New app lets you surgically birth "Frozen" Anna's baby

Remember that bizarre "Plastic Surgery Barbie" App that came out last year? Well, here's another opportunity for girls to learn about the magical worlds of surgery and copyright violation.

Buzzfeed's Daniel Kibblesmith talks readers through the game, which shows Frozen's 18-year-old  Princess Anna ready to give birth to Kristoff's baby (after they get married, of course!)

The app guides the user through a sanitized Caesarian birth, apparently not clarifying whether Anna is suffering from a complication that prevents vaginal delivery, or whether she's just "too posh to push." (It also implies that a woman is put under a general anaesthetic for the procedure, which is not typical.)

I'll leave the WTFing to Jezebel's Rebecca Rose:

Sure, maybe games or apps that talk about pregnancy can be a good teaching tool for parents who want to get their kids familiar with various aspects of childbirth. But unless you are a being on the planet Mikloap Alpha 7, there is no purple glowing orb that magically emerges from your womb because someone waves a special sparkle wand over it. No. Despite what they are trying to teach in Texas high school's sex education classes, this is not what happens during childbirth. 

After the baby is born, you have to use the scalpel to cut the umbilical cord (SO MUCH GODDAMN NOPE HERE) and weigh the baby.

Not exactly a welcome addition to the world of childbirth apps.

Sexy advertising gets clever for fashion app

As much as I complain about sex in advertising, it's not because I'm "anti-sex." What I am is anti-contributing-to-women-being-commoditized and anti-lazy-creative.

This ad, for a fashion shopping app, is pretty tasteful in its sexualization of both male and female models, and the insight is pretty clever. Using the pixelization we're used to seeing on the naughty bits, it tells us that it's the clothes that their customers really get off on:



It was actually kind of refreshing for a sexy ad, wasn't it?

Via Ads Of The World

"Will do dishes for sext"

Sir Richard's Condoms, always a cheeky marketer, has rolled out a new app for men who can only be motivated by their loved one's T&A.

"Pretty Please," according to the Denver Egotist, "challenges the recipient to agree to complete a task before they’re granted permission to view a photo — a photo uploaded by a lover that's presumably sexy and worth doing said chore in order to unlock." It will also auto-delete the picture before the woman ends up as the next Scarlett Johansson. (Interestingly, the screen caps at the Apple App Store no longer feature the boudoir shot as seen at the top of this post.)

I know it's all in fun, however it's kind of a depressing stereotype that women use sex as currency and men are lazy slobs who are only in it for the orgasm.

I suppose the sexting could go both ways, in theory, but to be honest I doubt I could convince my spouse to take out the garbage by promising her a photo of my junk.

Weather conditions as human stereotypes

From Y&R NZ comes this series of ads for a weather smartphone app that pun away at some really cardboard stereotypes. They are at least not all female ones:

It's pretty funny stuff, as long as you don't think about it too much.

Via Ads of The World

Beauty and the beastly business of quantifying it

The speed and temporary nature of social media feeds lead to some interesting contrasts.

In my Facebook newsfeed yesterday, I first took note of a Design Taxi link posted by Marc from Osocio about "The World’s Scientifically Most Beautiful Woman".

Here she is:

18-year-old student Florence Colgate has the most naturally perfect face, according to a British lifestyle show's nationwide search.

“Florence has all the classic signs of beauty,” Carmen Lefèvre, of The Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews’ School of Psychology, told The Daily Mail. “She has large eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and a fair complexion. Symmetry appears to be a very important cue to attractiveness.”

Along with — apparently — blonde hair, blue eyes and light, unblemished skin.

I won't even get into the Nordicism of all this. (The Mail actually called her "'Britain's most beautiful face".) There have been enough blogposts about that issue already. I'm more interested in the parts that sociobiologists have tried to rationalize.

For example, symmetry is seen as a sign of good genes and good health. Maladaptive mutations, as well as childhood disease and injury, can affect symmetry. It's seen as a way to advertise good health and disease resistance — in other words, that person is a good source of healthy babies.

The other features are ethnically specific. Blonde hair and big blue eyes are what are known as "neoteny" — that is, babylike features kept into adulthood. All humans are very neotenic apes, retaining our round-headed juvenile chimp features throughout our lives.

Via pbase

The loss of pigment that gave northern people lighter skin is also an adaptive mutation to absorb more vitamin D from less sun exposure. I personally believe that lightening of skin and eyes in parts of those populations came along for the ride, then got amplified by sexual selection because youth is attractive.

But Darwin I ain't.

The other link I was going to mention was actually directly above Marc's "beauty" link. It was a CBC story titled, "Ugly Meter app worries cyber bullying activists"

A smartphone app allows users to assess their own symmetry based on some unknown standards. It's like "Hot or Not", but without the subjectivity of human feedback.

According to uglymeter.net:

"How ugly are you? For over 3 million users, Ugly Meter has been the go-to iPhone App that won’t lie when it comes to determining how attractive or ugly you are. Just snap a picture of yourself (or someone else) in the app and hit the scan button. The Ugly Meter will scan your face and determine just how ugly you are and dispense advice accordingly. Ugly Meter then allows you to post the results to Facebook or Twitter."

I wonder about the ethnic standards of beauty behind this, too. Although my own northern Euro ancestry doesn't seem to have helped much:

I blame the lighting.

I tried a few more times, and found that the insults got pretty creative.

To test the baseline, I tried scanning a screenshot of Miss Colgate:

Clearly, the creators of this app and the people behind the British talent search read the same books. Or something.

But then what happens when I scan a head-on glamour pic of Iman, a woman so ethereally beautiful, she got David Bowie to settle down:

I must have held the camera funny. I'll try again:

Ummm...

But hey, there was nothing scientific about this (mostly because I don't have all day to fart around with my iPhone). If you don't mind giving them your 99¢, you can find out for yourself what "beautiful" really means.

(I'll update this post with more scans, as I get a chance.)

Adriana Lima

Grace Park

George Clooney (a reader request by Rachel)

Barbie

Sometimes, it just seems random. Watch what happens when I scanned the face of late-'70s David Bowie, two different times.

Was it the misplaced cursor that made all the difference? (Good thing I didn't shoot him in full Aladdin Sane makeup.)

Singapore's condoms protect you from more

Now here's a refreshing approach to condom marketing — a value-added App that keeps you from being walked in on by your parents.



Adrants posted this great campaign by TBWA\Tequila for Okamoto Condoms, the Okamoto Freedom Project, which promotes the brand by trying to help young people get it on without embarrassment.

We need more campaigns like that over here — promoting safer sex in every sense.

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.

Love On a Mountain Top

The crusty old cry of the lovelorn, "I want to shout my love from the mountain tops!" is coming true today for many online lovers.

Over 7,000 messages already. Man, their throats are gonna hurt come sundown.

Brandflakes for Breakfast reports that AT&T is running a cool Facebook promotion today: An app that lets you submit a message about your love, which will be hollered today from the top of an actual mountain by their team of shouty mountain men.

They all have AT&T iPhones, by the way.

Nice idea, and a lot of fun. Especially since so many people are threatening to break up with AT&T now that Verizon offers the iPhone too.

Come baaaaaaaaaack!!!!!

Maybe this classic romantic song, and some saucy TV dancers, will rekindle the romance: