I found the juxtaposition of this comment at Pharyngula with other ones from the same thread to be entertaining.
“This is a science blog. We deal in facts not in long-disproven and corrosive fantasies.”
Apparently these are the science facts concerning advertising that would improve an ad where a man pushes an elevator button and unleashes the sexy possibilities inherent in the elevator’s other occupant.
“You push the ‘stop’ button and… The woman is Emma Peel. She immediately incapacitates you with several painfully well-placed karate chops. You crumple to the floor with a whimper. When the elevator door opens, Steed looks in, pokes you in the kidney with his umbrella then tells you, “Let that be a lesson to you, old chap.”
Emma Peel is a fictional character from 1960s English television.
“And then she just gives him a “WTF?” look, and he gets kinda uncomfortable and embarrassed, pushes the button to start the elevator again and wishes for the ground to swallow him up while he apologizes. Oh yeah, I’d like to see that. I could then imagine assholes really backing off even if I can’t kick their ass, and then the next step being not pushing that button at all. Like, the next scene of the commercial being the same guy imagining how he’d like to get stuck in the elevator with her, maybe glancing at the button for a second, and then just standing there until his floor. Boring, I know.”
Science: it’s what a woman can imagine.
“Of course there could also be the sci fi option of the woman morphing into some sort of predatory alien, werewolf, vampire who the idiot has just trapped himself in a confined space with. One of my colleagues is a confident, karate black belt who, I could imagine would give a guy who did this such a stare that he would probably wet himself.”
Science: it’s what a woman can imagine. The interesting thing is the psychological projection. Since she just about wets herself when men stare at her, she assumes that men must do the same. Because confidence. And karate.
“You push the stop button and suddenly the rest of the elevator continues, while the small square of floor you were standing on stops in mid-air. You’re now 129ft up in the air, with no way down, Asshole.”
That would be a great commercial… if you’re selling female revenge fantasies to women. I’m not sure it’s suitable for selling anything to men.
But the fact that the Pharyngulans don’t understand the point of advertising isn’t surprising as they are mostly unemployed graduate students who couldn’t figure out that obtaining a science degree in a market oversupplied with them was unlikely to lead to worthwhile employment. We’re not dealing with a particularly bright lot here.
What is surprising is their insistence that the West possesses a rape culture, when there are genuine rape cultures in a number of the non-Western societies whose inhabitants most of the Pharyngulans favor importing for reasons one can only assume are science-based.