“Bustle”

International Women’s Day 2018: By The Numbers

International Women's Day 2018 (Code Pink)

International Women’s Day 2018 (Code Pink)

Today is International Women’s Day! Here are some fun facts appropriate for the day (and for the purposes of this blog) to dazzle your friends, with sources hyperlinked:

  • “Women love sex just as much as men. In a recent survey, three quarters of the females polled said they wanted to romp at least three times a week.”
  • Women now make up over half of college graduates at 58%. And it’s had an effect: “This increased percentage of educated women has been directly tied to economic growth worldwide — and faster economic growth at that.”
  • Curious about how the wage gap‘s looking? “In 2016, women working full time in the United States typically were paid just 80 percent of what men were paid.”
  • 80% of women directors made only 1 film between 2007 to 2016.
  • Only 17% of start-ups had a female founder in 2017.
  • This year’s theme is “#pressforprogress — a push for gender parity nationwide.”

And these are just the tip of the iceberg. There are lots more interesting facts out there. Now go out and spread the word that change needs to happen!!

Bus Permits for the Women’s March Outnumber Bus Permits for the Inauguration by a 1:6 Ratio

Women's Strike For Peace And Equality March, 1970 (Time)

Women’s Strike for Peace-And Equality, Women’s Strike for Equality, Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, August 26, 1970. (Photo by Eugene Gordon/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)Women’s Strike For Peace And Equality March, 1970 (Time)

Friday, January 20th is Inauguration Day for the president-elect. The Women’s March takes place the next day. (Who’s going? I am!) D.C. can already tell the event is sure to be huge, judging by the number of bus permits secured. And the March might overshadow the previous day’s activities.

According to D.C. Council member Charles Allen, 1,200 buses have secured parking permits for the day of the March in RFK Stadium. (RFK Stadium has a capacity of 1,300 buses.) By contrast, just 200 buses have registered for parking permits for Inauguration Day. For every bus that has registered for the inauguration, six buses have registered for the March.

For President Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2009, 3K buses registered for permits. Bus registrations for the current president-elect comprised 6.67% of that total.

Attendees for the March are expected to number as many as 200K.

Hopefully, this detail begins getting the message to the president-elect loud and clear that we will not be ignored.

 

 

Hillary Clinton Spoke 38% of the Time During the First Presidential Debate

Hillary Clinton (ABC News)

Hillary Clinton (ABC News)

The first presidential debate aired this past Monday night between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump. It was clear that Trump interrupted Clinton many times (51 times, to be exact), but his talking time massively negatively impacted Clinton’s.

Clinton spoke only 38% of the debate running time.

How do we know this? Twitter crunched some numbers surrounding the frequency of the hashtag #debates, and possibly how many times the two nominees’ names (and maybe quotes) were mentioned. (I couldn’t find the methodology behind Twitter’s data, so I couldn’t delve into it. Sad.)

By contrast, Trump spoke for 62% of the time. Given his verbose tendencies, this hardly comes as a surprise.

Smart Vibrators Will Data-Mine Your Pleasure

SmartBod vibrator prototype evolution (Angel.co)

SmartBod vibrator prototype evolution (Angel.co)

Happy Friday! We’ve talked about smart sex toys before, and also how Big Data is taking over sex. We’re ushering in a new era of sexual data and metrics, on a more minute level than ever before.

Enter the SmartBod, a vibrator that tracks its users’ data and aggregates it via a related app. While tracking arousal (and climax) patterns, the user will then be able to establish a baseline of usual trends. The app will also suggest ideas mined from the collected data. Call it sex-alytics, if you will.

UC Berkeley entrepreneurs Liz Klinger and James Wang aim to help women spark conversations regarding pleasure, since it can be an uncomfortable topic for most people. The user “would learn how their orgasm changes depending on how and when they use the vibrator.” It can also help women determine if they’re “normal” or not, in terms of their orgasms and arousal. So you can compete with others, or with yourself or both.

This counts as the second “smart” vibrator I’m aware of, next to the upcoming Una. As a both a sex geek and a data nerd, I can’t wait to use these and report my results. All in the name of science, of course!

 

 

Thursday Trends: Same-Sex Couples Reflected in Advertising

Tiffany's first ad featuring a gay couple (Adweek)

Tiffany’s first ad featuring a gay couple (Adweek)

Advertisements are finally getting with the times, and featuring more diversity than your run-of-the-mill straight white couple.

Last month, jewelry giant Tiffany’s debuted a new print ad for their wedding rings. But this ad had one thing different: it prominently featured a gay couple. And apparently the two men are a couple in real life, and were photographed on their own New York stoop.

This was the first time Tiffany’s has used a same-sex couple in their advertising. But it won’t be the last: Just this week, the brand used the same couple in a TV-spot ad. (The ad also features straight and interracial couples.) It signals that the 178-year-old brand recognizes that love comes in many forms, and they want to be all-inclusive. (And it’s a smart business move.)

Other brands in recent years have featured same-sex couples. Preppy retailer J. Crew used a gay couple in their catalog in spring 2011, and Gap used another couple on a billboard the following year. Incidentally, neither sets of couples are professional models: In the case of the J. Crew couple, one of the men was a designer for the brand. (It seems there’s also a side-trend of using real people.)

Lesbian couples are also increasingly represented. In 2012, JC Penney featured a lesbian couple with their children in a catalog pegged to Mother’s Day. Last year, condom brand Durex used two women being playfully affectionate with each other in an ad for a massage gel. This year, Hallmark showed an ad featuring a real-life lesbian couple describing their feelings for each other in the run up to Valentine’s Day.

It’s clear that things are changing. Even “The Onion” got in the action, with a (mock) article claiming that jewelry company Zales created an ad featuring a polyamorous triad. (But the article did rightfully call out that we, as a whole society, aren’t quite there yet.)

Hopefully this follow its natural progression, and  will eventually lead to more ads featuring same-sex couples with families. It’d be great to see future print and online ads and commercials where we see a family with two dads or two moms, NBD.

After all, this would make complete economic sense for these companies: In 2012, “Adweek” reported that the LGBT market is estimated to be worth around $743B+.