== The Key Chain Of Your Doom = By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Is something scary waiting in your car? Is your key fob beeping? Should you be screaming?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/27/notes042707.DTL&nl=fix

I do so love the marketing of fear. It is so very ideologically perfect, so quietly dehumanizing, so brutally American.

Politicians are experts at it. Gun nuts swallow it whole. The Christian right sucks it down and spits it back up and they all wallow in the low, ugly energy of fear as though it were some sort of vile mantra, some sort of cheap heroin and they were both the dealer and the junkie.

But as good as these groups are, they can't hold a cocked, loaded, dread-soaked candle to the king of all fear purveyors, the marketers. Really, there is simply nothing like sinister consumer advertising to make you think -- in simple, strategic, carefully test-marketed ways -- that you are about to die.

Here, then, is this new commercial. It is for a car. It does not matter which car, but just know that it's an upscale well-appointed sedan and it's beige or maybe silver and not all that interesting or overtly sexy, which means it's perfect for mid-level corporate executives who, according to this commercial, tend to be female and stay late at the office and who, for some reason, often park their cars on the rooftop parking lot. At night. In the rain. Alone. ...

Read the rest:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/27/notes042707.DTL&nl=fix

[OlderButWiser]

1. Written by a...

...man that has no fear of being raped.

[Cassandra]

4. How many rapists...

have the skill to break in invisibly into a modern car which has all the protections that are supposed to prevent break-ins in the first place?

[MADem]

5. I dunno about that.....

That's a false paradigm. It is less likely, sure, but not impossible or unknown (and outside of prison, too) by any stretch. The crime is underreported, certainly, but it happens. What it ISN'T, though, is DISCUSSED.

http://www.interactivetheatre.org/resc/silent.html

According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice's National Crime
Survey, released in 1991, there are approximately 168,000 rapes
annually in the United States. Of that number, 13,000 rapes
involve male victims. And their assailants are almost always other
men.
http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/research/sa.shtml
Using a definition of rape that includes forced vaginal, oral, and anal sex, the National Violence Against Women Survey found that 1 of 6 U.S. Women and 1 of 33 U.S. men has experienced an attempted or completed rape as a child and/or adult. According to estimates, approximately 1.5 million women and 834,700 men are raped and/or physically assaulted annually by an intimate partner in the United States. (Tjaden, P. & Thoennes, N. (1998, November). A Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings From the National Violence Against Women Survey, @ p. 2 & 5. Research in Brief. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice.)

[OlderButWiser]

7. I'll stand by my statement

that men don't fear rape, not that it doesn't happen, just that men (99% of the time) don't have that fear in their head.

[MADem]

8. You have a right to your opinions. NT

[OlderButWiser]

9. That's good to know n/t

[MADem]

2. Jesus, that's enjoyable as hell!! I loved this bit:

Is it a rapist? A monkey? Is it the sad little baby you left there a few hours ago to go shopping at Bloomingdale's and totally spaced and went to a movie and then to a bar and you got a little, OK, a lot drunk in the cheerless hope that you'd forget you have a kid in the first place? Is it some nightmare hellbeast with 15 oozing eyes and blue-green scales and breath like Dick Cheney? Is it Dick Cheney?

In this particular commercial, it's definitely option A, the criminal. This is the implication: Someone has (very carefully, with no signs of forced entry, broken glass or alarm) broken into this fine female exec's shiny Volvo S80 (OK, now you know) and is now lying in wait in the handsome, leather-trimmed backseat, just out of sight, hoping she doesn't stay too late at the office because oh my God his legs are getting totally cramped, and he's simply dying to jump out at her and beat her with a sledgehammer and steal her credit card and go shopping at Bloomingdale's because, well, doesn't this sort of thing happen all the time? No?.... (Strangely, Volvo chose not to advertise the alternative use of this technology, the holy-crap-I-left-the-baby-in-the-car situation. "Are you a horrible mom? Like to go out shopping and partying till dawn but you've got a kid you have to haul around like a sack of wailing, needy meat? Let your key fob save the day! Our blinking red light will tell you if your kid is still alive in the backseat where you left him four hours ago! But beware: If that blinking light stops, Britney, you're totally screwed.")

[Cassandra]

3. That was funny!

It couldn't have been Cheney in the back seat. That key chain requires a human heartbeat.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. There's a market for Vampire and Zombie detectors, too

High-tech, and so trés au courant inside the Beltway.

--p!