
Mean Girls
2004 · Film · 97 min
Directed by Mark Waters
Cady Heron is a hit with The Plastics, the A-list girl clique at her new school, until she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George.
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49 comments on Hacker News
They actually did make fetch happen. Once upon a time it was usual in Javascript to use a thing called XMLHttpRequest which despite its name isn't actually for XML, it's just that XML was a big deal when it was created. The replacement API for making normal HTTP requests is just named fetch, and it was "new" so long ago that popular web browsers had versions like 40 rather than 150.
That movie is so old it's entirely possible that it's just named "fetch" because that's a reasonable thing to call this feature and so it's a coincidence, but I do like to think that at least some people at WHATWG were quoting Mean Girls...
I don't even think I'd have the right to tear down anyone's list -- I actually think that even if an 22-year-old replied with a list of ten movies from 2016-2025 that he went to the cinema to see, and which he would be happy to recommend, that'd be enough for me!
I brought up this list: https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/essential-2000s-movies/ and scrolled through, and I think I saw at least half these movies either in the theater or as rentals, and most of the ones I saw I loved. Furthermore, I think at least a third are major contributors to the American cultural canon, both as being in the zeitgeist in the season of their initial release as well as being remembered going forward. For instance, people still today make references to "Mean Girls" or "The Dark Knight" or "Minority Report" that only fully make sense if you've seen those films or at least know they exist and their premises. And I think it would be pretty easy to make a list of 50-75 significant movies each from the 80s and 90s, but I'm focusing on ones during my adulthood to follow the spirit of your ask.
This is what I can't imagine finding ten of in the past decade. I'd be tempted to put "Barbie" on that list potentially, given how many memes I've seen using frames from it. Also, honestly, several Pixar films deserve to be on the list too, though I admit that I'm biased because they're some of the few that I've seen.
As for the presentation of the idea, who in their right mind is going to blindly trust an AI like that? There wasn't any review of the numbers, or even a hint of a "sniff test" on the output of the AI?
--
PS: That's so Fetch![1]
To me it seems like Gretchen, from the Mean Girls, is working at an AI company now.
I'm with Regina, it's just not going to happen!
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377092/quotes/
We are far more subtle and targeted about it as a whole, possibly due to our social structures.
As vapid as the movie (intentionally) is, "Mean Girls" does a really good break-down of things, and perhaps the main issue is that unlike some other animal groups, people don't always stop.
It's a reference to the "stop trying to make fetch happen" meme from the movie Mean Girls.
The exception being work, where a lot of people seem like they never left high school. Everywhere I've worked had the social totem pole, the cliques, the politics, the in-crowd and out-crowds. One place I worked was almost exactly like the movie Mean Girls. Lots of people just don't grow out of it.
https://tenor.com/view/gretchen-weiners-gretchen-lacey-chabert-mean-girls-mean-girls-movie-gif-22957905
Great performance from following Apple's design lead (clear, 2-level big.little segmentation, rather than the usual 3-4), but some improvements that can easily be implemented by anyone using the ARM ISA, apart from the L3 cache removal - even that could change, though. Expect AMD and Nvidia to bring it on PC after the Qualcomm-Microsoft exclusivity agreement ends this year. Remember that ARM's in-house designers are kinda second-class - look at the Dimensity 9400 on the charts in the YouTube video below. Even that's close to the A18 and M4, and closer to the M3 and A17 Pro.
If this continues long-term, Apple is in serious trouble. X Elite was a hack-job on TSMC N4P. This on N3E is dead-even low power performance and a clear lead in high power CPU. Qualcomm has actually been ahead in GPU performance on mobile for about 2 years; Android just needs to clean up the graphics stack and devs need to get on board. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__9sJsKHBmI)
Qualcomm supplies Meta and future players like Sony with VR SoCs as well, so there's the Vision Pro buried. The Qualcomm-Microsoft exclusivity agreement ends for PCs this year, and I'm pretty sure Nvidia isn't going to mess up on their attempt in 2025. AMD is also planning ARM for 2025. Linux has been quietly building ARM support, ironically with the help of the Asahi Linux team, and Steam's Proton recently merged ARM patches - there's a real possibility the next Steam Deck goes ARM. This will do wonders for native ARM gaming.
There is an actual possibility now that major studios take Linux's early technical advantage, move to Linux to avoid Microsoft's AI bullshit, and Adobe, Ableton and a few other platforms follow. DaVinci Resolve actually already works quite well natively on Linux. Nvidia will probably keep selling high-end GPUs, and PCIe access will probably be good enough that ARM on desktop will be a lot better than whatever Apple's done with the Mac Pro. Apple has burnt bridges with Nvidia, and AMD has never quite settled into the macOS driver environment well, even with a bigger market on offer (Intel 16" MacBook Pro, RDNA2). It is actually possible to have fast M.2 storage with an ARM CPU, as well as expandable RAM with CAMM modules, so Apple will be in trouble for that bullshit too, pretty quickly as soon as Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD start releasing ARM motherboards. Expect the small form factor case market to do great.
Fedora is also incredibly reliable lately, and recent efforts on sandboxing apps with Flathub mean that 99% of people will be able to use immutable, version-controllable versions that are as reliable as, if not better than macOS, let alone Windows. Both Gnome and KDE are progressing fast, and new drivers for ARM will be Wayland-first, as is Asahi Linux.
Throw in early AMD/Nvidia ARM SoCs using TSO execution for x86 translation, and some 16k page size patches on Linux, and Elsevier might be supporting Complete Anatomy on Linux before Apple tries to obsolete my M1 MacBook Air.
In mobile alone, the Chinese domestic market is a pretty good indicator of what's next - ridiculously fierce competition between BBK (Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus), Xiaomi and Huawei, with Samsung way behind and Apple mostly relying on a unified app store and brand value to retain ~20% marketshare. Play Store doesn't exist there, so Chinese apps on Android are a mess, but they do have the benefit of WeChat being cross-platform. The future in the U.S. and particularly Europe, where iMessage won't help, is arguably even worse for Apple.
The claim that high-schoolers are going to stick to iOS for iMessage isn't going to hold up to this much pressure, and no $3 trillion company is going to survive on Mean Girls (2004). No high-schooler, given the option to save ~US$500 and get a device that takes artsy film shots (look at Vivo and Xiaomi, and even OnePlus in the U.S.) and runs every app faster and better, is going to cough it up. Once this frenzy is in full swing, if OnePlus expands the Hasselblad software processing to some cheaper models, improves social media app photo processing pathways, and holds a few workshops on artsy film shots at college campuses or NYC and LA, they're blowing open the U.S. market, ditto Europe.
Apple's current weakness on iPadOS is also going to bite really badly if Microsoft or anyone else manages to get a good ARM SoC into a Surface Pro or something similar. As long as the on-screen keyboard appears reliably, power efficiency is good, and app support is there, Windows can do the rest. If Windows doesn't get its act together, Google, DaVinci and Adobe will do it. LumaFusion, the former golden child of iPad vloggers around iOS 12 when everyone was excited about the 2018 iPad Pro, is already on Android, as is GoodNotes.
It's an exciting time to be in consumer tech, and a terrible time to be Apple.
If this continues long-term, Apple is in serious trouble. X Elite was a hack-job on TSMC N4P. This on N3E is dead-even low power performance and a clear lead in high power CPU. Qualcomm has actually been ahead in GPU performance on mobile for about 2 years; Android just needs to clean up the graphics stack and devs need to get on board. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__9sJsKHBmI)
Qualcomm supplies Meta and future players like Sony with VR SoCs as well, so there's the Vision Pro buried. The Qualcomm-Microsoft exclusivity agreement ends for PCs this year, and I'm pretty sure Nvidia isn't going to mess up on their attempt in 2025. AMD is also planning ARM for 2025. Linux has been quietly building ARM support, ironically with the help of the Asahi Linux team, and Steam's Proton recently merged ARM patches - there's a real possibility the next Steam Deck goes ARM. This will do wonders for native ARM gaming.
There is an actual possibility now that major studios take Linux's early technical advantage, move to Linux to avoid Microsoft's AI bullshit, and Adobe, Ableton and a few other platforms follow. DaVinci Resolve actually already works quite well natively on Linux. Nvidia will probably keep selling high-end GPUs, and PCIe access will probably be good enough that ARM on desktop will be a lot better than whatever Apple's done with the Mac Pro. It is actually possible to have fast M.2 storage with an ARM CPU, as well as RAM with CAMM modules, so Apple will be in trouble for that bullshit too, pretty quickly as soon as Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD start releasing ARM motherboards. Expect the small form factor case market to do great.
Fedora is also incredibly reliable lately, and recent efforts on sandboxing apps with Flathub mean that 99% of people will be able to use immutable, version-controllable versions that are as reliable as, if not better than macOS, let alone Windows. Both Gnome and KDE are progressing fast, and new drivers for ARM will be Wayland-first, as is Asahi Linux.
Throw in early AMD/Nvidia ARM SoCs using TSO execution for x86 translation, and some 16k page size patches on Linux, and Elsevier might be supporting Complete Anatomy on Linux before Apple retires my M1 MacBook Air.
In mobile alone, the Chinese domestic market is a pretty good indicator of what's next - ridiculously fierce competition between BBK (Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus), Xiaomi and Huawei, with Samsung way behind and Apple mostly relying on a unified app store and brand value to retain ~20% marketshare. Play Store doesn't exist there, so Chinese apps on Android are a mess, but they do have the benefit of WeChat being cross-platform. The future in the U.S. and particularly Europe, where iMessage won't help, is arguably even worse for Apple.
The claim that high-schoolers are going to stick to iOS for iMessage isn't going to hold up to this much pressure, and no $3 trillion company is going to survive on Mean Girls (2004). No high-schooler, given the option to save ~US$500 and get a device that takes artsy film shots (look at Vivo and Xiaomi, and even OnePlus in the U.S.) and runs every app faster and better, is going to cough it up.
Apple's current weakness on iPadOS is also going to bite really badly if Microsoft or anyone else manages to get a good ARM SoC into a Surface Pro or something similar. If Windows doesn't get its act together, Google, DaVinci and Adobe will do it. LumaFusion, the former golden child of iPad vloggers around iOS 12 when everyone was excited about the 2018 iPad Pro, is already on Android.
It's a great time to be in tech, and a terrible time to be Apple.
If this continues long-term, Apple is in serious trouble. X Elite was on TSMC N4P. This on N3E is dead-even low power performance and a clear lead in high power CPU. Qualcomm has actually been ahead in GPU performance on mobile for about 2 years; Android just needs to clean up the graphics stack and devs need to get on board. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__9sJsKHBmI)
Qualcomm supplies Meta and future players like Sony with VR SoCs as well. The Qualcomm-Microsoft exclusivity agreement ends for PCs this year, and I'm pretty sure Nvidia isn't going to mess up first-time. Linux has been quietly building ARM support, ironically with the help of the Asahi Linux team, and Steam's Proton recently merged ARM patches - there's a real possibility the next Steam Deck goes ARM. This will do wonders for native ARM gaming.
There is an actual possibility now that major studios move to Linux to avoid Microsoft's AI bullshit, and Adobe, Ableton and a few other platforms follow. DaVinci Resolve actually already works quite well natively on Linux. Nvidia will probably keep selling high-end GPUs, and PCIe access will probably be good enough that ARM on desktop will be a lot better than whatever Apple's done with the Mac Pro. It is actually possible to have fast M.2 storage with an ARM CPU, as well as RAM with CAMM modules, so Apple will be in trouble for that bullshit too, pretty quickly as soon as Qualcomm, Nvidia and AMD start releasing ARM motherboards. Expect the small form factor case market to do great.
Fedora is also incredibly reliable lately, and recent efforts on sandboxing apps with Flathub mean that 99% of people will be able to use immutable, version-controllable versions that are as reliable as, if not better than macOS, let alone Windows.
Throw in early AMD/Nvidia ARM SoCs using TSO execution for x86 translation, and some 16k page size patches on Linux, and Elsevier might be supporting Complete Anatomy on Linux before Apple retires my M1 MacBook Air.
In mobile alone, the Chinese domestic market is a pretty good indicator of what's next - ridiculously fierce competition between BBK (Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus), Xiaomi and Huawei, with Samsung way behind and Apple mostly relying on a unified app store and brand value to retain ~20% marketshare. Play Store doesn't exist there, so Chinese apps on Android are a mess, but they do have the benefit of WeChat being cross-platform. The future in the U.S. and particularly Europe, where iMessage won't help, is arguably even worse for Apple.
The claim that high-schoolers are going to stick to iOS for iMessage isn't going to hold up to this much pressure, and no $3 trillion company is going to survive on Mean Girls (2004). No high-schooler, given the option to save ~$700 and get a device that takes artsy film shots (look at Vivo and Xiaomi, and even OnePlus in the U.S.) and runs every app faster and better, is going to cough it up.
Apple's current weakness on iPadOS is also going to bite really badly if Microsoft or anyone else manages to get a good ARM SoC into a Surface Pro or something similar.
It's a great time to be in tech, and a terrible time to be Apple.
Movies I think I truly great I usually only watch once, sometimes twice. If a movie ends and I just sit there thinking to myself… “wow”… I will probably never watch it again.
Movies I watch over and over again are movies that I relate to in some way or find comforting. These are ones I’ve watched at least 5 times, and some I’d bet more than 30 times.
- Back to the Future
- Home Alone
- What About Bob?
- It Could Happen to You
- Matilda
- As Good as It Gets
- Office Space
- Cruel Intentions
- Boiler Room
- Finding Forrester
- Training Day
- Super Troopers
- 8 Mile
- The Transporter
- Elf
- Bad Santa
- Mean Girls
- Saved!
- Garden State
- V for Vendetta
- Thank You for Smoking
- Stick It
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Idiocracy
- Hot Rod
- Run Fatboy Run
- The Other Guys
- Wreck-It Ralph
To name a few.
Sure, but fact is lots of companies have bad managers, toxic work environments, etc.
There are some great places to work out there, but there are plenty that are basically the movie mean girls.
I refer you to the definitive resource on this issue- the movie "Mean Girls". This movie is the key to understanding the current age.
Have you seen the movie "mean girls"?
People of all genders do this all the time, group up and rat-fuck the reputation of someone they don't like for all sorts of reasons, not all of them particularly good.
Throw in a bit of bandwagoning during the height of #metoo when we decided that having a bad date where the wrong kind of wine was ordered with Asis Ansari or having a jokey boob photo from 30 years ago with Al Franken was somehow worthy of Thou Shalt Never Work Again, and I can totally understand how all this went down.
I believe it's a reference to this 2004 movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Girls
The original quote being "Oh my god Karen, you can’t just ask people why they’re white."
The movie "Mean Girls" explores this: women bullying one another socially to attain social status.
Porn and beautiful women in movies are very different things.
For example, look at Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls or Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.
That, and porn are very differently appealing, and almost surely have very different audiences.
I think this causes further problems as well. These big companies know they can easily be listed at the top of Google, and therefore they pump out low quality articles for every popular key phrase. They can write a "Top 10 X of 2023" list and bring in lots of traffic and referral sales, while a smaller site has no chance of doing the same. Then, the big site takes all that income, and pumps out more low quality articles. It's a rich get richer scenario.
If I search, "The top 10 movies on Netflix", I get sent to this page...
https://decider.com/list/top-10-movies-on-netflix-most-popular-right-now/
The top 5 movies above are...
1. The Boss Baby (2017)
2. The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
3. We're the Millers (2013)
4. Zookeeper (2011)
5. Mean Girls (2004)
Is this really the best the world has to offer for my search query? I could spend a week putting together a far better page for that query, but what's the point? It's not going to rank anywhere notable in the Google results. There's no incentive for me to produce that quality content.
Re "It's honestly one of the most quotable movies I've ever seen."
When I read the title "Raft is so Fetch", I was going to come here to simply leave the comment "Strop Trying to make Fetch a thing!", without context ~ and then I read the rest of the title and realized it was supposed to be a Mean Girls reference.
Every few years someone produces a movie in which the antagonist throws away an insult as they're walking toward the parking lot and I fully expect them to walk in front of a bus.
I'm half convinced that directors do this on purpose, as a fake-out homage to Mean Girls.
Ok, FYI but “fetch” was relegated in the movie to irrelevance, ie, “stop trying to make fetch a thing.” So for the “fetch”-aware audience, the title reads, “Raft Is *Irrelevant*: … Explained Through Mean Girls”
I'm a 40 year old man and Mean Girls is one of my favourite movies of all time, not even in a guilty-pleasure kind of way. I love it.
By the way, for anyone who hasn't seen Mean Girls yet, you definitely have to watch it.
I watched it with my girlfriend, just for her to enjoy, and was not expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Now it's actually one of my favorite movies, plus growing up homeschooled it spoke to my soul on some deep levels. It's very well-written!
I had assumed the whole point of this was to make a joke about how after so much effort they were finally able to make fetch happen (a reference to Mean Girls, a 2004 movie which means by now probably many HN readers have never heard of it). But not so.
Mean Girls wasn't a documentary, and as a former teen girl, I'd argue that girls aren't actually uniquely awful: what they are is especially sensitive to social cues and influences. You may note that the article here isn't really about bullying, it's more about girls making themselves miserable by comparing their lives and their bodies to what they see online. I do actually think there may be an evolutionary element to the fact that females are (on average) more oriented to language and interpersonal skills, more attuned to social feedback, and on the flipside, more prone to anxiety as a result, but I think it's a mistake to view that through too simplistic a lens.
Facebook is an accelerant. The movie "Mean Girls" largely predated social media and highlighted many of the same issues. This seems to be a pretty ingrained issue, although I think most people agree that Facebook makes it worse.
Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water:
Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new emotions, and new social awareness, etc. But, it's also the case that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, young girls are are the most fertile and therefore the most desirable. This will decline over time, and sharply as women enter their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Perhaps there's an evolutionary reason why young girls work so hard to identity and sideline any competition? If this is the period of their life where they are the most desirable, there might be an evolutionary benefit to be the most cut-throat when it comes to vying for the best mating opportunities.
A few caveats:
- Hopefully I don't have to explain that evolutionary impulses are not the same as desirable or positive social values.
- Nor are evolutionary impulses immutable, or always expressed in the same way. (for example, sports are often observed as a peaceful replacement for warring city states.)
- Further, I'm definitely aware that evolutionary psychology can sound very reasonable while being perfectly rubbish and unscientific. There are plenty of people who say things like "because hunter-gathers experienced X," that explains "dubious trend which I have anecdotally observed." Even in the case where an evolutionary psychology explanation may happen to be correct, it remains difficult to prove or test.
Movies in the 90s and early 2000's were much better than the garbage we get today.
From T2, to Jurassic Park, to the Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, Mean Girls, 5th Element, Independence Day, etc.. etc..
Something happened after 2007-2008, perhaps it was the shift to digital, where filmmakers started relying more and more on special effects, and less on good acting and storytelling.
The first Iron Man and Avengers were great, but then the formula got very repetitive. None of the DC movies were good, Fast and the Furious are the same story on repeat, both comedies and romantic movies became dumber/more simplistic etc.. etc..
Movies became more like a circus show of forgettable digital effects and less about a good story that teaches something or leaves an impression.
I think streaming might be part of the problem (just lots of churn of a large quantity of low quality movies), but also the box industry started revolving too much around few large franchises, and everything else became a low budget niche.
I think there were still few good movies (Interstellar, Gone Girl, Midsommar, and Parasite), but still much fewer than the previous generation (91-2007), which I think it was a golden time for the movies.
I think PG-13 had more to do with it than anything else. If you’re coming from an R rating, reaching PG might destroy your movie. PG-13 is far more reachable. No one is trying to peddle serious quantities of Mean Girls merchandise.
It's also one of those odd films like Mean Girls screenplayized somehow out of a nonfiction book.
The expression fetch, popularized by the 2006 American cultural meta-documentary and seminal work "Mean Girls" is in fact an abbreviation of the term "fetching", i.e. attractive in the British vernacular.
I have spoken.
It’s just a reference to the Mean Girls movie. Works well with haskell’s kind → mean.
It's a stupid title. Connecting the concept to a movie was unnecessary.
But it's not any more sexist than making a movie called (and about) Mean Girls in the first place...
He's drawing a comparison between Haskell kinds and concepts shown in the (once) popular teenage movie "Mean Girls".
It's a jokey reference to the movie Mean Girls (a comedy).
Purely anecdotal of course but the kids I met in college who were nerdy and studious and sat out that kind of social jockeying in high school were the biggest jackasses in college because they hadn't gotten any of that out of their systems yet. I kinda think we need to learn a lot of this stuff from experience - we don't learn compassion by being told to be compassionate, we learn compassion by looking back with a more mature perspective on our own actions and how they affected other people. Middle school and early high school made Mean Girls look like a documentary and while it wasn't the best time in my life I learned how to be a much better person from those experiences where I was on both the giving and the receiving end of the teenage nastiness. People are going to learn these things one way or another because we're not all born saints; in my opinion it's better to do so alongside immature peers when the stakes are lower than to do it later on as an adult.
Edit: this is in reply to ksdale, not sure why I can't reply to your comment
Yes, the article discusses this:
>The rise of the sexy Halloween costume probably began sometime after the 1960s, but its biggest pop culture moment came in the 2004 movie "Mean Girls." Cady, the naive heroine, arrives at a Halloween party dressed as a gory bride of Frankenstein only to find the popular girls dolled up as a sexy bunny, sexy cat and sexy mouse. Oct. 31, she realizes, "is the one day a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything else about it." Sex-advice columnist Dan Savage once called the yearly display of flesh a "Straight Pride Parade." "Halloween is now the big public celebration of straight sexuality, of heterosexual desire," he wrote in 2009.
> Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood
When I studied abroad in Europe, other exchange students regularly asked me how us Americans learn anything when we are constantly talking during class as seen in any highschool teen drama movie. As if Mean Girls was a documentary. I was dumbfounded.
>As the kids say: stop trying to make Lisp happen, it's not going to happen.
Mean girls came out in 2004, no kid knows that movie
Who pissed in your coffee today? Perhaps it's my bias living in NYC, but the average denizen here (myself included) finds someone asking proper, honest questions to be the absolute bare minimum to taking that person seriously, not to mention the absolute bare minimum to a whole host of basic human interactions and endeavors: working together, dating, making and sustaining friendships, making art, building a company.
Frankly, I find the almost passive aggressive lack of asking proper questions to be a little condescending and mean in and of itself. One of my favorite movies has several themes, but that's one of them. It's name, very interestingly enough, is Mean Girls.
"never going to happen" is a sort of valley slang, probably best exemplified in the film "mean girls" wherein one girl is trying to introduce 'that's so fetch' to the local lexicon, and her friend says "Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen"
"Lightning" is not simply code that does indeed run at this minute - it is also the idea that Bitcoin will transcend into a pragmatic currency with the widespread usage of this 2nd-layer interface that can handle more than 7 transactions per second. That's the part that's not happening.
Wow, pretty interesting to see my school district as one of the closest 15 to the bottom right corner. Looking back though, I can definitely see it. Most of the kids in my AP computer science class were boys and I now see way more guys from my high school in STEM jobs then girls.
In my opinion, the biggest cause was due to gender stereotypes. We weren't the actual school based on for the movie mean girls (although lots of people joked that we were), but it had a very similar vibe in that math was not seen as being cool for girls to do and popularity was definitely a major focus for a lot of people.
Edit: reading further into the actual paper, the first possible reason they site are gender stereotypes. It's a pretty interesting read. I would at least skim if it if you are at all curios and it's a shame that this article seems to have been shadow hidden from the front page despite having 25 points in an hour: https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp18-13-v201806_0.pdf
I can throw my own theories into the stew:
A. Many Americans are overweight or obese. Overweight people are conventionally less attractive and thus less prone to having sex or being in a relationship.
B. Social media permeates all aspects of people's lives. Some people might opt out of having sex or relationships if they didn't want to risk the chance of it showing up on Facebook, Twitter, etc. and getting scolded by Mom and Dad.
C. Poor sexual education in school, usually via fear mongering. There's a bit of satire in the movie Mean Girls (2004) where a sex ed teacher says, "If you have sex, you will get pregnant, and you will die".
I'm not sure if I buy the idea that porn has that much of an impact. Porn in some form has been around for quite a long time.
"Three of them likened the atmosphere at Rent the Runway to the 2004 film Mean Girls. Each one made that reference separately, without prodding."
"The former employee adds that there were “frequent screaming matches” in the office between top executives."
“You don’t feel it’s an environment where women support each other,” an ex-employee told the the magazine under condition of anonymity. “It felt like high school, it was very clique-y.”
With an executive team that's over 75% female, it's a shame to see it getting such bad press from former employees. In terms of gender representation, RTR was a rarity the tech space.
> The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.
Mean Girls was actually based on a book on helping your teenage daughter survive bullying in school ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Bees_and_Wannabes )...
The worst of the sexism comes from other girls.
Nerdy boys largely get ignored by their non-nerdy peers. There's an attitude of "I don't know why anybody would like that, but whatever".
On the other hand, nerdy girls are treated like absolute shit by other girls. Instead of "not my cup of tea", it's more like "eww, that's disgusting, and you're disgusting for liking it". The movie Mean Girls could have been a documentary.
And adults can influence this too. Even well-meaning feminists are more likely to steer young girls towards careers in more "acceptable" professions like business, law, or medicine rather than something down-and-dirty like engineering. And if science is involved, it's likely to be either medicine or a research career in natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry).
I agree with your point, but the "stop!" girl is a screen grab of Rachel McAdams from the movie Mean Girls.
I think this is the most pedantic thing I've ever said.
Let's hope it gets the same fate as the Wave did... death.
Although new exciting and innovative... it's too radical and rather little too open. Not to mention, when will you ever get your work done.
I was watching Mark Twain Award to Tina Fey last nite and they showed a little clip from the movie Mean Girls which she wrote. Basically that scene epitomizes what will happen if you try to maintain a massive multiple thread msgs. You'll eventually get to a point where you won't know what you're saying to whom.
Understandable, that's why there is the debate about teaching kids about condoms in school. Does teaching them about sex education and condom usage undermine the argument that you shouldn't have sex? I feel like at least here we can look at some scientific data to reach a conclusion (that with the suicide example, we wouldn't be able to).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3071001/ "In a study of 35 sex education programs around the world, the World Health Organization found there is no evidence that comprehensive programs encourage sexual activity.
The study also concluded that abstinence-only programs are less effective than comprehensive classes that include abstinence and safe-sex practices such as contraception and condom use."
At the same time it reminds me of a scene from the movie "Mean Girls" a comedy about the American High School where the gym teacher (who somehow in most high schools is also the "health teacher") uncomfortably states:
"Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die! Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just don't do it, OK, promise? OK, now everybody take some rubbers."
However, if having sex puts you at a high risk of infinite punishment forever (instead of infinite reward forever) it sort of changes the argument which is why the two sides have difficulty even discussing the topic. It's also why there are claims that after more and more studies show that sex education doesn't increase promiscuity (but it does reduce STD and teen/unwanted pregnancy rates), and the documented failures of abstinence only education, that even then many Christian groups will always say the studies are flawed. This is because the question was never open to debate in the first place, it was a divine infalliable law and we just need to keep running the tests until we get the predetermined correct answer. That's sort of where I see people arguing that many Christian groups are opposed to science. They love science, as long as it agrees with them (the same can we said for many secular liberals as well as Larry Summers found out).
I also think the Catholic church will reverse it's position on contraception for married couples within my lifetime. They sort of semi already have the steps to do that when they endorsed Natural Family Planning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_family_planning)
"Having sex at an infertile time in a woman's life (such as pregnancy or post-menopause) is also considered acceptable, since the infertile condition is considered to be created by God, rather than as an act by the couple." (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii_en.html)
I always thought that was rather arbitrary that you could have sex for pleasure only, but only during infertile times to prevent pregnancy, which we can measure rather accurately today due to advanced technology that we couldn't do very well in the past, because that's part of the human cycle and thus part of God's plan. However, doing the exact same sex-for-pleasure while preventing pregnancy act by using a piece of technologically simple latex that also protects against STI's is an awful sin.
However, due to the vast pluralism of viewpoints in society and our governments responsibility to not endorse any set religion, they suppose to consider the heaven/hell side of the argument in it's policy decisions. It should of course allow others to consider it independently, and thus we have an opt-out program with our sex education.
Up until about a year ago I was data security coordinator for a very large cable ISP. A large portion of our team's time was spent dealing with DMCA copyright complaints.
At this point, by law, an ISP must accept copyright complaints and have a publicly registered copyright agent (At our ISP, our team's director was the registered agent). The DMCA gives ISPs some choice in how they handle the complaints, but they can not be ignored. I fear this ISP owner may not be fully aware of current obligations(I am not speaking about non-actionable RIAA threats or future plans).
We hated this work. Our main focus was catching criminals that were committing crimes either utilizing or against our network. With an online customer base in the millions we would get thousands of complaints a day. If a big movie came out on Friday, for the next week or two we could get upwards of ten thousand a day. We feared Star Wars openings like you wouldn't believe. You can imagine a team of 6 very techy hacker guys getting extremely depressed spending 2-3 hours a day matching IP logs to modem MACs and finally onto a customer.
Our only solace in this work was something that my manager made clear was a department goal and practice. That this menial task was meant to protect the customer base from the copyright holder's carpet bombing mentality. We kept accurate data and because of that, were able to simply discard a large portion of the complaints as inaccurate. When the evidence was clear, we forwarded the complaint to the subscriber by email and snail mail. We instructed our subscribers to not contact the copyright holder to discuss it as this would just enable the holder to get identifying info(name, address) without a subpoena.
We also warned our customers that after a single complaint the copyright holder may subpoena our records and take them to court. Out of the almost million complaints a year, I saw an insignificant amount of cases ever go this far. The DMCA complaints were largely a scare tactic and often nothing more.
I was not privy to any knowledge of the compensation we received for completing this process, but did gleam from over hearing from the higher ups that we did indeed receive some money for the process or were in process of creating contracts to do so. I wish I had more info on that aspect to share with news.y.
The guys doing this work hate it, but the law forces it onto them. Until the laws change, no security department is going to bend over backwards for these guys.
It was an amazing and exciting job despite this issue.
On a lighter note, for your random facts file, the movie "Mean Girls" was the number one infringed file for 4 years running. Lots of laughs were had seeing what kind of weird and random stuff the people were downloading. Fun times.