Deviant-ishArt

[tartysuz]

Just wanted to post a link to the recent all-points!fail at DeviantArt.

The site recently changed their profile options so that users were forced to state whether they were male or female, decision which has since been changed. transfinite explains what happened via Dreamwidth:

I got a response from a user named realitysquared, aka Daniel Sowers Jr., the site's Copyright & Etiquette Administration manager:

Thank you for contacting deviantART, I will be assisting you with your support ticket.

A relatively recent redesign of our profile setting page now requires that you designate yourself as being male or female.

If you do not wish to designate your gender and prefer to deactivate your account due to being forced to make this choice then you may do so if you choose.

Missing the point much? It's not that I do not wish to designate my gender, but that I am unable to with their current setup.

Source: http://transfinite.dreamwidth.org/215469.html

As transfinite points out, this happened on Spirit Day. If anyone ever asks why we need a Spirit Day, let this be one of the exhibits.

ETA
"But Honestly, Monica," a YouTube ballad via baker_kitty! (It's actually quite a sweet tune.)

Comments

[baker-kitty.livejournal.com]

Even aside from the fail, why on earth would they require gender in the first place? Aside from marketing (ads for the member), I can't see any valid reason for them to want it!

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Is there something in the law books of wherever their corporate HQ or server locations is that compels them to seek this information out?

Further thought after reading the link: Beginning to think that willful obtuseness may well be playing a role here after all.

[baker-kitty.livejournal.com]

Willful obtuseness did seem to me to be playing a strong role.

And really - if they're not going to accept non-standard anything (especially sexuality, but they're leaving themselves wide open with the name), why complain when someone says they're not deserving of the name "Deviant"? They're practically advertising that they embrace non-standard everything!

It was particularly rich that they did this on Spirit Day...

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Certainly seems to be evidence of a certain poverty of spirit.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

Is there something in the law books of wherever their corporate HQ or server locations is that compels them to seek this information out?

From that email exchange, it sounds like they need to supply the info to their marketing contractor. But wouldn't it tell the marketers something if people didn't largely identify themselves by gender? Like, they might be barking up the wrong tree if they place ads with girly-girl and macho man images?

The binary gender thing is standard in marketing demographics, but that kind of thinking may lead to advertisers not being able to capture what we used to call in the 70s the "unisex" identifier. That was actually also a marketing term, but, hey, it was the 70s, and they allowed all sorts of things back then!

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant would call that a serious info-gathering failure, I suspect. Chapter one of The Age of Persuasion - a print adaptation of the first episode of the radio show of that ilk - makes a few points about such self-induced blindness, myopia, or whatever the best metaphor for this is.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

That's cool. I don't always remember to tune into that show.

I think you're right: this is clearly a case of self-induced blindness. They're only measuring what they know to measure. It's like that old joke about a guy looking for his keys under a streetlamp.

Passerby: Where was the last place you saw them?

Idiot: Over in that corner (indicates a dark corridor).

Passerby: Why aren't you looking over there?

Idiot: The light is better here.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

The reply to that being "Here's a flashlight. Go to work on checking that corner", of course.

[rpm45.livejournal.com]

Wow. This is sad. I can understand making the occasional mistake, but that's not this. They actually took away the third option, which says somebody at some point realized it was important and they changed their minds to support their advertisers' software and brainspace limitations so they could make their ad targeting more sexist (literally). Then their responses when the issue was brought to their attention... wow. :(

I'm still going to stick it out there -- the community is pretty cool so far, at least from what I've seen, which is at least somewhat independent of the people running the show -- but I'll have to keep an eye on it. *sigh*

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

Sometimes we have to separate management from operations. This is a case where that can happen. Now that they've fixed the hands-on problem, the management of DeviantArt can take their time getting their heads around the underpinnings of their decision -- hopefully before they try something like this again!

This is different than the Gold's Gym problem. The head of the ownership group donates to anti-gay organizations, and a huge part of Gold's Gym is gay or pro-gay: their business contributes to the profits that this guy uses to lobby against gays. It's a direct relationship, so it's appropriate that a couple of franchises left Gold's over it, and boycotts have been called.