skirtcafe.org

A few items I found when looking at Facebook and links to these articles.

Misconceptions of men wearing skirts
Skirt fashion for men
Why Men Should Wear Skirts

Interesting

Uncle Al

Encouraging men to embrace their inner femininity won't sell skirts; if anything, that will repel them.

The marketing assumes that men are women. If so, we are very strange women

Not with you, Grok. Where does he encourage femininity? Some of his styles are too fem for me - the gipsy skirts and dirndls, but most are OK.

As for the adverts, they are propably generated automatically. The software sees the word "skirt" all over the place and assumes that the page is aimed at women.

I have no idea where the notion of "embracing inner femininity" came from as all the articles quoted were quite solidly in the masculine camp with the possible exception of the shoes in one of the articles. So, I believe we can safely dismiss the notion. Full stop.

Skirts work. They work on gals (and we love them for it) and they work on guys (and we're cooler for it). This has precisely nothing about "embracing femininity". It has everything to do with a sense of style and what looks good on us and what's comfortable.

Sure, we will encounter narrow minds when we're so attired, and sometimes those narrow minds hold power over us, but if we surrender to those small minds we are lowering ourselves to their level which is never healthy for a free thinker. "Non illegitimi carborundum" as the saying goes. If they grind us down to their level then they have won. Yes, occasionally we'll have to bow to convention, possibly to keep jobs or (vastly more perniciously) marriages, but in the long haul ought to be able to run free.

So the soft ware has a gender bias?

Grok wrote:So the soft ware has a gender bias?

Calling it a bias is overstating a little, but it will have a built in concept of linked or associated products in order to target advertisements as accurately as it can. For example trying to sell hunting rifles on a page of search results about pet shops is unlikely to be successful. Equally, advertising Hy-Mac diggers to people searching for baby clothes may also be a tough sale...

The software is designed to look for key words and then, based on probability, it will offer adverts that it thinks may be relevant. Guys in skirts are too small a market segment to have made much impact on Mr Google's probability models yet.

Have fun,


Ian.

That sort of software is very sophisticated. I read an article about the American store Target, who inadvertently tipped a man off about his teenage daughter being pregnant. Target worked it out because she had started to buy certain items, so they sent adverts and vouchers for babygrows, prams etc to her address. She lived with her parents, so her father saw the adverts and the penny dropped!

George Orwell was right; Big Brother is watching you.