Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Let's Try Something Different

Before anything: facebook now officially scares me. If it weren't for me having such boring times at work, I would probably never update again.

Also, I hate it when one of my coworkers farts while in the testing lab. Honestly, this isn't just an excuse to be immature and type out the word "fart." It wouldn't be too bad except for the fact that there is no circulation of air going through there, so everything lingers. Eugh. But back to real matters.
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California (or some part of it, probably the CHP) has recently released anti-drunk driving PSAs which warn drivers that police officers are CRACKING DOWN on drunk driving. If you're above the limit, they WILL find you. It's remarkably similar to the seat-belt violation PSAs that circulated earlier. I'm all for stopping drunk driving, but there's one thing that I noticed after seeing it a few times: all of the drivers are male.

I'm no statistic expert, so I decided that instead of fabricating the facts, I should look them up. I found it hard to believe that all drunk drivers are male. Apparently, of the fatal car crashes that occur, men are above the limit ~35% of the time, and women are above the limit ~21% of the time (I wasn't able to find stats on non-fatal crashes, but thank you MADD for the stats I could find). Although men seem to drink and drive more, I wouldn't exactly say it was a sweeping majority. So why the exclusively male-themed PSA?

I would evoke the cry of sexism, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm just wondering why a lot of PSAs are like this. I've noticed that the abstinence/rape ones are very much anti-male, too. While, statistically speaking, most rape is man raping woman, let's not forget that the other way around does happen. I tried searching for the numbers on male rape percentage, but every single statistic had such a huge range of values that they were almost useless. Every single website stated that although they presented these numbers, experts believed that such statistics "vastly under-represent the actual number of men who are raped each year (source)." I personally know more men who have been raped by women than women who have been raped by men, and none of the men have reported the incident to the police. You could argue that the female friends I know have just not told me and I shouldn't be so bias, but thanks to the macho-image society places on males, under-reporting of rape is much higher than that of women (see same source as above).

So what's the deal with all the anti-men PSAs? It's not exactly helping the stereotypical image that men you randomly meet are untrustworthy and dangerous.

Any opinions?

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