katie bouman's algorithm, black holes, and incels

There's a lot of news going on about the "black hole girl" right now, and how she's being given too much credit for her role in the historic first image of a black hole. Because this is too important, I want to set the record straight.

Once Katie Bouman became the "face" of the black hole photo, and articles began to call her "the woman behind the black hole photo", an assortment of people that I'm strongly inclined to call incels but won't decided to figure out just how much of a role she had in it. Why? You'd have to ask them. Something about her attractiveness, youthfulness, and femaleness disturbed them to the point where they had to go digging.

And after digging, they found Andrew Chael, who wrote an algorithm, and put his algorithm online. Andrew Chael worked on the black hole photo as well. And because people kept saying that Katie Bouman wrote "the algorithm", these people decided that "the algorithm" in question must be Chael's.

So they looked at Chael's GitHub repository and checked the history. The history showed that Andrew Chael's commits totaled more than 850,000 lines, while Katie Bouman contributed only 2,400.

"Oh my god!" they all said. "He did almost all of the work on the algorithm and yet she's the one getting all of the credit!"

They dug a little deeper - but not much - and discovered that the algorithm that "ultimately" generated the world-famous photo was created a different man, named Mareki Honma.

"She's taken the credit from two men!" they gasped. "Feminism and the PC media is destroying everything!"

There were, of course, those who tried to be kind. "She's always said that this was a team effort," they said. "We don't blame her, we blame the media. She didn't ask to become the poster girl of a team project she barely contributed to."

Meanwhile, Andrew Chael - a gay man - tweeted in defense of her. He thanked people for congratulating him on the work he'd spent years on but clarified that if they were doing so as a part of a sexist attack on Katie Bouman, they should go away and reconsider their lives. He said that his work couldn't have happened without Katie.

And it turns out that he was the one who took the viral photo of Bouman, specifically because he didn't want her contributions to be lost to history

So I decided to find out for myself what Katie Bouman's actual contributions were. As a programmer, I'm well aware that the number of GitHub commits means nothing without context. And Chael himself clarified that the lines being counted in the commits were from automatic commits of large data files. The actual software was made up of 68,000 lines, and though he didn't count how many he did personally (having said he doesn't actually care how much of it he personally authored), someone else assessed that he wrote about 24,000 of those.

Whether 68,000 or 24,000-- it's more than 2,400 right? Why call it "her" algorithm, then?

Because there's more than one algorithm being referenced here. These people just don't realize it.

I'll work my way backward because it's easier to explain that way.

The photo that everyone is looking at, the world famous black hole photo? It's actually a composite photo. It was generated by an algorithm credited to Mareki Honma. Honma's algorithm, based on MRI technology, is used to "stitch together" photos and fill in the missing pixels by analyzing the surrounding pixels.

But where did the photos come from that are composited into this photo?

The photos making up the composite were generated by 4 separate teams, led by Katie Bouman and Andrew Chael, Kazu Akiyama and Sara Issaoun, Shoko Koyama, Jose L. Gomez, and Michael Johnson. Each team was given a copy of the black hole data and isolated from each other. Between the four of them, they used two techniques - an older, traditional one called CLEAN, and a newer one called RML - to generate an image.

The purpose of this division and isolation of teams was deliberately done to test the accuracy of the black hole data they were all using. If four isolated teams using different algorithms all got similar results, that would indicate that the data itself was accurate.

And lo, that's exactly what happened. The data wasn't just good, it's the most accurate of its kind. 5 petabytes (millions of billions of bytes) worth of accurate black hole data.

But where did the data come from?

Eight radio telescopes around the world trained their attention on the night sky in the direction of this black hole. The black hole is some ungodly distance away, a relative speck amidst billions of celestial bodies. And what the telescopes caught was not only the data of the black hole but the data of everything else as well.

Data that would need to be sorted.

Clearly, it's not the sort of thing you can sort by hand. To separate the wheat (one specific black hole's data) from the chaff (literally everything else around and between here and there) required an algorithm that could identify and single it out, calculations that were crunched across 800 CPUs on a 40Gbit/s network. And given that the resulting black hole-specific data was 5 petabytes (hundreds of pounds worth of hard drives!) you can imagine that the original data set was many times larger.

The algorithm that accomplished this feat was called CHIRP, short for "Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors".

CHIRP was created by Katie Bouman.

At the age of 23, she knew nothing about black holes. Her field is computer science and artificial intelligence, topics she'd been involved in since high school. She had a theory about the shadows of black holes, and her algorithm was designed to find those shadows. Katie Bouman used a variety of what MIT called "clever algebraic solutions" to overcome the obstacles involved in creating the CHIRP algorithm. And though she had a team working to help her, her name comes first on the peer-reviewed documentation.

It's called the CHIRP algorithm because that's what she named it. It's the only reason these images could be created, and it's responsible for creating some of the images that were incorporated into the final image. It's the algorithm that made the effort of collecting all that data worth it. Any data analyst can tell you that you can't analyze or visualize data until it's been prepared first. Cleaned up. Narrowed down to the important information.

That's what Katie Bouman did, and after working as a data analyst for two years with a focus on this exact thing - data transformation - I can tell you it's not easy. It's not easy on the small data sets I worked with, where I could wind up spending a week looking for the patterns in a 68K Excel spreadsheet containing only one month's worth of programming for a single TV station!

Katie Bouman's 2,400 line contribution to Andrew Chael's work is on top of all of her other work. She spent five years developing and refining the CHIRP algorithm before leading four teams in testing the data created. The data collection phase of this took 10 days in April 2017, when the eight telescopes simultaneously trained their gazes towards the black hole.

This photo was ultimately created as a way to test Katie Bouman's algorithm for accuracy. MIT says that it's frequently more accurate than similar predecessors. And it is the algorithm that gave us our first direct image of a black hole.

Around the internet, there are people who have the misperception that Katie Bouman is just the pretty face, a minor contributor to a project where men like Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma deserve the credit. There are people pushing memes and narratives that she's only being given such acclaim because of feminism. And because Katie Bouman refuses to say that this was anything other than a team effort, even the most flattering comments about her still place her contributions to the photo at less-than-equal contribution to others.

But I'm writing to set the story straight:

When it is written that Katie Bouman is the woman "behind the black hole photo", it is objectively true. She wasn't the only woman, but her work was crucial to making all of this happen.

When Andrew Chael says that his software could not have worked without her, he isn't just being a stand-up guy, he's being literal. And there are those who could just as easily say the same about his contribution, or the contributions of many others.

And while it's true that every one of the 200+ people involved played an important role, Katie Bouman deserves every ounce of superstardom she receives.

If there must be a face to this project - and there usually is - then why shouldn't it be her, her fingers twined across her lips, her gleeful eyes luminous and wide with awe and joy?

Edited:

Thinking on it a little further, I felt I should clarify that I'm not actually trying to downplay Andrew Chael. His imaging algorithm is actually the result of years of effort, a labor of love. Each image that could be composited into the final photo brought with it a unique take on the data, without which the final photo wouldn't have been complete.

So let's take a moment to celebrate the fact that two of the most integral contributors to the first direct photo of a black hole

were a woman

and a gay man.

===============================================
2nd Update (LONG!)

I went to bed at 19 shares on a post I wrote to vent to my FB friends, and now it's over 2K. I guess it's gone viral. That means I have some work to do.

I'm going to provide a list of the various articles I read to piece this together. When I wrote this, I wasn't trying to write an essay so I didn't put sources in and I didn't ensure that every detail is 100% accurate. So I'm doing that now.

Any edits I make are mentioned below (apart from spelling/grammar fixes). The resources that led me to write this are listed below. And because I value accuracy, I welcome people to point out mistakes of any kind. I'll make corrections and credit them here.

Edit: I incorrectly wrote that Bouman worked on the algorithm for 6 years and spent 2 years refining it. This was an accidental mush of facts: She's been working on this project for a total of 6 years (ages 23 to 29). She spent 3 years building CHIRP and 2 years refining it. I've corrected that and included that she led the four teams, as two separate articles mention it.

Edit: One of the leads for the 4 team project was a man named Jose L Gomez. I added that to the above, after being sent a twitter thread from Xu S. Han. Thank you! Twitter thread here:
https://twitter.com/saraissaoun/status/1116304522660519936…

Edit: Thanks to Zoë Barraclough and someone who would prefer not to be named, for messaging me with another couple of edits. As confirmed on Kazu Akiyama's twitter, there were more than four leaders for the four imaging teams. As I find out the names of these co-leaders, I'll incorporate them into the post.

http://news.mit.edu/2016/method-image-black-holes-0606
This is a 2016 MIT article announcing CHIRP. It gives a pretty excellent idea about the magnitude of Bouman's contribution.

https://www.extremetech.com/…/229675-mit-researcher-develop…
This goes into detail about Katie Bouman's algorithm. It describes how her algorithm differs from normal/traditional interferometric algorithms. This article explains the difficulty she faced in how trying to capture a black hole is like trying to photograph "a grapefruit on the moon." This also explains how Bouman's algorithm made all of this work-- it combines all of the data from the participating telescopes into, in essence, one massive telescope.

https://youtu.be/BIvezCVcsYs
This is a 2016 TEDx talk from Bouman where she describes her work. Note: though I am intentionally focusing on her contributions specifically to defend the attention she's getting, she makes it clear that this was a team effort. She always gives credit to her teammates who work with her. She is full of humility and wonder.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/…/papers_an…/cvpr2016_bouman.pdf
This is the paper based on Bouman's work, where she's listed as first author. The position of her name is important. While the meaning of being first author can differ in certain fields, I'm basing the 'primary contributor' interpretation on the fact that multiple other articles say she was lead, MIT refers to the algorithm as hers, as well as the fact that she named CHIRP.

https://github.com/achael/eht-imaging
This is Andrew Chael's imaging library available on GitHub. It's where our original "sleuths" discovered that Bouman had contributed very little and assumed that she was stealing the glory from others. NOTE: Andrew Chael didn't make these claims or ask for this sort of attention!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06156
This is a paper describing Chael's work, which is impressive. Bouman is in the position of last author. Again, the relevance of the author order can differ, but the common significance of 'last author' is either the supervisor or the relative least contribution. In Bouman's paper, the position of last author seemed to indicate supervisor(s) based on the organization hierarchy on the EHT website. In this instance, I interpret Bouman's name being last as her being a minor contributor to Chael's specific work.

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/
This is the official EHT telescope website. I can't remember what I looked at here, it's in my history. I think I was trying to find out who Bouman's project lead was.

https://twitter.com/thisgreyspir…/status/1116518544961830918
This is the twitter thread where Chael defends Katie. He explains that he didn't write 850K lines, defends Katie and says that his algorithm couldn't have worked without her, mentions his LGBTQ status, and more. He seems like a great guy.

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/…/10.1063/PT.6.1.2…/full/
This article speaks to some of the other people involved, including the project leader Sheperd Doeleman. This describes the process they went through in creating the black hole image and is where I got the information about how they split the teams into 4, and how the final image is a composite.

https://phys.org/…/2019-04-scientist-superstar-katie-bouman…
This is the article that talks about CHIRP sorting through a "true mountain" of data, and how that data was passed out to four teams to check for accuracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/…/black-hole-picture-captured-f…
This article talks about Bouman coming up with a new algorithm to "stitch data across the EHT network" of telescopes, and how she led an elaborate series of tests (splitting the data up across four teams, etc) to verify that the output wasn't the result of a glitch or fluke.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201904110037.html
This article explains Honma's significant role. It describes what Honma's algorithm does and how it was used in this project.

https://www.nao.ac.jp/en/news/science/2019/20190410-eht.html
Here is another article that goes into more detail about Honma and team. He does a great job of explaining how all of the algorithms in question were, in fact, capable of producing accurate images of the black hole, and a part of the task of his algorithm was to verify the accuracy of those generated photos.

The final link is the document by all 200+ participants. This document is important because it gives such a clear idea of the work that went into this, the fabric of which Bouman is an integral part. While I'm intentionally highlighting her contributions in defense of her, it should be understood that, like with most scientific breakthroughs, there were many unsung heroes:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0ec7

homophobic chilean anti-domestic violence campaign

In societies where masculinity equals power and femininity is equated with weakness, it's no wonder that gay men and women are marginalized. It's frustrating to see women internalize that message and turn it against their gay bretheren. It's also not surprising in a culture where machismo dominates everything and everyone.

A recent Chilean ad has me deeply conflicted -- it's one step forward, two giant steps backward in dealing with societal attitudes about domestic violence. On the one hand, it's a campaign condemning violence against women, which is great and a huge step forward in a society where, on average, women wait 7 years to file a police report about domestic violence and 73% of women who die of domestic violence never even file a police report.

On the other hand, it's advocating calling men who are violent against women by a slur that demeans them as weak -- 'maricón' means 'faggot'. The rationale is that a man who demeans a woman is "poco hombre" -- barely a man.

"¿Es más macho el que maltrata, golpea o denigra a una mujer? La respuesta es clara: el que maltrata a una mujer es poco hombre", agregó la Ministra.

Gay groups are (justifably) pissed now backing the campaign. Clearly, a larger conversation needs to take place about what it means to be powerful and attitudes that marginalize the powerless.

En Chile llaman 'maricón' al que maltrate a una mujer
www.eltiempo.com
29 de Octubre del 2010
Es una campaña del Ministerio de la Mujer para reducir los índices de violencia contra ellas.

La ministra del Servicio Nacional de la Mujer, Carolina Schmidt Zaldívar, anunció que en Chile casi 2 millones de mujeres sufren violencia intrafamiliar y que una mujer es asesinada a la semana por su pareja o ex pareja.

La campaña, denominada 'Maricón es el que maltrata a una mujer', insiste en que la violencia intrafamiliar es un delito, pero invita a los agresores a informarse y a pedir ayuda.

"Esta campaña está dirigida al hombre. Es una campaña fuerte, potente, con una mirada nueva, habla claro y de manera frontal", dijo la Ministra al explicar que la violencia de género en Chile se basa en el abuso de poder y en una mala comprensión de la verdadera masculinidad.

"¿Es más macho el que maltrata, golpea o denigra a una mujer? La respuesta es clara: el que maltrata a una mujer es poco hombre", agregó la Ministra.

La campaña contará con los rostros del fotógrafo y presentador de televisión Jordi Castell, quien ha reconocido públicamente su condición homosexual.

"Cientos de veces me han gritado maricón y maricón es el que maltrata a una mujer. Digámoslo al que se lo merece", enfatizó Castell. De hecho, las organizaciones de homosexuales respaldaron la campaña.

La presentación de esta iniciativa coincidió con la entrada de la Ley de Femicidio, que tipifica el delito e impone mayores sanciones.

En Chile una mujer tarda, en promedio, 7 años en denunciar a su agresor y el 73 por ciento de las chilenas que murieron por violencia familiar nunca pusieron una denuncia.

SANTIAGO
Efe

gendering halloween costumes

I'm not a fan of the ho-riffic Halloween costume for women. There's no need for any female to dress like a trick, especially when she's a kid.

This cartoon from Sociological Images sums up my point quite nicely.

do you wear nail polish? dress for breakfast?

I routinely put my ice-cold, candy apple red-painted toes on Leo to warm them up.

Clearly, that explains why I'm not marriage material according to this marital suitability rating scale.

know your place

Leo stumbled on this Uruguayan photoblog and there's quite a bit of good stuff here.

quotable

"Islam is not more violent or fanatical than any other religion — it's just that many Muslim countries have politicized religion for the benefit of the rulers. There are Christian fanatics and Hindu fanatics, too — put a gun in the hands of any of them and they will terrorize people.

Religion should be something personal. It should not be the concern of the state, and no religion has a right to degrade women or erode their human dignity."
-Asma Jahangir, female Pakistani human rights attorney

"a statement like that seems irresponsible"

Q: What do a three-year old segment on Philadelphia eight graders, girls in DC fighting over men, and Fox News have in common?
A: Nothing.

But that didn't stop Bill O'Reilly from declaring that there's a "nationwide epidemic" of violent lesbian gangs terrorizing schools and neighborhoods on his show on June 21. (He's since admitted that he "overstated" the facts.) Speaking of the facts, DC police say that there is 1 lesbian gang (out of the 175 gangs) in the DC area.

O'Reilly backtracks on lesbian gangs
Thursday, July 26, 2007 / 11:57 AM

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly has apologized on the air for errors in a widely criticized June 21 segment that reported a "nationwide epidemic" of violent lesbian gangs terrorizing neighborhoods and schools.

"We overstated the extent of gay gangs in the Washington area," the "O'Reilly Factor" host said on his show as GLAAD spokesman Rashad Robinson stood by on a split screen. "Detective Wheeler has apologized."

"Thank you for correcting the record," Robinson said.

The exchange disintegrated, however, as O'Reilly went on to explain how the story came into being: He had seen a story in which several New Jersey lesbians attacked a man who spat on one of them when she spurned his attentions. Four of the women were ultimately convicted in the Aug. 18 incident.

"They were never identified as being in a gang. Gang charges were dropped." Robinson said.

"They were a pack of lesbians. Who jumped this guy," O'Reilly said. Soon after, he said, he saw tape on a "gang" in Memphis.

"There was no criminal activity," Robinson said.

"And a gang in Philly."

"They were eighth-graders," Robinson said.

"We got three. We put our guy (Fox crime analyst Rod Wheeler) on it. I'm just trying to tell you how we got on this."

"You called it a nationwide epidemic," Robinson told him.

"I got a little carried away with that," O'Reilly said.

Gay and progressive media-watchers had pounced on the report, as did the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., one of America's leading civil rights groups.

They noted that the Philadelphia segment was three years old, the Memphis segment did not produce any evidence of illegal activity, and that in some of the video re-aired by O'Reilly the girl hooligans were actually fighting over men.

Washington, D.C.-area law enforcement said it was simply inaccurate.

"We have 150 to 175 total gangs in the D.C. area, and, out of those, only nine where the predominance of members are female," Sgt. Brett Parson of the D.C. Metro Police Department's Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit told the Southern Poverty Law Center.

"You simply can't make the jump that they are lesbians. I think it is fair to talk about violence and female gangs. But to sensationalize or marginalize a community by making a statement like that seems irresponsible," Parson said.

"There is no evidence whatsoever of a lesbian gang epidemic in this region . . . . Our membership reports only one lesbian gang," Gaithersburg, Md., police Det. Patrick Word, president of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Gang Investigators Network, told the rights group. (Barbara Wilcox, The Advocate)

you must remember this ...

I'm a big fan of kissing, cuddling, etc.

And I was surprised to learn that bonobos are the only other primates that kiss.

When a Kiss Is More Than a Kiss: Richard Gere, Shilpa Shetty and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: May 6, 2007

RICHARD GERE, while not the first person you’d think most likely to invoke the wrath of a conservative religious mob by kissing somebody in public, was at least a passably recognizable symbolic target for Hindu demonstrators last week, when they burned his figure in effigy in cities across India.

If not a wavy-haired, pretty-faced, prostitute-patronizer-portraying American actor, then who are religious firebrands supposed to burn in effigy when a man violates a cultural taboo by kissing a woman in public, as Mr. Gere did? (He planted several lingering kisses on the neck of an Indian actress, Shilpa Shetty, at a televised charity event in Mumbai.)

Surely not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But think again. When Mr. Ahmadinejad, the ultraconservative president of Iran, kissed the gloved hand last week of an elderly woman who had once been his school teacher, at a ceremony for a national teachers’ day, he, too, received sharp rebukes from clerics.

Islamic religious leaders accused him of “indecency.” Islamic newspapers noted that under Shariah law contact with a woman with whom one is not related is a crime sometimes punishable by death.

Mr. Gere apologized to those he had offended.

Mr. Ahmadinejad did not. (And left town instead for a scheduled visit with the pope.)

But anthropologists and philematologists (people who study kissing) say the harsh reactions to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s and Mr. Gere’s kisses underline a certain cultural and political mystery about the seemingly simple act of kissing.

Kissing in public (private kissing exists in a different universe of discourse, and for the most part will remain there for the duration of this discussion) is quite often a public statement, they say: Witness the use of the public kiss in the lore of organized crime (to mean soon dead). Or in the political world, the moment in the 2000 campaign when Al Gore passionately kissed his wife, Tipper, (to signify his Alpha-Maleness). Or the mostly forgotten but once infamous kiss Hillary Rodham Clinton planted on the cheek of Yasir Arafat’s wife (signifying many things, not least of which that she would spend a good deal of time repairing relations with Jewish voters).

Vaughn M. Bryant Jr., an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, said that contrary to the lyrics of “As Time Goes By,” a kiss is almost never just a kiss. It is a language with a grammar all is own, which is as strict as the syntax of international diplomacy, he said.

“When people kiss, there are all kinds of hidden rules in play,” he said. “Where they are; who they are to each other; what the relationship between the sexes is in a country; all that gets considered.”

Robert Albro, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., who specializes in the role that culture plays in international relations, said Mr. Gere’s faux pas was an example of a cultural “border clash” that is increasingly common in the era of globalization.

To plant a kiss on the face of an Indian woman in public, he said, would be seen by conservative Indians as a trespass on “the cultural space” of their country.

“Women, in particular conspicuous women such as the actress, bear the burden of cultural identity in many parts of the world,” he said. “They are like the social skin of society itself.”

Kissing is more or less universal. People in all but a few, tiny cultures do it. And wherever people kiss, they practice the same categories of kissing that the Romans first identified: the “basium,” for the standard romantic kiss; the “osculum,” for the friendship kiss; and the “savium,” the most passionate kind, sometimes referred to as a French kiss. (Mr. Ahmadinejad’s was a classic osculum. Mr. Gere’s was probably an osculum playfully masquerading as a basium that, unfortunately for Mr. Gere, may have looked a little too much like a savium on TV.)

Monkeys do not kiss. Apes do, but usually only on the arm or the chest, to show respect. “Except among the bonobos, there is nothing like sexual kissing among the apes,” said Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University. “Apes do not practice foreplay.”

The earliest written record of humans’ kissing appears in Vedic Sanskrit texts — in India — from around 1500 B.C., where certain passages refer to lovers “setting mouth to mouth,” according to Mr. Bryant.

There is debate among scientists over whether the kiss is an innately human practice, or one that we fortuitously acquired along the way. Some trace it to the mother who made the first mouth-to-mouth transfer of pre-chewed food to her child; others to prettier biological Eureka-moments. But in general it is agreed that people kiss in private mainly because it is nice.

So what does it mean when people, especially public people like the president of Iran or the world’s second most famous Buddhist, commit kisses in public places?

In the case of Mr. Ahmadinejad, according to press reports, his respectful kissing of his teacher’s hand was a gesture of conciliation with Iranian school teachers, who as a group have recently complained of low wages.

In Mr. Gere’s case, no one seems to know much more than the obvious. They were on national TV, promoting AIDS awareness together. She was pretty. He was Richard Gere. The results are on YouTube.

Robin Hicks, a cultural anthropologist at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., said that when the kissing involves people of different ethnicities — especially a Western man and a local woman, as in the case of Mr. Gere’s kiss in India — the cultural sensitivity of conservative-minded people is often greatly heightened.

“Frankly, I was shocked at his behavior,” Ms. Hicks said. ”He’s been to India so many times. He should have known better.” Mr. Gere, a practicing Buddhist and supporter of the Tibetan cause, visits India frequently to meet with the Dalai Lama.

“On the other and,” she added, “I guess this is one way for cultural anthropologists to get jobs.”

d&g ad hits a nerve

Talk about monumentally awful marketing. This almost leaves as bad a taste in my mouth as Häagen-Dazs' "cortez invaded for it" ad. No wonder NOW included the Dolce & Gabbana ad in the "Love Your Body: Offensive Ads" campaign this year.

And for the record, I'm a huge fan of toppling cultural taboos. I also think that South Park and Family Guy rock.

Dolce & Gabbana Pulls Controversial Ad
D&G ad (above) which appeared in Esquire and elsewhere, kicked off a storm of controversy.
March 07, 2007

By Sandra O’Loughlin

NEW YORK -- A Dolce & Gabbana ad that appeared in the March issue of Esquire and in other countries around the world has been pulled following protests in Italy and Spain.

The ad, which shows a woman in a menacing situation on her back in a tight black dress and spiked heels as a bare-chested man holds her down by the wrist with four other men looking on, raised the ire of consumer groups in the U.S., Spain and Italy.

The New York offfice of the company did not return calls to Brandweek seeking comment on the ad’s withdrawal, but Stefano Gabbana, a partner in Dolce & Gabbana, has indicated that the image does not represent gang rape or violence but rather an erotic dream or sexual game.

Still, Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, finds the portrayal disturbing. “It is a provocative ad, but it is provoking things that really are not what we want to have provoked,” she told Brandweek. “We don’t need any more violence.”


Marketers Struggle With the 'Dark' Side
February 20, 2007

By Sandra O'Loughlin and Steve Miller

NEW YORK -- A woman, fully clothed in a tight dress and spiked heels, lies on her back, hips raised as a bare-chested man holds her down and four other men look on.

The menace in the situation is underscored by the fact that the woman is blankly unsmiling and some of the men appear to have slight sneers on their faces.

It isn't clear what is happening. Has he knocked her down? Is he about to strangle her? To some, the print ad from fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana suggests gang rape. To others, it's a matter of a fashion-forward brand publicizing itself.

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, found the ad surprising and disturbing. "It's in Esquire, so they probably don't think a stylized gang rape will sell clothes to women, but what is more likely is that they think it will get them publicity," she said. Esquire did not respond to calls for comment by press time.

"It's a provocative ad but it is provoking things that really are not what we want to have provoked," Gandy continued. "We don't need any more violence." NOW is considering some form of protest, and will include it on the "Love Your Body: Offensive Ads" portion of its Web site. D&G reps declined comment.

D&G's ad is just the latest attempt among marketers to mine darker themes in their advertising. Last week, Volkswagen pulled a TV ad that featured a man about to commit suicide by jumping off a roof—the latest in a surprising number of suicide-themed ads lately.

Even beer ads, once an oasis of 'Whassup'-style good cheer, have succumbed to a more biting brand of humor. Remarking on a Bud Light Super Bowl ad that showed a man bashing his friend with a rock during a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and a Coors Light ad in which a man hacked off the bride's head in an ice sculpture to cool the beer, The New York Times detected a new theme: "Anything that delays a man's beer drinking is bad and must be eradicated, be it women, best friends, jobs, pets or children. In other words, whatever you have to do to get more beer, do it . . . as quickly as possible."

Marketers have long used sex and humor in their ads to generate interest, but such black humor, not to mention dabbling in rape and suicide, appears to be a phenomenon confined to this decade. Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, blames the usual marketing bugaboos—splintered media and short attention spans—for advertisers' new interest in darker fare.

Thompson said marketers are also trying to catch up with programs like South Park and The Family Guy that make sport of toppling cultural taboos.

"This kind of outrageous material is today's lingua franca," he said. "One would expect ads to follow."

Though D&G's ads are informed by popular culture, it's likely the brand is following the tradition of another Italian fashion brand, United Colors of Benetton. Throughout the '80s and '90s under former creative director Oliviero Toscani, Benetton ads famously have shown a nun kissing a priest, a newborn baby still attached to the umbilical cord and a man dying of AIDS, among other provocative images.

Since 2000, Benetton creative has been handled by Fabrica, a communication research center Toscani helped establish, and has alternated between conventional product campaigns and social themes such as volunteerism, famine and portraits of apes.

Margaret Duffy, chair of strategic communications at the Missouri School of Journalism, sees another influence: Calvin Klein's ads in the '90s featuring models that many thought were meant to evoke emaciated junkies.

"Despite all the hue and cry, most people felt it did not damage the brand but caused so much publicity it really wasn't a negative experience," Duffy said of Klein's ads. "From the standpoint of the brand, Dolce & Gabbana is not Ann Taylor. It is expected to be edgy and out there. If they're not pushing the envelope a little bit, they're probably not doing very good advertising."

Raul Martinez, CEO/executive creative director at AR, New York, has devised D&G ads since 1996, with the exception of the ad in Esquire. Martinez said communicating the brand's assets is the primary concern. "If you look at the Dolce & Gabbana brand in the first 10-15 years, you have a brand that is completely focused on communicating its Italian, in fact, Sicilian, heritage," he said. "It is coming from a very Latin, passionate, emotional and sexually charged space."

While "Sicilian heritage" may explain away provocative ads for some, others are at a loss to explain why suicide is popping up more and more as an advertising theme. VW's ad was one of many recent ads that refer to the taking of one's life. A current spot for Careerbuilder.com, for instance, features a flock of office workers who leap off a cliff to avoid a training seminar.

In another ad, a group of wives shame their husbands who are about to jump off a building over Washington Mutual's free checking.

And of course, there's the General Motors Super Bowl spot featuring a forlorn robot that appears to "off" himself by jumping into dark waters after being let go from his assembly line job. Though GM and VW pulled their ads, reps at Careerbuilder.com and WaMu said the ads have run without incident.

Suicide has popped up as an ad theme before in this decade. In 2001, Ikea ran an outdoor ad in which a depressed gnome—this was in Germany, understand—was lying on a rail track with ad copy that read: "An end to feeling grumpy—Ikea is coming." In 2003, Honda ran an ad in Australia that showed an older model Accord driving itself off a cliff, distraught over the allure of the newer model.

The recent spate of ads with suicide content "has to be a coincidence," said Gary Topolewski, a Detroit-based ad veteran who has worked on campaigns for Jeep and Apple. "Suicide is something that is talked about fairly freely, as in, 'I'm going to kill myself,' something that people say in sort of a kidding way," he said. A climate of sensitivity and a broader distribution base via the Internet has made what was once edgy into something that may be construed as insensitive, he added.

Suicide prevention activists claim an ad could tip over someone on the brink of the act. "These are showing methods, and can contribute to 'copycat' suicides," said Robert Gebbia, executive director-American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

In the face of such criticism, Wally Snyder, president/CEO of the American Advertising Federation, advises advertisers to resist the urge to keep up with racy South Park-style humor and hard-R subject matter.

"I salute the clients' move to say, 'This isn't worth it," he said. "Sometimes, it just doesn't advance the product. This is not like literature or the movies. This is a business proposition and we have to take it very seriously."
Via Vanoosheh