London Urban Space (so many hats)

Taste for Beer and Inclination for First Date Sex: Data on Dating

I recently discovered the most insightfully fascinating blog. Written by the good people behind OkCupid, on it they compress their users profiles' data into these simple graphs with powerful one liners: they objectify people, correlate oral sex and eating habits, and activity on twitter with masturbation probabilities. It's amazing!

My favorite so far links beer appreciation with the potentiality of sleeping with someone on a first date:

How amazing?

Weirdly the same day I heard about this blog, I finished an old New Yorker article on online dating that mentions it. In the article we learn about the science and math behind meeting a significant other, potential differences between the photo pauses that attract men versus those that attract women, the OKcupid founders' marital status, and the religious rigor behind eHarmony's experiments. About the blog we learn that the data is based on the analysis of 34,620 couples and that, according to its author, Nick Paumgarten, the blog's purpose "is to attract attention: the findings, like the quizzes [in its early days the site's four Harvard math majors founders attracted members through quizzes] are to lure you."

Not so sure about being lured by OKCupid, but totally lured by human beings.

Coding Secret Wars vs. Experiencing Public Security

After last's post theme that gay rights is all too often a guy's club, I think it is only appropriate to post on two very dude topics - war and coding (see below). Who knew anything about Stuxnet? Who knew anything about this compared to the ratio of those who know the security measures in airports? I'm about to take a plane right now, and as I will be getting my water bottle scanned, I'm going be reminded the great risk my country is at and the great security measures my country is putting in place to save me from this danger. But really a part from pissing me off, forcing me to buy an expensive water bottle and convincing me Western society is going mad, clearly this type of visible security is worth peanuts...

Hh: It's Guy Pride Month

Stella and Heineken: The New Beer Drinkers

Stella Artois has long tradition of advertising itself as the la bière pour les hommes à femmes. In their past ads women and Stella Artois bottles are interchangeable because both are light and straight out of the 60s, and the male characters are handsome Frenchmen with perfect-fitting suits and ravishing taste. Their latest ad keeps to their manicured nostalgia but changes the narration making the girl the one who switches the boy for the Stella.

Heineken seems to be wanting to go somewhere somewhat similar by presenting an ad with a lovely couple, a touch of humor, choreographed eye movement and 60s beats that calls anything but "beer is exclusively for men who like sports, bawling and junk food."

Girls, not feeling those sugary Smirnoff Ice delicacies any more, well both Stella and Heinken are thinking of you:

JR's TED wish

JR in London during the 2008 exhibit at the Tate

Hard not to love JR and admire the artist's aspirations and process. Since his 2005 takeover of the 16ème arrondissement in Paris with portraits of banlieues inhabitants during their riots, JR has gone around the world to make his large glued-in-publicscapes portraits more than just street art but agents of social change.

All of his art excursions tackle topics animating our contemporary culture by way of personal narrations. In Israel he placed side by side portraits of Palestinians and Israelis in 8 cities; and in Brazil he invaded one of the most dangerous favellas of Rio to question the gap between the media's portrayal of the area and its inhabitants' stories.

Probably his most powerful project as of yet, is his 2009 travels with Médecins Sans Frontières through Sierra Leone, Kenya, Soudan and Liberia to meet women, many of them rape victims and most of all discriminated against throughout their life because of their gender. Speaking to them and then snapping their portraits JR and his team plastered their black and white images on rooftops, trains, and other public platforms as if to give their life a place in the public realm. It isn't only faces, it is about making material objects that give meaning and bring respect to their subjects as well as a means to discuss the everyday to change it.

There is a lot of idealism involved in his work - and at times the rhetoric of changing things with little images relative to the poverty and violence of its subject seem to make it the quintessential western 'feel good' project - but then again there isn't much to loose and certainly so much to make better. I've wanted to send him an email for years along the lines of "I love you" but now that TED has made him the winner of their 2011 TEDprize (in 2005 a certain singer and NGO owner with a Louis Vuitton contract had won) I fear my declaration would be discarded as insincere. He revealed his TED art project last week. Called the Inside Out Project, it is about getting anyone who wants to upload and plaster a photograph in their public space to do so.

That's great, but in my opinion it excludes a lot of people without the internet or a camera (means of communicating about oneself) and as such, not nearly as great as this:

Sea Elephant Harem vs. Emperor Penguin Monogomy: Why Shape and Size Matter in Mating

Recently I listened to an introductory social psychology class from Yale on Love and another entitled "What motivate us: sex." I learned that for most animals, males are more inclined to mating than females simply because females know that if the intercourse is fruitful a major energy burden is upon them. Just considering the time burden in the case of a human offspring is relevant: men-time burden 15 seconds, women-time burden 9 months and 15 seconds.

Overall the rule is the bigger the body difference between male and female the less the male will be needed in the post-breeding and the more it will be difficult for him to sleep with a female. For the sea elephant, the male is 4 times the size of the female, and unsurprisingly the male has nothing to do once the mating is over and only ten per cent of them get to copulate (becoming Alpha or Beta males) during their lifetime. Comparatively the male and female emperor penguins have perfectly equivalent body sizes: they share all the breeding and incubating burden and find each other through their vocal chords - no male fighting required.

(why no one ever produced an award winning film on the sea elephant courtship, mating and giving life ritual is presented via the links above)

This is a male seahorse giving birth - the female is 15 to 20% bigger than her male counterpart.

New Year Resolutions

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Green Porno

Sigmund Freud came up with a few ideas. Including one - later coined death drive - with which he revised his key notion of the pleasure principle. It goes more or less like this: At first Freud thought all humans innately acted upon a unique and repressed sexual drive (a drive to live and reproduce), he called the pleasure principle; a little later - after WW1's trench victims came back with their vivid trauma dreams and his daughter Sophie died - he proposed the more nuanced idea that human beings actually are ruled by a sex drive as well as the more self-destructive death drive directed at one's own organic end. 

As Rossillini demonstrates (wearing a few coloured leotards) seems like insects act out on both drives quite well:

The male bedbug stabs (death drive) his female counterpart in the abdomen to ejaculate (pleasure principle) in the wound. It is through her blood stream that his semen reaches her ovaries.  

To reproduce (pleasure principle), the praying mentis male gets his head eaten (death drive) before copulation is done by his female counterpart's 180 degree rotating head.

There isn't much sex for bees - it's hard to know where the pleasure principle and where the death drive begin or end. The Queen, only female bee of the colony who gets to do it, does it once, in mid air and lays eggs for the rest of her existence, while the 'lucky' male bee (drones) looses his penis (the ovipositer) in the process and immediately dies from the loss.

Fixing Playmates and the Birth of Viagra

December 1992's playmate, aka Barbara Moore, is on sale for an estimated 1,500 - 2,500$. Among the many lots, the centerfold prints showing post-production comments on the Playmates' sexy poses seem like the most interesting pieces being auctioned off at Christie's December 8th "The Year of The Bunny: The Playboy Collection" sale.

While unsurprisingly most of the Playboy memorabilia for sale offer a pleasant array of cookie cutter sexuality and generic eroticism (in this case: here's Barbara about to make you a creamy smoothie) these footnoted photographs offer powerful cues  for a better sex-life. Women, own up to it:
- "better curve" (Dec 1992 Playmate)
- "smoother" (All Playmates)
- "slimmer here slightly" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "accentuate nipples" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "kill nipple" (Jan 1995 Playmate)
- "kill stretch-marks" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "diminish stubble" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "kill out veins" (March 1996 Playmate)
- "fill with similar skin" (August 1995 Playmate)
- "kill line bellow lip" (August 1995 Playmate)

And how did the pharmaceutical industry come up with Viagra?

What Does the Man Want? Negotiating Gender in Ads

According to Old Spice, the man wants a girlfriend. According to Argentina's best selling beer, Andes, the man wants a girlfriend. What both brands also agree on is that by their very nature women will only want to be girlfriends if men can comply to a multitude of qualities that men (by their very nature) will never have. 

It's a tough situation. Luckily brands are here to help us negotiate our gender differences and expectations:

Step 1 - to 'get' a girlfriend fool the female olfactory sense into believing you are the perfect man (which translates as simultaneously a motorcycle owner, kitchen maker, beach showerer, cake cooker, forest adventurer, swan diver).
Step 2 - once the girlfriend acquired continue to perpetuate the lie by answering her phone calls in a manufactured audioscape to dupe her into thinking you are unable to see her because of a terrible situation beyond your control (diarrhea, hospital emergency, bar mitzvah, traffic jam, karate class, babysitting).

I think it's a an interesting demonstration of cowardliness and fear of solitude which is rarely reserved to men. In many ways these ads are more representative of human traits ( which applies both men and women) and our high hopes that things might hide these aspects of our kind than gender specifics. Although undeniably prince charming fantasies and men lying to the ones they consider themselves the closest to make for funny (selling) situations.

Demonstration:
June 2010 - Old Spice Deodorant

January 2010 - Andes Beer (Del Campo/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi Buenos Aires)

A Computer Mouse vs. The Stone Axe: Rethinking Gender Division, Ideas having Sex and Understanding Progress

"No one on this planet knows how to make a pencil"

A great TED talk found on metcool: