you read this: This is a bit of a silly attitude to hold. Calling this response extremist, or characterising it as a spot of attention seeking for the media, doesn’t acknowledge the fact that there really is a legitimate problem with the industry’s depiction of women. It’s also pretty short-sighted to dismiss your detractors as being entirely outside your market; I think it’s reasonable to assume that a “feminist IT blogger” and her readers, being interested in the Web, will possibly want to buy some hosting one day.

I did visit the booth and had a chat, I do buy domain names, and I frequently recommend web hosting and other web-related stuff to others. I hadn’t seen or heard any controversy at the time, I made up my own mind, and I still thought the booth was uncool. Sorry if you think that makes me an extremist hardcore feminazi or whatever; I’d like to think not.

Either way, if you don’t want me in your market anymore, that’s really not my loss.

It’s like water on rocks

I’ll freely admit that I’m especially sensitive to this issue than your average Joe or Joanne, what with actually being a chick in IT—we’re outnumbered, usually paid less, and generally treated with a bias (PDF). It is not the easiest thing in the world to be a woman in this industry. So sure, maybe I’m interpreting this in a way that others wouldn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less valid, thank you very much. If anything, I’m better equipped to articulate an opinion about this, because it affects me in a very real way.

Changing the way we depict women in technology can go a long way to resolving a very real problem. Here’s a quote from Larry Bloch, NetRegistry’s CEO:

Mr Bloch admitted the IT industry was challenging for women, but offered no apology for his marketing department’s strategy.

“I think IT is a challenging industry for women… clearly that is a problem,” he said.

But the executive was hesitant to draw conclusions when asked if his company’s actions would deter women from joining the industry.

“I think that is a very long bow to draw,” he said.

Water that trickles over rocks will slowly wear them down. Of course it’s a long bow to draw if you think this one incident will, alone, put women off IT — but combined with everything else we have to put up with, it’s just yet another little drop on that rock. It’s just so tiring.

I guess this is just a long-winded way to say that I’d like to have seen this issue acknowledged as something more than just a few sensationalists getting all hot and bothered over nothing. There is a real issue and this booth didn’t help, and neither did the NetRegistry guys’ reaction.