June 3, 2017

Sensor aimed at men to hide their porn viewing

Filed under: Gadgets,Technology by Orangemaster @ 9:15 pm

Facepalm

Forget private browsing on your computer, shopping for gifts without others knowing, and using that bullshit excuse to watch porn as a man. Dutch inventor Moos Neimeijer is asking for money on Indigogo for a gadget called ‘Minimeyes’, which will close windows and mute sound if an ‘intruder’ walks into the room while you’re doing something you shouldn’t.

Minimeyes is a small box people can see next to your computer, but it’s an app on a phone. If you have one of those boxes in plain sight, aren’t you already telling everyone around you that you’re planning to do seedy shit and pretend you’re ‘doing nothing’ when you get caught? How stupid do you think people are? I doubt even kids will be convinced. And the money not pouring in speaks volumes: Niemeijer still has 17 days to go to collect 96,000 USD (about €85,163) and so far has collected the grand total of 807 USD (€715.90).

The YouTube video encourages straight white men to donate, is sexist towards both genders and stereotypically heteronormative. Good luck with that.

(Link: bright.nl, Photo of Paris Louvre facepalm by Phelan Riessen, some rights reserved)

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March 13, 2017

‘Dutch girls not interested in STEM subjects’

Filed under: General,Science by Orangemaster @ 10:00 pm

According to a survey carried out by Microsoft among 11,500 girls and women from 11 European countries including Russia, the Dutch are the most unsure of themselves when it comes to STEM subjects. Some 1,000 girls and women from the ages of 11 to 30 were interviewed at length for this survey.

More than 50% of the Dutch girls and women estimated their knowledge to be less than that of the other countries and 40% said their knowledge fell short of what it should be. Dutch girls were also quicker to claim their disinterest for STEM subjects, one year earlier than their European peers, apparently due to a lack of female role models since 60% of STEM-related teachers in the Netherlands are men. As well, some 31% of the girls talk to their mothers about STEM subjects and 33% to their fathers, while in the rest of Europe, 38% of the girls talk to their mothers and 37% talk to their fathers.

(Link: nieuws.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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November 12, 2015

Law firm compared to escort service because of women

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:00 pm

An Amsterdam legal firm made up entirely of women was compared to an escort service in a tweet by a well-known legal business publication based solely on a recent firm picture. The tweet reads “Marketing question: legal firm or escort service?” and was met with astonishment and disgust by men and women alike. The photo has five of the firm’s lawyers sitting on and around a couch surrounding the managing partner, Marielle Van Essen.

Van Essen said she could not understand why colleagues would imagine it’s OK to call them prostitutes. “We like to look good, that’s all. If other people want to wear a sloppy suit, they can. This is what we do.” On Twitter there are parodies popping up, with pictures of policewomen being compared to hookers and doctors to whores to drive the point home. Many people commenting also wonder if it was a case of the dumb, young white male intern trying to be funny, but the publication has refused to comment or rectify anything. Trashing lawyers because they’re women is someone’s idea of normal in 2015 and it shouldn’t be.

This would be a non-topic if it was a bunch of men. It is free publicity, but the firm has more work than they can handle with Van Essen herself stuck at home with the flu as I write this.

(Link: www.ad.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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March 21, 2015

Toy shop sells mirrors for assaulting women

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 7:37 pm

Mirror

A distant cousin of the 1970s T-shirt ‘Sex inspector first lesson free’ that was once funny but now icky, this wonderful gadget called the ‘Extendable inspection mirror’ could be used as a toy to find things stuck behind furniture, but the image on the box suggests otherwise.

The image conveyed here is that it is OK for young boys (what is up with those glasses?) to sexually assault women because it’s funny. Although I’m glad Dutch folks on Twitter blew the whistle on this one, the typical ‘we thought it was odd too, but we stacked in the shelves anyway’ response from the shop shows how much critical thinking some employees have, which is none at all. The toy shop in question is busy scrambling and pulling the item from their shelves after it hit the media because they were too stupid to come to that conclusion themselves.

(Link and photo: nieuws.nl)

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June 7, 2014

The Hague court wants less female judges

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:30 pm

In 2009 for the first time ever women made up the majority of judges in the Netherlands. This year even 64% of the judges of the court of Utrecht are female.

In response, according to Algemeen Dagblad, the court of The Hague (56% female judges) wants to give preferential treatment to male candidates. The court fears having too many women could influence the way the public views the courts’ impartiality.

The court’s plan received support from celebrity lawyer Theo Hiddema in Trouw who warned that you wouldn’t want to create a situation where a male rapist would have face three female judges and a female prosecutor. “Imagine,” Hiddema told Trouw, “that the suspects come from a different culture. Imagine the shame and humiliation when an all-female court tells them their behaviour is not of this time!”

Institutional mansplaining, who would have thought? Only job market news site Werf& appears to have noticed that what the court of The Hague wants is very much against the law. The site points out that affirmative action is only legal when used to help disadvantaged groups.

Although women form the majority of judges in lower courts, as late as 2006 they were still in the minority in appeals courts where a majority of two-thirds of the judges were men, as Trouw wrote back then. Judges that were ‘foreigners’ (allochtonen, Dutch code for people of colour) were in an extreme minority, the paper reported.

According to a Metro article of 2011, sociologist Bregje Dijksterhuis explains the preference of women for judicial robes because an appointment as judge is for life and because it is a job that combines well with having a family. Men on the other hand prefer higher paying jobs as lawyers.

The Dutch Council of Women quotes De Groene from 1947 after the appointment of Johanna Hudig as the first female judge in the Netherlands: “Courts have the reputation of being bastions of conservatism. The greater is our satisfaction at seeing how the court of Rotterdam has stood as one man behind the candidacy of this woman, giving a shining example of a broad and modern vision towards the judicial office.”

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June 4, 2014

Women dressing up as men to ask for a pay raise

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:36 pm

“Are you a woman? Then you deserve € 300,000 more”, says Women INC in collaboration with Loonwijzer, a site that helps people calculate what they should be making. Loonwijzer claims that a woman could make on average € 300,000 more — I’m assuming in their lifetime.

The YouTube film below (in Dutch) starts off with the statement, ‘Where is my € 300,000?’. The gist of the video is, as one of the women says at the beginning, “enough is enough, I’m asking for a raise!”. The rest is quite self-explanatory and looks like a Smack the Pony sketch, and in fact, one of the women, Margôt Ros, is well-know from a comedy show called ‘Toren C’ (Tower C), which is a bit of a Dutch equivalent. Basically, if women want a raise, they need a beard and a fake penis to get one, which is funny, but also quite sad. Employers and politicians are the ones being lobbied to close the gap between the earnings of men and women, something nobody has ever solved in the Western world. Of course, the reason why women are paid less come down to much more than a costume change.

Just remember that the Netherlands ranks in bottom 10 performing countries for women in business and Some 60% of women cannot earn their own keep.

(Link: www.deondernemer.nl, Illustration: public domain version of the symbol of feminism, via Wikimedia Commons)

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May 23, 2013

Musical instrument shop snubs its rock ‘n’ roll clients

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 3:58 pm

A musical instrument shop in Groningen, a city some call the real rock city of the Netherlands (surely a bone of contention with the people of Eindhoven), is looking for someone, male or female, to sell guitars.

They proudly tell us in their advert that their main clientele are rockers, you know, the kind of people who wear black concert shirts, have piercings and tattoos, and favour loud rock music. The shop called Tonika Music wants the ideal candidate to really look like they enjoy selling guitars, have the right qualifications, be convincing, and all the stuff you would expect from a good salesperson, but not have anything in common with the average rocker. They also mention no beards and mustaches, which potential female candidates read as not really wanting women either, but are too daft to say out loud for fear of discriminating!

Blatantly discriminating against people, which goes against Dutch law, the shop will refuse candidates with piercings, visible tattoos, ‘wild hair’ or a predilection for the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. You shouldn’t be a smoker, which they consider as being ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ in a negative way and ideally you should still play in a band and understand musicians. I am sure there are people that fit this description and want to work there, but I’m more worried about the drop in sales that is soon to follow.

A keyboard player on Facebook said it best: “The dumbest sales tactic there is, is valuing your opinion more than you value your clients’ opinion. Luckily, clients are able to discriminate and take their business elsewhere.” The company, currently being trashed on Facebook, has removed their advert, which pretty much proves how stupid they’ve been. People have offered to help them with their PR and give them social media classes. Insulting your clientele has to be the dumbest crisis move ever.

(Photo of Slash, top, by Florex007, some rights reserved. Bottom: partial screenshot of the offending advert via Facebook)

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December 18, 2012

Firemen’s almanach fans the flame of sexism

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:32 pm

Many fire brigades just sent this firemen’s (and firewomen’s) almanach back, calling it distasteful. The head of regional safety for Rotterdam-Rijnmond said even though tastes differ this was inappropriate for their line of work and understands why people would send it back.

A firewoman also wondered if the people who designed the cover knew that women were firefighters in this country, expressing her disgust.

The cover is fugly, poorly photographed (smartphone?), the girl is badly styled to say the very least without sounding like a misogynist, it’s not representative of this unique and dangerous line of work, and looks more like an advert for a low budget strip club. It’s not a Pirelli calendar with hot models, it’s trash and belongs in a bonfire.

(Link: frontpage.fok.nl, Photo: bliub9)

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March 15, 2012

Judges punish ‘foreign looking’ criminals harder

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 7:26 pm

Dutch judges are five times more likely to send a criminal to jail if the suspect has a foreign appearance, researchers from Leiden University found out.

That likelihood increases to 20 times if the suspect does not speak Dutch.

The researchers checked for expected variables such as the features of the crime, the likelihood of the suspect to commit further crimes, and the location of the court.

Judges not only discriminated against foreigners with a non-Dutch appearance, but also against men. Women are three times less likely to end in jail than men who committed the same crimes. Only lighter crimes, including theft, assault, battery and traffic violations were studied.

A factor that did not influence the weight of the punishment was whether suspects showed they were sorry.

The researchers expressed concern that people receive a prison sentence when community or a fine would have sufficed, because prison sentence are known to kick-start criminal careers.

(Via: NRC. Link: Leiden University)

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July 16, 2009

Generic ad insult gays and Amsterdam fans

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:07 pm
gay

Here’s a scary portion of “maybe the good marketers were on vacation” over at the Dutch bureau for tourism.

I bet you couldn’t guess what this advert was for even if you wanted to. It could be whitening toothpaste. Or Prozac. And you’d be dead wrong.

This advert was designed to encourage American gay men (because they keep telling us lesbians have no money) to come to Amsterdam. Since gay also means happy, everybody is laughing, including a dog (!) and an underaged boy (!!). They threw in an Asian and an ‘African-American’ (chances are they aren’t) like they do in the US. None of these people look Dutch, either.

I asked gay Amsterdam resident and Ph.D. in Sociology Laurent Chambon what he thought of this advert.

“This campaign is idiotic for two reasons. First, it seems like they were afraid of the word ‘gay’ and are playing on the word to disguise what they really want to say, which hurts after spending decades trying to come out of the closet! American gays come to the Netherlands to be themselves and for marihuana, sex, culture, architecture, shopping, design, clubs, etc. That is what we should be selling them.

The second is that they are selling Amsterdam as if it they were selling yogurt, insurance or a family vacation. Amsterdam practically sells itself, but here they are using generic headshots from an image databank.”

(Link and image: volkskrant.nl)

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