Friday, September 30, 2011

F'd Ad Fridays: Android Freud determines whether your son is gay

According to RFl, French Android smartphone users can download an app that will let them know if their son is gay.


It costs less than 2 Euro, and uses just 20 questions to robotically determine who your child really is:

The questions range over a variety of subjects that are supposed to indicate their son's sexual preferences. They include his attitude to personal grooming and dress sense, whether he likes football and reads sports papers and whether he likes musicals and/or divas such as Mylène Farmer.

The questionnaire also puts the parents under the spotlight.

“Are you divorced?” it asks, going on to suggest that there might be “a certain absence of the father” or, alternatively, that the progenitor might be “very authoritarian”.

While mothers whose sons are judged to be gay are told to “ACCEPT IT”, mothers of supposed heterosexuals receive a message that appears to take a much less indulgent attitude to homosexuality.

“You have nothing to worry about, your son is not gay,” it reads. “So you have a very good chance of being a grandmother with all the joys that brings.”
It's hard to count all the kinds of wrong this is, including all the stereotypes and the obsolete Freudian idea that parental conditions made people gay. (Although it should be noted that Freud was otherwise relatively progressive in his attitudes on that front.)

Not to mention the fundamental problem of assuming gayness is some kind of problem. Equality group All Out has a petition to Google to remove the app. As of this writing, it has 34.227 signatures.

4 comments:

  1. Awful indeed. But the other question intrigues me the most: Do we have to ask Google to ban it from the App Market?
    This year we had similar cases in the iPhone world.
    Freedom of speech is almost holy. How far can we tolerate these things.
    I hesitate.

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  2. I'm with you on that one, Marc. It is a big question.

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  3. Leave it there, and get people to rate it down.

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