Seth’s blog

I loved Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. It was one of the best books I read in 2007. So I was pleased to learn of the Bechdel Test, which can be applied to TV and movies:

To pass it your movie [or TV show] must have the following:

1) there are at least two named female characters, who

2) talk to each other about

3) something other than a man.

Few movies or TV shows pass it, said Jennifer Kesler.

I came across this test after spending a pleasant morning analyzing data while listening to the first six episodes of Denise Richards: It’s Complicated which I found on YouTube. (Such as part 1 of Episode 1.) The show consisted mainly of two named female characters — Denise and sister, Denise and friend, Denise and daughter — talking to each other about something other than a man.

I was surprised how much I liked it. When Denise and her dad (who lives with her) interview people to be her assistant, it was amusing (Denise has about 20 pets; one applicant said she didn’t like pets); when she gets mad at an entertainment journalist, it was forgivable; when she enters her nephew’s room to find him and his friends looking at a Playboy with her on the cover, it was unforgettable. The entertainment journalist wants to know why she is doing the reality show. “My [recently dead] mom wanted me to do it,” Denise says. The journalist can barely keep from laughing. “A deathbed wish?” she says. Denise got upset, so let me answer: The better you know almost anyone, the more you like them.

How to avoid demonization.

More. Gillian Flynn, one of Entertainment Weekly’s TV reviewers, hated the show — gave it a D. Could reviewers be overly negative because they are forced to watch?

The Harvard Society of Fellows, I learned from this great post by Steve Levitt, drink expensive wine — like $60/bottle. Steve, who was a Fellow for 3 years, did a simple experiment that showed the other members couldn’t tell expensive wine from cheap wine. Although the other members had liked the idea of doing the experiment, they didn’t like the results:

There was a lot of anger when I revealed the results, especially the fact that I had included the same wine twice. One eminent scholar stormed out of the room stating that he had a cold — otherwise he would have detected my sleight of hand with certainty.

Stormed out of the room! Why were they so angry? I think they were embarrassed. And not just that. Steve doesn’t say it, but I think there had been lots of dinner table conversation about how great the wine was. Now all that conversation was revealed to be delusional. Noting the greatness of the wine was — to be crude about it — a way of noting the greatness of those assembled at the table. “We appreciate the finer things in life,” they were saying. “We deserve to be here.” Snobbery is reassuring. In a tiny voice, the results said, yes, you are here, congratulations, but the reason you are here is more complicated than “you deserved it”.

In the last chapter of The Shangri-La Diet and this post, I said it was foolish for those who want to improve the world to denigrate those in industry. (”[Food] companies will put anything in their food if they think the extra marketing hype will help them sell more of it,” said Marian Nestle.) A recent article in the NY Times described in detail how a wash-your-hands campaign became more effective by studying industry tactics. The head of the campaign said pretty much what I’ve been saying:

“For a long time, the public health community was distrustful [not to mention scornful] of industry, because many felt these companies were trying to sell products that made people’s lives less healthy, by encouraging them to smoke, or to eat unhealthy foods, or by selling expensive products people didn’t really need,” Dr. Curtis said. “But those tactics also allow us to save lives. If we want to really help the world, we need every tool we can get.”

And every person.

Thanks to Marian Lizzi.

I learned a new verb today: to other, meaning to treat someone else as “other,” as different. The person I learned it from had used it once before. She had learned it from a graduate student. Sample usage: “They were othering him and I didn’t like it.” I like to other because there’s room for a milder term than demonize.

Definition of othering, which isn’t in Merriam-Webster’s Online.

In response to my post Can You Change Something if You Don’t Love It? Patri Friedman wrote:

This seems like a good argument for social freedom and harm reduction rather than criminalization, for things like prostitution, gambling, and drugs. If they are illegal, we tend to demonize them, and the people who do them are people willing to do illegal things, who tend to be sleazier. You get a feedback cycle of sleaziness. And then when there are problems (drugs that are bad for you, STDS among sex workers), they are hard to fix.

If instead you acknowledge that these things are going to happen anyway, make them legal and regulated, when problems come up it will be much easier to find smart, competent people who respect drug users, prostitutes, and Johns, and can provide good suggestions for fixing the problems.

Besides being a great point all by itself, it is eerily similar to something Eduoard Servan-Schrieber told me at lunch when he was a grad student at Berkeley. He’d been a sailor in the French navy when he was about 21. Every day, everyone on the ship had lunch together, the officers at the same table as the privates. This was great, said Eduaord, because when a problem came up it was easy to speak with the officers about it. You weren’t scared of them, they weren’t mistrustful of you.

I’ve repeated this story many times. I think there is something basic and biological that makes us trust and work well with people we see regularly and makes us mistrust and work poorly with those we don’t see regularly. When you are in the same company or organization with people you don’t see regularly, great problems can arise, especially if you have power over them or they have power over you.

More. Elisabeth Pisani — the source of the post to which Friedman responded — wrote me, “I agree 100% with Patri, not just on principle but with the weight of the evidence of 15 years experience.”