Category:
Gender
In August 1962, New York City cops began patrolling the streets at night while dressed as women. The idea was to trap would-be muggers.
But not all the decoy cops were successful at apprehending the muggers. Patrolman Victor Ortiz got hit over the head by a mugger, lost his gun, and his assailant got away.
Update: Author Erika Janik discusses Operation Decoy in her book
Pistols and Petticoats: 175 Years of Lady Detectives in Fact and Fiction. She places it within the context of an ongoing resistance within the police department during the mid-twentieth century to the idea of having female police officers:
By the 1960s, this attitude had become entrenched in police administration and law enforcement literature. Police Juvenile Enforcement declared that while a policewoman could be an asset, "a female officer is not a necessity."
Some even went so far as to suggest that male officers could simply dress as women for undercover work. In 1962, eight male officers did just that in order to trap muggers and rapists in New York City. "We want our men to look like housewives, not like Hollywood stars," explained Inspector Michael Codd, head of the tctical force. Twenty-seven-year-old patrolman Victor Ortiz wore white sandals, orange tapered pants, and a beige padded sweater on top of a bright print blouse. On hand to help the officers get ready were two policewomen, Caryl Collins and Dolores Munroe. The women stood by in their official uniforms as the men posed for the TV and newspaper cameras. Why teaching men to wear heels and put on lipstick was deemed more useful than simply deploying policewomen seems a question the reporters never asked. It's true that decoys did get attacked as part of these operations (that was the point), but all officers worked in teams with detectives standing by to apprehend suspects. In this instance, two of the disguised policemen had their purses snatched in Central Park and seven people were arrested in the overnight anti-mugging operation.
Orlando Evening Star - Aug 25, 1962
Greenville News - Aug 24, 1962
Allentown Morning Call - Aug 28, 1962
A guide published by the Radio Corporation of America circa 1943.
Source:
imgur via
reddit.
A Czech brewer has introduced
Aurosa, a "beer for her":
Aurosa was born to prove that women can succeed anywhere without having to adapt and sacrifice their natural femininity. Women have been disregarded in the beer industry but owing to determination and faith in herself, Aurosa is set to redefine the perception of beer.
How exactly does one transform a beer into a "beer for her"? Apparently you put it into a pink-hued bottle and charge more for it.
This isn't the first attempt to make a beer specifically for women. Back in 2011, there was
Chick Beer.
More info:
eater.com.
Milton Bradley debuted the board game Battleship in 1967, and the illustration on the box of that first edition has become somewhat notorious because it shows a father and son playing the game while the mother and daughter in the background do the dishes.
That choice of scene wasn't any kind of accident. The game was deliberately marketed as a "father and son game." The phrase was constantly repeated in early advertisements for the game. The whole idea of "father and son games" has now, of course, disappeared from board games.
The Akron Beacon Journal - Nov 30, 1969
Maybe they were hoping to appeal to the serial killer demographic.
The ad ran in
Playboy magazine, 1964.
The after shave is briefly mentioned in
Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, by Elizabeth Fraterrigo:
Bond reached the status of "popular hero" in the mid-1960s, bringing an explosion of press coverage and Bond-themed merchandise and advertising. Colgate-Palmolive launched the 007 line of men's toiletries, with a misogynistic slogan that called forth the linkage of seduction and masculine power in the Bond narratives: "007 gives any man the license to kill... women." During this period, sales of Fleming's Bond novels peaked, and several other Bond-inspired playboy-spy-adventure films appeared.
October 1938: 82-year-old Mihailo Tolotos died. He had lived his entire life in Greece's Mt. Athos monastery, which women were (are) not allowed to enter, and he was therefore believed to have been the only man in the world never to have seen a woman — or rather, the only man never to have been in the presence of a woman (except his mother, who died giving birth to him), because as the folks over at
The Straight Dope point out, anyone who is born blind will have never seen a woman.
The Edinburg Daily Courier - Oct 29, 1938
In 1949, the Nixon Furniture Company featured the story of Mihailo Tolotos in one of their ads. They were worried that just as Tolotos had never seen a woman, perhaps the readers of the
Raleigh Register hadn't seen all of Nixon's new furniture.
The Raleigh Register - Jan 7, 1949
Guess which model is for boys, and which for girls....
Original ad here.
EU bureaucrats, in their great wisdom, decided that the way to encourage teenage girls to pursue a career in science was not by appealing to their intelligence and curiosity, but rather by flashing images of high heels, lipstick, and makeup at them, along with the tagline: "Science, It's a Girl Thing." The inevitable outrage followed. (
telegraph.co.uk)
It was my impression (though I don't have any data at hand to back it up, so I could be totally mistaken) that in some sciences, such as biology and medicine, women are fairly equally represented (perhaps even at risk of becoming over-represented). So in those cases science already is a "girl thing." It's the physical sciences, such as electrical engineering, that still have trouble attracting women.
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