E.J. Dickson | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2020-02-07T18:08:20+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/e-j-dickson/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 E.J. Dickson Sean Collins <![CDATA[Marianne Williamson is Oprah’s spiritual adviser. She’s also running for president.]]> https://www.vox.com/2019/1/30/18203811/marianne-williamson-2020-presidential-candidate-policies 2020-02-07T13:08:20-05:00 2019-01-30T13:10:00-05:00
Marianne Williamson addresses the crowd at the 2019 South Carolina Democratic Party State Convention in June. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images

The 2020 election has a motley crew of non-politicians who have expressed interest in running for the presidency, from fugitive/disgraced cybersecurity impresario John McAfee to former Starbucks CEO and self-aggrandizing billionaire Howard Schultz. Yet perhaps none of the potential nominees has been as head-scratch-worthy as author and spiritual leader Marianne Williamson.

In a live-streamed event broadcast from a Beverly Hills theater in January, Williamson strode onto the stage against the backdrop of a giant American flag, to rapturous reception from the crowd. She announced that she wanted to run for president as a way “to engage voters in a more meaningful conversation about America, about our history, about how each of us fit into it, and how to create a sustainable future.”

”Our national challenges are deep, but our political conversation is shallow,” she said. “My campaign is for people who want to dig deeper into the questions we face as a nation and deeper into finding the answers.’’

If you listened to Williamson’s speech without knowing anything about her or her work, you’d be forgiven for assuming she sounded less like a presidential candidate than like a New Age-style spiritual leader of sorts, because that’s exactly what she is. A world-famous spiritual leader and author of New Age tomes such as A Woman’s Worth and A Return to Love (the latter of which was plugged by none other than the high priestess of the genre, Oprah Winfrey), the brassy, straight-talking, highly charismatic Williamson has attracted fans all over the world, including celebrities like Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, and Laura Dern. To a degree, she’s something of an antecedent to Goop, albeit sans the plugs for jade vagina eggs and with more sensible pantsuits and casual references to Jesus.

But who exactly is Marianne Williamson, and why is she running for public office? Here’s a primer to the career of the self-proclaimed “bitch for God.” She may have next to no shot at taking the White House, but as spiritual gurus exert more and more influence over American life, she’s worth understanding.

Who is Marianne Williamson?

The daughter of an immigration lawyer and a homemaker, Williamson was born in Houston, Texas. She was raised Jewish, though she did not regularly attend synagogue as a child. (While her books and lectures quote a range of spiritual leaders from Jesus to Buddha, Williamson still identifies as a practicing Jew and does not see a conflict between her faith and much of the Christian-inflected language she uses in her work.)

Like many self-help gurus, Williamson has often spoken about being aimless and adrift prior to her spiritual awakening. She spent two years at Pomona College, a liberal arts school in California, before dropping out to move to New Mexico, where she briefly lived in a geodesic dome on a commune. She then ping-ponged between the East and West coasts, spending her 20s temping and occasionally working as a cabaret singer. “I sank deeper and deeper into my neurotic patterns, seeking relief in food, drugs, people, or whatever else I could find to distract me from myself,” she later wrote in A Return to Love.

It was around that time that Williamson discovered the book that would determine the path of her career: A Course in Miracles. Otherwise known as the Course, A Course in Miracles is a massive three-volume religious work that teaches that the only real thing in the world is God’s love, and surrendering to God’s plan can lead to inner peace and real-life miracles.

Although A Course in Miracles is often marketed as a secular self-help text, it relies heavily on the language of Christianity; when it was published in 1976, the author, medical psychologist Helen Schucman, claimed Jesus had dictated it to her. Nonetheless, the teachings of the book resonated with Williamson. “I never realized you can’t find peace in your life without forgiving other people,” she told the LA Times in 1992. “I never knew how many of my problems stemmed from my fear of other people.”

In 1983, Williamson moved to Los Angeles and began teaching the book at the Philosophical Research Society, a center for metaphysical study. Over the next decade, she garnered a massive following — particularly among LGBTQ men amid the HIV/AIDS crisis, for whom she held weekly support groups at the Center for Living, an organization that provided counseling for HIV-positive patients during the early days of the crisis, when few other organizations would. (She also founded a charity, Project Angel Food, to deliver meals directly to HIV/AIDS patients’ homes.)

”Western medicine had nothing to offer,” Williamson told LA Weekly in 2014 of the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis. “Organized religion was silent for quite a while. … And there was this young woman in Los Feliz talking about a God who loves you no matter what.”

With the publication of A Return to Love, her first book, in 1992, Williamson ascended the ranks from West Coast shaman to world-famous spiritual guru: The book became a self-help classic, spending weeks on top of the New York Times best-seller list. A plug from Oprah, who claimed she experienced “157 miracles” after she read the book, led to sales of an additional 1 million copies; over the next few decades, Williamson would become a regular guest on Oprah’s show, and she is often touted as Oprah’s spiritual adviser.

The book is the source of Williamson’s most famous quote, which is often seen on inspirational Instagrams and erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

Williamson has since written 12 books, from the career guide The Law of Compensation to the spiritual weight loss manual A Course in Weight Loss: Spiritual Lessons for Surrendering Your Weight. Her rise to fame has not been without controversy: She has been subject to accusations of hucksterism, not to mention bullying. Former employees have said she has alienated even her most fervent believers with her egocentric behavior and intimidation tactics, with one source telling Entertainment Weekly in 1992 that Williamson has a ”despotic, tyrannical streak and inability even to hear dissent” and that her charitable organizations are a front to ”sell her book and increase her own fame.” (Williamson has laughed off such critiques, referring to herself as “a bitch for God.”)

But even Williamson’s detractors cannot dispute her naked charisma and prodigious rhetorical skills. “She uses the language and attraction of sensuality to hold an audience,” one Psychology Today journalist wrote in a profile of Williamson in 1992. “Her charisma is sexual and humorous. Watching her perform is more like wrestling naked with Venus than kneeling with the saints.”

What are Marianne Williamson’s policies?

Throughout her career, Williamson has been vocal about her political views, from her stance in favor of offering reparations to black Americans (which she compares to the German government offering billions of dollars in compensation to Jewish victims of the Holocaust) to her proposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I don’t think the ultimate answer will be about settlements or checkpoints,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last fall, in what is perhaps the most Marianne Williamson response of all time. “The work of the genuine peace builders must be on the level of the heart.”

Her foreign policy agenda in general is couched in what she calls “peace building.”

In a foreign policy speech at the World Affairs Council of New Hampshire, Williamson explained, “The same holistic paradigm that has transformed our view of physical health can be applied to our societal health. Active peace-building measures reinforce the social health of our planet the way good nutrition and exercise reinforce the physical health of our bodies.”

She summed up her approach by saying: “Love of our fellow human beings, not fear and domination, should guide America’s foreign policy.”

On the domestic front, Williamson is perhaps best known for being the first candidate to address reparations, and the only one to call for direct payments to the dependents of slaves — she wants to put aside between $200 billion and $500 billion for a reparations program.

She is, however, more in line with her fellow candidates on other issues. She supports the Green New Deal, universal pre-K, free college, protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, gun reform, increasing abortion access, and the Equal Rights Amendment. She also wants a version of Medicare-for-all that does not eliminate private insurance plans.

Why is Marianne Williamson running for president?

This is not Williamson’s first foray into politics. In 2014, she ran for Congress as an independent in LA’s 34th Congressional District, against longstanding Democrat Henry Waxman. Despite raising $2 million for her campaign and garnering such high-profile supporters as Nicole Richie (who appeared in her campaign video), Katy Perry, and Alanis Morissette (who wrote her campaign theme song), Williamson only came in fourth, winning 13.2 percent of the vote. Ted Lieu ultimately won the seat.

But Williamson’s experience in a congressional election apparently didn’t slake her thirst for politics in general. Prior to announcing her bid for president (she is now running as a Democrat), she publicly endorsed Bernie Sanders and has spoken out at length against President Trump’s administration. In her announcement speech, she made it clear that her bid for the presidency was in direct response to what she saw as the “spiritual and moral rot” in Washington.

It’s also clear that she is positioning her bid for the presidency as a moral imperative, using the language of spirituality that is woven throughout her work. “It’s going to be a co-creative effort, an effort of love, a gift of love, to our country and hopefully to our world,” she said in the video for her exploratory committee.

Nonetheless, while Williamson’s congressional campaign was largely dismissed in 2014 — “she’s not a credible candidate,” Eric Bauman, the LA County Democratic Party chair, sniffed in the LA Weekly piece — the political landscape has irrevocably changed since, and it’s clear that she and her followers are taking her presidential run seriously, even if many other Democrats may not.

”It is time for us to rise up, the way other generations have risen up,” Williamson said in her January announcement speech as a crowd of her acolytes roared.

]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[Where are The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s children?]]> https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/1/18/18159589/marvelous-mrs-maisel-missing-kids-children 2019-01-18T15:46:42-05:00 2019-01-18T16:10:00-05:00

Midge Maisel can do it all. She tells jokes. She cooks brisket. She charms the pants off everyone, from crotchety club owners to her fellow shopgirls to seminal 1960s urbanist Jane Jacobs. And she seamlessly juggles the affections of not one but two well-to-do, smoldering Jewish men (three, if you count Lenny Bruce).

But one thing she cannot do — or, perhaps more accurately, one thing she has no interest in doing — is parent.

As the title character of Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Midge (played by Rachel Brosnahan) has two children under the age of 4, Ethan and Esther. While Esther is seen only a handful of times on the show, Ethan will make an occasional appearance irritating Midge’s irascible father Abe (Tony Shalhoub) or displaying creepy, oddly adult-like behavior, à la Mad Men’s Glen Bishop. But aside from these brief appearances, Midge’s children rarely factor into the universe of Mrs. Maisel at all. When Midge is performing at sticky-floored downtown nightclubs or doing impromptu (and frankly, extremely annoying) gigs at housewarming parties, Ethan and Esther are elsewhere — though exactly where, we don’t know, because the show rarely addresses the question of who is taking care of them.

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This wasn’t always the case. In its first season, Mrs. Maisel took a few cursory stabs at explaining the absence of Midge’s kids: Whenever Midge had to go to a gig, she would leave them with her mother Rose (Marin Hinkle) or a kindly older neighbor. In season two, however, the show’s writers apparently abandoned any attempts at exposition, sending Midge and Abe and Rose gallivanting to Paris with an offhanded reference to Esther and Ethan being with a “babysitter.” (What kind of babysitter watches two kids under 4 for a week? And where can I find them?)

Additionally, we rarely, if ever, see Midge and her ex-husband Joel (Michael Zegers) negotiating child care logistics, or trying to figure out who will watch the children when — even though, as any parent will tell you, this subject comprises 85 percent of discussions between parents of small children.

Some critics have responded to Midge’s hands-off maternal style by essentially accusing her of being a bad mom. (Writer Jordana Horn, herself a single mother of six children, went so far as to refer to Midge as such in an op-ed for Kveller.) Other critics have argued that Midge’s lack of interest in her children is essentially a product of her era. “It’s possible [that creator Amy Sherman-Palladino is] making a point about casual Boomer attitudes toward raising children, modern helicopter parenting, or both,” Sophie Gilbert writes at the Atlantic.

And to an extent, this “sign of the times” argument makes sense. In the 1950s and ’60s, parents typically took a much more laissez-faire approach to parenting. In fact, the medical establishment had previously actively discouraged parents from spending too much time with their kids, warning them that showing too much affection would impair their children’s ability to become productive members of society. As a result, parents 50 years ago spent about half as much time with their children as parents do now.

That said, the argument that Midge’s so-called “icebox” parenting is typical of the time period only makes sense if the show is intended to be an accurate reflection of those times — and as many critics have pointed out, it is unsuccessful in this regard. While the show has been applauded for its sumptuous period costumes and vivid recreations of 1950s New York City, it’s also been criticized for its anachronistic dialogue, as well as its whitewashing of the complex racial politics of the time. (There are, in fact, few prominent characters of color on the show, even though 23.6 percent of the population of New York City at the time was African-American.)

Mrs. Maisel appears to want to recreate the style and glamor of the midcentury-modern era (and, in so doing, appeal to the nostalgia of those who lived during that time), while largely ignoring its repressive political and social dynamics. “In Mrs. Maisel’s New York, there is no racism or poverty,” Megan Reynolds writes for Jezebel, adding that the show “casts the past in a warm, golden light, artfully erasing the bad.”

Acknowledging the lives of marginalized figures of the time period — people of color, poor people, even Midge’s kids, left to their own devices in a sun-drenched classic four on the Upper West Side — does not work in service of the show’s singular focus on Midge and its narrative as a female empowerment fantasy. But what does it say about this female empowerment fantasy that it makes no room for children? And what does it say about Midge herself, this ostensibly marvelous multitasking heroine, that she doesn’t even attempt to make that room for them?

Midge’s kids don’t really fit into her new life

Nowhere is Midge’s lack of interest in her kids more apparent than in the final episode of the second season, when Midge is offered the opportunity to accompany a famous singer on a European tour. She immediately jumps at the offer, though her joy is momentarily put on hiatus when she remembers that she’s fielding a marriage proposal from her dreamy doctor boyfriend Benjamin (Zachary Levi). Midge realizes she can’t wed Benjamin and pursue her dream as a comic: “I can’t go back to Jell-O molds. There won’t be three [babies] before 30 for me,” she says. To be truly successful, she must be alone, a realization that’s reinforced by a performance of Lenny Bruce’s iconic standup act “All Alone.”

The problem is that Midge is not — and can never be — all alone. She may not want to go back to making Jell-O molds, but she does already have two children before 30, who recede into the background so often as to register as little more than a passing blur.

Midge’s indifference toward her children is particularly striking in contrast to another sitcom mom and beloved Amy Sherman-Palladino heroine, Lorelai Gilmore of Gilmore Girls. On that earlier series, Lorelai took a more traditional approach to mothering, reorganizing her entire life around that of her teenage daughter Rory. In fact, the show actively framed Lorelai’s decision to become a teenage mother and pursue a quiet, domestic life as an escape plan, a more satisfying alternative to the Ivy League degree and society matron role she had been encouraged to pursue since birth. Viewers are intended to view Lorelai’s humble life as a small-town innkeeper and her close, borderline obsessive relationship with her daughter as aspirational, and are never really prodded to ask how much she has given up to get there. 

Were Mrs. Maisel a different show, the tension between Midge’s ambivalence about motherhood and adhering to the cultural pressures of her era would make for a fascinating dramatic arc. At the beginning of season one, the series even hinted that it might head in that direction: During one of Midge’s first standup sets, she asked herself, “What if I wasn’t supposed to be a mother? What if I picked the wrong profession?” while joking that she couldn’t pick her kids out of a lineup.

That line remains one of Mrs. Maisel’s rawest, most revelatory moments, not to mention a key joke in one of Midge’s funniest sets. But Mrs. Maisel chooses not to show Midge wrestling with these feelings in subsequent episodes. Indeed, it doesn’t really address her feelings about her role as a mother at all, because in its view of 1950s New York, the demands of motherhood are ultimately incompatible with the quest to find your own voice.

Whether that’s actually true, or whether Midge is a “bad” or “good” mom, is ultimately beside the point. But the show’s singular focus on Midge’s journey of self-fulfillment, and its insistence that there’s no room for her children on this journey, proves that in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, this is Midge’s world. Everyone else, up to and including her children, is just living in it.

]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[Can Alexa and Facebook predict the end of your relationship?]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/2/18159111/amazon-facebook-big-data-breakup-prediction 2019-01-02T15:04:54-05:00 2019-01-02T09:00:05-05:00
Our technology knows more and more about our lives. | Sarah Lawrence for Vox

We’ve quickly come to accept that brands know as much about us as we know about ourselves. Facebook serves you ads for cat food after you talk about getting a cat. Target knows you’re pregnant before you tell your friends and family. Even Instagram knows about your shameful predilection for Hallmark Christmas movies. So it stands to reason that fewer pics of you with your significant other on Instagram could signal to apps and brands that your relationship may be coming to an end.

But how much can Big Data actually tell you about your relationship? Can it predict, say, when you’re about to break up? And if you start to see pop-ups for ice cream, Kleenex, and dating sites, should you be concerned?

As it turns out, while experts say it isn’t being used, relationship prediction technology already exists to some degree. The question is, will brands take advantage of it? And more importantly, will you?

Relationships are notoriously difficult to predict. There are so many variables at play, from environmental context to biological attraction to personality compatibility to whether or not you share the same opinion on Jimmy Fallon, that mathematically speaking, determining a specific expiration date for a relationship with a great deal of accuracy is close to impossible. “Relationships are dynamic processes and complex systems,” Justin Garcia, Match Scientific Advisor at dating site Match, told Vox. “To be able to say, ‘You and Brian are going to break up in 2.5 months’ — I don’t think that’s very likely.”

That said, researchers have been studying relationship outcomes for decades, so there’s a significant (and fairly strong) body of work for developers to build on. Perhaps the most well-known research of this kind is John Gottman’s 1992 study of 52 newlywed couples, in which Gottman’s team interviewed them and observed their interactions, then asked them to fill out a questionnaire three years later. Gottman was able to develop a model predicting the likelihood of whether a couple would get divorced with more than 94 percent accuracy. He later published a book arguing there are seven traits associated with relationship outcome, such as whether couples express fondness or affection toward each other and how they deal with conflict.

Gottman’s research has gotten a great deal of media attention, but it also isn’t particularly surprising: If couples are arguing about money right after they’ve gotten married, it stands to reason they’ll continue to do so for the duration of the relationship. Further, the 1992 study also relied on oral history interviews with the couples, implying that the model only works if you can observe couples IRL.

But can you come up with an equally accurate model based on data alone?

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook has also long been interested in the question of relationship outcome prediction, to the degree that it is embedded in the company’s DNA: According to the book The Facebook Effect, while Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, he developed an algorithm that could predict which of his friends would hook up with each other with 33 percent accuracy. (Apparently, this was something he did for fun, which speaks volumes about both Facebook’s origins and Zuckerberg’s college social life.)

In 2013, Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom and Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University co-authored a paper identifying a number of factors that contribute to long-term relationship success, such as whether a couple had lots of friends in common or whether they posted a lot of photos together. The researchers found they were able to determine with 60 percent accuracy whether a couple would break up. A subsequent study by Facebook data scientist Bogdan State analyzed Facebook relationship statuses from 2008 to 2011. He found that couples on Facebook were more likely to stay together once they hit the three-month mark, with their chances of success increasing the longer they stay together.

The idea that big tech companies could use your data to predict something as intimate and emotionally charged as a breakup resonated with people, and not necessarily in a good way. (“Facebook can predict with scary accuracy if your relationship will last,” one headline read.) Nonetheless, a number of developers have since dabbled in relationship prognostication, with one such app, StayGo, launching in 2016.

Developed by a team of psychology and relationship experts and based on a mountain of relationship research, StayGo asks couples 20 questions that ostensibly determine long-term compatibility, from how satisfying their sex life is to how they handle money. Then it calculates an “SG score” out of 100. The app also allows couples to crowdsource feedback about their relationships from family members and from other users of the app, which sounds both extremely pragmatic and like an extremely easy way to endanger your relationship, whether your “SG score” is high or not. (It’s unclear exactly how StayGo’s algorithm works or how accurate it is. StayGo did not respond to my questions by press time.)

“We have a model that can predict the fate of a relationship fairly accurately … If people are accepting of it, it can be done very soon”

As technology has evolved and become further integrated into our private lives, so too has the amount of personal data we’ve made available to Big Tech, which has inevitably resulted in researchers getting more and more creative about studying our sex lives. A 2018 report from eHarmony in conjunction with the Imperial College Business School in London, for instance, found that smart home assistants that use voice recognition technology, such as Google Home and Alexa, could one day be used to predict breakups or even provide relationship counseling by listening to our conversations.

As study co-author Aparna K. Sasidharan recently explained, this insight was based largely on 2017 research that used speech recognition technology to analyze 134 couples’ conversations during marital therapy over the course of two years. The researchers analyzed data such as changes in pitch or how often someone would switch from “you” to “I” or “me,” and they developed an algorithm that was able to predict whether a couple would break up with 79 percent accuracy.

To be clear, eHarmony’s report does not state that companies like Google and Amazon are actually doing this, nor is there any substantial evidence that smart home assistants are listening to our conversations without consent. That said, Amazon recently filed a patent suggesting it may at least have interest in doing this. (In a statement sent to Vox, an Amazon spokesperson said: “We take privacy seriously and have built multiple layers of privacy into our devices. Like many companies, we file a number of forward-looking patent applications that explore the full possibilities of new technology. Patents take multiple years to receive and do not necessarily reflect current developments to products and services.”)

Sasidharan’s point is more that companies like Amazon and Google could do this if they wanted to. “We have a model that can predict the fate of a relationship fairly accurately, but no one has operationalized it or incorporated it into a device or a dating app and said, ‘Okay, use this,’” she says. “But if people are accepting of it, it can be done very soon.”

Of course, this brings up two very important questions: Will people ever accept it? And why, exactly, would companies want to know about the fate of your romantic relationships to begin with?

“Hang the DJ,” the fourth episode of the fourth season of the dystopian BBC series Black Mirror, attempts to answer that first question, albeit in a somewhat oblique way. In the universe of “Hang the DJ,” couples are matched by the Coach app, which tells you how long your relationship will last. When a couple falls in love despite their relationship having an expiration date, they try to beat the shadowy forces that control their ecosystem (the ominously titled “System”) to be together.

Unlike the majority of the Black Mirror canon, “Hang the DJ” isn’t necessarily an indictment of our over-reliance on technology; in fact, in some ways, it is an endorsement. The couple’s subversion of Coach turns out to be a function of a larger computer simulation, which determines their compatibility based on how many times their avatars beat the System (998 times out of 1000, as it turns out, making them 99.8 percent compatible.)

Even more surprisingly, Black Mirror fans weren’t necessarily creeped out by the concept of “expiration dating.” In fact, they immediately began to speculate whether such technology would one day be available, prompting Netflix to release an ersatz version of the app for Valentine’s Day. In an article for the Washington Post, Lisa Bonos even argued that the System would be an improvement on the swipe-filled drudgery of the real-life dating world.

“When the dangers of online dating are discussed in real life, the paradox of choice comes up. This is the idea that, faced with an abundance of choices, be it on Tinder or brands of cereal, we’ve become not freer and happier but more paralyzed and dissatisfied,” Bonos writes. “The System aims to offer the best of both worlds: Lots of options, and at the end of it you get the best one.”

For single millennials who have slogged through one bad Tinder date after another, expiration dating has obvious appeal: Why waste time arranging a coffee date or asking the obligatory questions about jobs and siblings if there’s a deadline hanging over your head?

Garcia, the data scientist at Match, has not seen “Hang the DJ,” but he agrees that people would be interested in using technology to predict relationship outcome. “Romantic love is one of life’s greatest prizes. If we could use people’s user behavior [to find love], my hunch is there are plenty of people who would want to do that,” he says. And using data to predict the long-term success of a relationship with a prospective match could be one of many possible ways to do that.

It’s also not impossible to imagine a world in which people would be willing to relinquish such data in the name of finding love. As much as Americans purport to care about privacy and social media platforms accessing their data, most don’t care enough to actually leave said platforms. It’s safe to assume they’d care even less if these companies started using their data to help them get laid.  

That said, the question remains: Why, exactly, would companies like Facebook and Google want to know the details of your breakup, long before either you or your partner decide to pull the trigger? While it’s tough to answer this question with certainty — most big tech companies are understandably tight-lipped about the specifics of collecting user data — it probably wouldn’t be for altruistic reasons.

It’s a well-established fact in the marketing world that people are more likely to spend lots of money after a bad breakup. “When a relationship ends, people go shopping,” Sasidharan says. It’s also a well-established fact that companies like Facebook track this information — per their own data, users spend 25 percent more on travel-related purchases after changing their relationship statuses — and share it with marketers looking to brush up on their targeted advertising practices.

With this in mind, Sasidharan predicts that companies will use that data to serve you ads, “knowing what you’re going to buy, and where you’re going to go.” It’s not tough to imagine a world in which Facebook or Instagram would see you posting fewer photos with your partner and then serve you ads for an airline, a hotel brand, or even a dating app. And now that Facebook has officially moved into the dating space by launching its own dating app in Canada and Thailand, it will gain access to even more valuable (not to mention intimate) user data. (Facebook says that it currently doesn’t show ads or plan to show ads within Facebook Dating, and says that the company does not “use information on how people use the dating experience” to target ads across Facebook’s products.”)

The question of whether Big Data would embrace the opportunity to monetize heartbreak aside, however, let’s assume for a moment that people would want to have access to this information, and that we could predict, with a strong degree of accuracy, whether or not a relationship would be successful. Garcia says that maybe it’s worth asking ourselves what defines a successful relationship to begin with.

“When we talk about successful relationships, my measure of success is not longevity,” he says. “It’s ‘Did you have personal growth? Did you laugh? Was the sex good?’ When we think about technology to predict our relationships, we have to think about what we’re trying to predict.”

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]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[The homebody economy comes for New Year’s Eve]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/26/18156790/new-years-eve-dominos-netflix-bed-bath-beyond 2018-12-26T16:44:28-05:00 2018-12-26T16:50:04-05:00
Netflix and Domino’s want you to know it’s totally fine to stay home on New Year’s Eve. | Getty Images/EyeEm

For the socially anxious, or even just the socially inept, New Year’s Eve is a historically tough holiday. The intense pressure to have A Great Time, combined with bizarrely expensive prix fixe menus, crowded roads, Uber surge pricing, and the fact that counting down from 30 to 1 is not an inherently exciting thing to do makes for a less-than-fun evening.  

As you get older, you start to realize that having cool, fun New Year’s Eve plans is overrated. And now brands are starting to realize that, too. As part of a larger effort to capitalize on the “homebody economy” — or millennials who prefer to stay at home and spend money on self-care items rather than go out — services like Netflix and Domino’s Pizza are launching promotional campaigns on Instagram and Twitter explicitly targeted at the stay-at-home crowd.

Because while there’s certainly money to be made off drunk youths teetering from house party to house party in a valiant attempt to get laid by 3:00 am, there’s arguably more money to be made off drunk youths staying at home and feeling superior to the tourists freezing their asses off in Times Square. At least brands know where to find them, which is more than you can say about anyone who has found themselves trapped on public transit between parties at 11:55 pm.

Home delivery brands like Domino’s, for instance, have partnered with food bloggers for sponsored ads for #DominosNYE, a code that offers 20 percent off online orders through December 31. Domino’s sponsored posts appear to be actively trying to downplay the glamor of New Year’s Eve, instead catering to a more sweatpants-and-messy-bun crowd. “There is literally nothing that sounds more horrific than getting dolled up, putting on heels, and celebrating 2019 with a group of strangers in a crowded nightclub,” food blogger Frosted Petticoat groused in a sponsored post, next to photos of plastic gold utensils and iceberg lettuce salads.

Bed Bath & Beyond also tweeted a blog post specifically targeted at people staying home on New Year’s Eve. “Might we recommend an evening in? You won’t have to deal with waiting in line anywhere. You can keep it casual, comfortable, and you won’t have any less fun,” the copy reads before recommending a plush bathrobe ($59.99) and a magnetic cheese plate ($49.99):

Netflix is also targeting the stay-at-home crowd, albeit not necessarily people who are staying at home by choice. The company recently released a series of 14 New Year’s Eve countdown videos featuring characters from popular kids’ Netflix shows like All Hail King Julien, Super Monsters, and Fuller House. In a statement, the streaming service said it conducted an internal survey that found that 77 percent of parents with young children prefer to stay home instead of going out on New Year’s Eve (though considering how tough it is to find a babysitter on New Year’s Eve, “prefer” may be a bit of a stretch).

Netflix’s statement also cited data from the research and marketing firm YPulse, which found that “7 in 10 Gen Z & Millennials would also rather stay in on New Year’s Eve” — a convenient finding, given that about 77 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 29 are Netflix subscribers.

For brands, the benefits of catering to this demographic are obvious. According to an (admittedly not super scientific-sounding) survey from WalletHub, almost half of Americans spend the night of December 31 at home, while only about 9 percent say they go to a bar or a party to ring in the new year. Per the WalletHub survey, that’s in part for financial reasons, as people might be more reluctant to drop a few hundred dollars on a bottle of vodka at a shitty club if they’ve just spent a ton of money on Christmas gifts for their friends and family.

But it’s not like people aren’t buying stuff at all on New Year’s Eve, a holiday that ranks just behind Christmas and Valentine’s Day in terms of encouraging luxury item consumption. According to Postmates data from last year, alcohol sales spiked 164 percent on New Year’s Eve, and GrubHub has similarly reported huge spikes in New Year’s Day food delivery orders. It’s not so much that millennials are averse to celebrating New Year’s Eve. They just don’t want to leave their houses to do it.

That makes a lot of sense, considering the emergence of the homebody economy, or the consumer market for people who love nothing more than to sit, eat, and buy shit. As Vox’s Kaitlyn Tiffany explained in a piece earlier this year, the homebody economy consists of streaming services, self-care startups like skincare brands, and delivery-on-demand services like Seamless, Postmates, Drizly, and Amazon Prime, which cater to “younger Americans who are ensconced in their homes and uncharmed by nightlife, with all its associated ‘effort.’”

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While the homebody economy caters to consumers of all ages, it does seem to appeal specifically to millennials, who spend 70 percent more time at home than members of previous generations. To that end, many millennials have leaned into the couch potato identity, literally wearing it on their sleeves with Instagrammable T-shirt phrases like “I just want to stay at home with my dog” and “Netflix and wine” and “introverted AF,” or posting photos of themselves sipping an adult beverage in the tub while reading Ferrante on a Saturday night.

The homebody identity is so popular on social media that it’s evolved into something of a cliche, with some influencers clearly using it as a way to telegraph relatability without compromising the otherwise aspirational nature of their brands. But it’s also significant that the homebody economy has taken root among millennials, a generation that has a lot less disposable income and financial stability than its predecessors: If you’re poor, staying at home on New Year’s Eve to watch Twilight Zone reruns and do face masks is going to seem a hell of a lot more attractive than Ubering to clubs and buying bottles of Cristal, even if brands try to market the former option as a form of “self-care.”

At the end of the day, it’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg question as to who is actually responsible for creating the homebody economy: Is it the millennials who don’t want (or can’t afford) to go out, or the brands that tell them to sit back, relax, stay in, and buy stuff? Either way, on New Year’s Eve in particular, the homebody economy seems like a win-win for brands and millennials alike. Because if there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that there should be fewer drunk people puking in Ubers and street trash cans, and more people puking in the privacy of their own apartments.

]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[Inside the mommy-friendly, scientifically sketchy world of breastfeeding supplements]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/20/18149182/do-breastfeeding-supplements-to-increase-milk-supply-work 2018-12-20T17:12:37-05:00 2018-12-20T17:12:35-05:00

Like an estimated two-thirds of new mothers, I had a tough time breastfeeding. My child was born a month early and refused to latch, so I spent the first few months of his life essentially milking myself for 20 hours a day, holding a pair of wheezing plastic cones over my nipples while my husband and I watched Oz on HBO Go.

My lactation consultant told me to keep going at the pump while simultaneously trying to get my son to latch. Once he did, she said, my milk supply would go up, as a baby is naturally much more efficient at drawing out milk from a breast than a pump is. But my son continued to refuse to nurse, and after every pumping session, I’d look at the few tiny drops of milk in the bottles and be quietly swept away by despair.

I was shattered by this, to say the least. Before giving birth, I had been taught — by doctors, mom blogs, relatives, and blissful celebrity mom Instagrams — that breast was best, and that giving my child formula was tantamount to force-feeding him cigarettes and McFlurries. But not only had I failed to breastfeed my son directly, I had also failed to produce enough milk for him. So I became obsessed with increasing my milk supply, to the point that I would literally fantasize about becoming a bountiful milk machine, my breasts spraying milk in slender arcs like an Austin Powers fembot assassinating her victims.

Gradually, the amount of milk I produced per pumping session became a litmus test of my self-worth, officially replacing my weight or my age or my cup size as a quantification of my value as a woman. I was constantly Googling “ways to increase your breast milk supply” and various permutations thereof. And this is how I stumbled on galactagogues, and the many, many ways they’re sold to new mothers.

The party line from lactation consultants, pediatricians, and other breastfeeding advocates is that most new mothers are naturally equipped to produce sufficient milk for babies, and that external factors, such as a baby’s poor latch or tongue tie or a mother failing to nurse often enough, are to blame for low milk supply. Yet there is a large industry of products intended to help you increase your supply — and that industry is only growing.

What are galactagogues, and how do they ostensibly work?

Galactagogues can be broadly defined as “foods, drinks, herbs, supplements, or medications that are said to increase milk supply,” explains Tipper Gallagher, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-based certified lactation consultant who also blogs at the breastfeeding support website the Boob Geek.

Galactagogues have a wide range of origins, some of which are reportedly ancient remedies mothers have used for centuries to increase milk supply. Blessed thistle, for instance, is a plant that was originally native to the Mediterranean and was used by monks in the Middle Ages to relieve digestion; its leaves are now sometimes recommended to nursing mothers in tea or capsule form. The leaves of moringa, an antioxidant-rich plant found in the tropics, also come in capsule or tea form to boost production. Fenugreek is perhaps the best-known production stimulator; the seed is often used in Indian cooking and to flavor maple syrup. (In fact, one of the most common myths associated with fenugreek is that you know it’s working if your pee smells like maple syrup.)

There are also certain foods and beverages that are rumored to have the unintended effect of boosting milk supply. Gatorade, for instance, is often cited as a lactation booster, though opinions on mom forums vary as to which flavor is more effective — some are in the blue camp, while others are squarely in the orange. (“While we’ve heard this theory before, there isn’t any scientific research to suggest drinking Gatorade helps new mothers increase their milk supply,” a spokesperson for Gatorade told Vox.) Dark beer and oatmeal are purported to boost supply; it’s also rumored that Pink Drink, a “secret menu” item at Starbucks that contains coconut milk and strawberry acai, makes you lactate like gangbusters.

Who’s buying galactagogues?

For new moms, it’s easy to see how galactagogues may be appealing. In light of increasing evidence that breastfeeding is correlated with a number of health benefits in babies, including reduced risk of obesity, asthma, allergies, and respiratory and ear infections, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other health organizations recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed for a minimum of six months.

Although breastfeeding is still a highly fraught topic in parenting circles, in the United States, “breast is best” messaging has largely prevailed (at least, in middle- to upper-middle-class circles): 83.2 percent of mothers in the United States now breastfeed immediately after their children are born, according to 2018 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet exclusive breastfeeding rates tend to drop off within the first six months of a baby’s life, due to the wide range of struggles a mom may encounter, from tongue ties to difficulty latching to, yes, low milk supply.

As a result, the breastfeeding accessory market has exploded. Though it still pales in comparison to the $70 billion formula industry, as of 2016, the nursing accessories market, which comprises everything from pumps to nipple balms to nursing pillows to supplements, was worth an estimated $1.4 billion. Brands like Milkmakers make lactation cookies intended to boost milk supply, which cost more than $20 per bag at Target.

One major player is Milky Mama, a lactation supplement and breastfeeding support company. Its founder Krystal Duhaney, a former registered nurse who also runs a brick-and-mortar shop in Rancho Cucamonga, California, was inspired to launch her business after struggling to nurse her first child. “You see pictures of moms breastfeeding and they’re smiling and laughing,” she told me. “To feel like I wasn’t able to do that, I felt like a failure.”

After she had her second child, Duhaney wanted to ensure that nursing wouldn’t be as difficult this time around. She started researching traditional galactagogues and came up with a recipe for lactation cookies, selling them to her local moms’ Facebook group. As a former registered nurse, “I saw what issues [postpartum women] were having” with nursing, she says. “Then I researched foods that have been used all over the world or in other cultures and used those time-tested remedies to help develop our products.”

In 2016, Duhaney opened her store, and later started selling lactation brownies ($12 for a dozen), lemonade ($32 for 7 days’ worth), lattes (also $32 for a week’s worth), and herbal supplements ($25 each). She says she is now on track to make $5.6 million in sales by the end of 2018.

While her products don’t come with any specific guarantees, there are a number of glowing customer reviews of the brownies, cookies, and supplements, all from formerly anxious mothers thrilled to see a supply boost. “I went from pumping an ounce and a half total after feeding to 6oz total,” one woman writes, adding, “I have my confidence back that I can continue breastfeeding when I start working again.” The implication is clear: By buying lactation supplements, you too can become the lactation goddess of your dreams — and, by extension, the ideal mother.

Are galactagogues effective?

The short answer: We don’t know.

Generally speaking, there is a paucity of research that herbal breastfeeding supplements actually work. Studies on galactagogues “have really small sample sizes, [and] they’re not well controlled,” says Gallagher. Breast milk volume is also tough to measure to begin with: While lactation consultants usually weigh a baby before and after a feeding to determine approximately how much milk they’re getting, unless a mother exclusively pumps (as opposed to directly breastfeeding their child), it’s hard to gauge exactly how much milk her breasts are producing.

“The main thing is there is not enough rigorous research” on galactagogues, says Alessandra Bazzano, an associate professor at Tulane University School of Public Health. In 2016, Bazzano published a review of 18 studies assessing the efficacy of five herbal galactagogues that are commonly searched on Google and recommended by lactation consultants, including fenugreek, garlic, and shatavari, which is commonly used in ayurvedic medicine. She found that the results on herbal galactagogues were mixed. “We have some evidence they could be effective for some women [in increasing milk production], but we need appropriately designed trials to know for sure,” she said.

Nonetheless, many lactation consultants (aside from Gallagher) will frequently promote herbal galactagogues in their own practices, recommending specific products to clients or even giving clients samples. In fact, according to Kimberly Schram, vice president of marketing and communications at Upspring, which sells capsules, cookies, and a berry drink mix to increase supply, the company partners with the International Lactation Consultant Association (ILCA), appearing at trade shows and supplying lactation consultants with samples.

In addition to herbal supplements, there are two pharmaceutical medications intended to increase milk supply: domperidone and metoclopramide, otherwise known as reglan, which Bazzano also assessed in her review. Both were developed to treat gastric issues but have the effect of boosting milk supply.  

The debate over low milk supply

Although breastfeeding issues are far from uncommon, it’s not exactly clear how prevalent an issue low milk supply specifically is. Most lactation consultants and pediatricians will say that low milk supply is fairly uncommon: Though estimates vary, one study suggests that only about 15 percent of women have supply issues for a legitimate medical reason, such as a lack of sufficient glandular tissue. “In my practice, I might run across one person a month who has [these issues],” says Gallagher. She says it’s far more common for women to attribute breastfeeding issues to low milk supply, when in fact they may be struggling with mechanical issues like poor latch.

If a mom is concerned that she has low milk supply, most doctors and lactation consultants will tell her to breastfeed or pump more often. “The most effective way to increase milk supply is to make sure that milk is being extracted from the breast every two to three hours either by breastfeeding or pumping,” says Dr. Smita Malhotra, a Los Angeles-based pediatrician, explaining that milk production is based on “supply and demand.”

But there’s some debate over whether every mom can have sufficient milk supply, provided she empties her breasts often enough. Bazzano, for instance, suggests that low milk supply may be more common than lactation consultants and pediatricians often suggest. “There’s a lot of different things going on in terms of letdown and milk production,” she says, suggesting that maternal obesity, maternal stress, and delayed age of childbirth could contribute to mothers experiencing challenges with milk production.

Contrary to what most lactation consultants and pediatricians say, physiological barriers to breastfeeding may also be more common than we think, she says. “I work with lactation consultants, and I love them, but they have a vested interest in promoting counseling and support,” she says. “By and large, they are not physicians or herbal experts. … I think their training is the idea that there are so few women who have a physiological barrier to breastfeeding. Most issues, they say, are mechanical. And that’s simply not true.”

The problem with current breastfeeding research

Of course, this debate (and myriad other debates over breastfeeding) could easily be solved if we better understood the mechanism behind increasing milk supply, not to mention lactation in general. But Bazzano says there’s not enough research on breastfeeding as a whole: “There’s a lot we don’t understand yet.”

Considering that mothers have been breastfeeding their babies for millennia, this may seem ridiculous. But the truth is that historically, breastfeeding — and maternal health in general — has not been considered a subject deemed worthy of study by the largely white male medical establishment, says Gallagher. “Women are not a real priority, especially in terms of maternal care and even more so in lactation,” she says. While we know that breastfeeding is beneficial to both mothers and babies, and we know what many of these specific benefits are, the research largely stops there.

“[There’s this] idea that there are so few women who have a physiological barrier to breastfeeding … and that’s simply not true”

Schram, the manager of marketing and communications at Upspring, freely admits that there isn’t much peer-reviewed, substantive research to back up the effectiveness of galactagogues, though she says that Upspring has conducted internal clinical trials and is in talks with researchers to conduct official clinical trials. She says part of the reason there have been so few clinical external trials on galactagogues has to do with the fact that researchers need to establish “proper protocols” to control for various factors in a laboratory setting.

“There’s so many things that can cause a supply change and an increase or decrease with mom,” she says. “It can depend on how tired the baby is, the latch, the position of the baby. It’s hard to have women breastfeeding at the same time, [with] the same babies. … It is such an individual experience that I think has a lot to do with [the lack of research on breastfeeding supplements]. Every baby and every mother is different.”

Do galactagogues have any negative side effects?

Most herbal galactagogues — like Upspring’s MilkFlow capsules and Milky Mama’s supplements — do not require approval from the Food and Drug Administration. “There’s no regulation. There’s no oversight,” Bazzano says. “But that goes for all vitamins and all supplements.”

Many of the ingredients associated with these supplements do not have well-documented, serious side effects. Gallagher says that for the most part, the breastfeeding supplements she’s seen on the market are harmless; at best, she says, a mother will see a marginal boost in her supply, and at worst, they “won’t do much of anything.”

That said, there have been reports of fenugreek producing side effects like lower blood sugar or gastrointestinal issues in mothers and babies. Further, some of these supplements do not disclose these potential side effects on their labels; the label for the blessed thistle and fenugreek supplement produced by the breastfeeding supplement company (and Khloe Kardashian-approved brand) Mommy Knows Best, for instance, includes no such warnings about fenugreek.

As for pharmaceutical medications, Bazzano found that while there was some evidence that domperidone could be effective at boosting milk supply, both domperidone and reglan have some pretty nasty side effects. Domperidone has been linked to long QT syndrome, a potentially fatal heart condition, which is why it is currently illegal in the United States; reglan has been linked to tardive dyskinesia (abnormal muscle movements) and even suicidal thoughts.

How galactagogues are marketed

Given the lack of research on galactagogues, it’s probably safe to view them with a slightly skeptical eye (and you certainly shouldn’t take herbal supplements of any kind without consulting a physician first). But to be fair, many of the people I spoke with for this article aren’t making any wildly exaggerated claims to the contrary, even if they are directly profiting from selling such supplements.

Duhaney, for instance, freely admits that supplements have their limits. As a trained lactation consultant, she believes that increasing supply ultimately comes down to good breastfeeding practice, i.e., regularly emptying the breasts every few hours and establishing a good latch with your baby. “There are tons of supplements that can help boost your supply, but nothing will help if mom isn’t emptying her breast properly,” she says.

“You think, ‘Breastfeeding is natural, every mammal does it, it won’t be a big deal’”

Nonetheless, imagery of overflowing Medela bottles and milk-splotched T-shirts dominates all the marketing surrounding lactation supplements, some of which is targeted specifically to mothers who are nursing or have just given birth. (For instance, Christa Knight, the digital marketing manager for Mommy Knows Best, says the company does targeted advertising for keywords and search terms like “lactation supplements” and“breastfeeding support.”)

When you’re a bleary-eyed new mom trying desperately to nourish a squalling little creature on demand, all this anecdotal evidence is pretty convincing. Peer-reviewed journals and scientific studies edited and authored by avuncular old white men are probably the last thing on your mind; you want to know what worked for other moms, and you want to do it fast.

And therein lies the seductive appeal of breastfeeding supplement brands: More than well-meaning relatives and friends and lactation consultants who can’t help but contribute to the disquieting sense that you’ve failed as a mother, the lactation supplement companies seem to be the only ones that know the truth about breastfeeding, at least as I experienced it. They know it’s not as easy as other people make it seem. They know about your omnipresent feelings of inadequacy, the one-sided, expletive-filled conversations you have with your pump at 2 am when you just can’t quite manage to eke out another drop. And they know that sometimes, you need a little push in the right direction.

“You’ve just delivered; your emotions are all over the place,” Schram said, summarizing new mothers’ nursing struggles. “You think, ‘Breastfeeding is natural, every mammal does it, it won’t be a big deal.’ It’s not until you actually have a baby that [it becomes clear] some moms do it easily and some moms don’t.”

On the advice of my lactation consultant, I did end up trying fenugreek and “mother’s milk tea,” a product that contains fenugreek and blessed thistle. I also tried eating oatmeal and drinking tons of Gatorade and Guinness, the latter of which was delicious but largely unhelpful. I did find that eating regularly and staying hydrated helped a little bit, as did alternating pumping with manual expression (a fancy term for “squeezing your boob and milking yourself like a cow”), but for the most part, my supply stayed relatively consistent. It wasn’t until I started desperately Googling around for a black-market domperidone supplier that I realized that nothing, not even exclusive breastfeeding, was worth risking my health to that degree. (The fact that I was basically netting two hours of sleep per night didn’t help matters.)

So I made peace with the fact that I would have to supplement with formula, cut down on my pumping sessions, and gave my son what little breast milk I could. Nearly two years later, I’m still haunted by the thought that maybe I should’ve tried harder; maybe I should’ve pumped more. Hell, maybe I should’ve tried Pink Drink (though honestly, strawberry acai sounds disgusting). But a different part of me also knows that there was no magic pill or herb or tea I could take that would solve the main problem: not feeling like I could never make enough for my son, but feeling like I could never be enough for him.

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Correction: A previous version of this post misspelled Bazzano’s name and misstated the year her article was published.

]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[What’s missing in all the praise of Rachel McAdams’s high-fashion breast pump photo shoot]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/19/18149012/rachel-mcadams-breast-pump-photo-shoot 2018-12-20T11:05:36-05:00 2018-12-19T17:06:53-05:00 Historically, pumping breast milk has been something working moms do behind closed doors (or in bathroom stalls, cars, Applebee’s supply closets, or wherever they can, really). Yet as the campaign to #NormalizeBreastfeeding has become increasingly mainstream, a growing number of actors, fashion brands, and influencers have been doing their part to bring more visibility to pumping, albeit in a highly stylized way.

Most recently, actress Rachel McAdams, who just had her first child with boyfriend Jamie Linden, was photographed on the cover of the fashion magazine Girls Girls Girls wearing Versace and dripping in Bulgari diamonds, her jacket open to reveal a breast pump.

Girls Girls Girls editor-in-chief Claire Rothstein posted the photo on Instagram, saying that McAdams was (remarkably) six months postpartum during the shoot.

“Between shots she was expressing/pumping as [she was] still breastfeeding,” Rothstein wrote. “We had a mutual appreciation disagreement about whose idea it was to take this picture but I’m still sure it was hers which makes me love her even more. Breastfeeding is the most normal thing in the world and I can’t for the life of me imagine why or how it is ever frowned upon or scared of.” Rothstein then added, “I did not look anywhere near as fabulous as this when feeding/pumping. And that’s ok too.”

Mothers on social media immediately applauded McAdams for normalizing pumping (and looking fly as hell while doing so). “Honestly if I can’t feed my children while wearing heaps of diamonds and designer clothing then i’m not doing it,” one woman wrote, along with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the image was proof that women could truly “have it all.”

The breast pump, but make it fashion

The image of a sleek and stylish McAdams strapped to a breast pump is not the first time this year that the fashion world has made an effort to feature pumps. In September 2018, model Valeria Garcia walked the runway at designer Marta Jakubowski’s show while wearing the Elvie Pump, an as-yet-unreleased hands-free pump (though there’s a waitlist, if you want to get on it) that she debuted at the end of the show by dramatically opening her blazer to reveal the pump underneath her bra cups. Like McAdams’s shoot, the goal of the appearance seemed to be “the breast pump, but make it fashion.”

In an October 2018 interview, Garcia said the brand had approached Jakubowski to hire a real-life mom to model the pump. “I’m really pro-breastfeeding. I fed both of my boys. I never did formula or anything,” Garcia boasted in Harper’s Bazaar. “I was really amazed when I saw the product because it’s really quiet and you can really do whatever you want to do while you’re using it. I thought, ‘People will get the message. You can even do runway with the pump.’”

In July 2018, model Mara Martin, a finalist in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit model search, was photographed on the runway breastfeeding her baby, who wore a diaper, noise-canceling headphones, and bikini bottoms.

While the images of Garcia and Martin got some backlash — mostly from trolls who questioned whether it was “appropriate” for a woman to breastfeed in public — the response was overwhelmingly positive, with many applauding the women for showcasing the reality of being a multitasking working mom.

In an Instagram post, Martin echoed this language, writing: “I’m so grateful to be able to share this message and hopefully normalize breastfeeding and also show others that women CAN DO IT ALL!”

What the coverage of Garcia’s and Martin’s runway appearances and McAdams’s photo shoot failed to mention, however, is that the reality of pumping for most mothers is anything but glamorous. In fact, for most working mothers in the United States (one of the few industrialized countries that does not have guaranteed maternity leave), pumping can be cumbersome, laborious, and often unhygienic.

The benefits (and challenges) of breastfeeding

Scientific research indicates that breastfeeding is correlated with a number of health benefits, from babies having higher IQs to mothers having a lower risk of developing breast cancer. While there’s some debate as to whether these benefits have been overhyped, the consensus in the medical community is overwhelmingly that breastfeeding is good for both moms and babies.

As a result, the World Health Organization (WHO) now officially recommends that mothers exclusively breastfeed babies for at least six months. This “breast is best” messaging has led to a spike in breastfeeding rates, and an estimated 83.5 percent of babies are now breastfed immediately after birth, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

But because the United States does not guarantee maternity leave, many mothers have to return to work immediately after giving birth, which can significantly disrupt the breastfeeding relationship. In fact, an estimated 25 percent of new moms go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, whether their bodies have recovered from a grueling labor or not. (The recommended recovery period for new moms, by the way, is about four to six weeks.)

There are also crucial class and race elements at play here, which rarely are brought up during conversations about the benefits of breastfeeding: Low-income mothers are more likely to be negatively affected by the lack of mandated maternity leave, and are thus less likely to exclusively breastfeed than their higher-income counterparts. Black mothers in particular have lower breastfeeding rates than white or Hispanic women, due in part to the fact that they are less likely to have jobs that provide sufficient maternity leave.

In the absence of mandated maternity leave policies, breast pumps have largely been marketed as a way for working mothers to keep up their supply when they return to their jobs — basically, a way for them to “have it all,” according to a 2014 Pacific Standard piece on exclusive pumping. And this marketing has largely been successful. Since the introduction of the Medela breast pump in 1991, the market for breast pumps has quadrupled, and is expected to be worth $3 billion in 2022.

There is, however, one problem with this marketing tactic: It doesn’t reflect women’s reality.

The reality of pumping at work for American mothers

In truth, for many, if not most, American mothers, the reality of expressing milk at work is anything but the glamorous, badass experience depicted in images like McAdams’s photo shoot.

Although the 2010 Affordable Care Act requires all US employers to provide new moms with “reasonable break time” and a clean and hygienic place to express milk, there are a number of loopholes: If a company has fewer than 50 employees, for instance, it does not have to comply with the law, and hourly employees are usually not protected.

According to one survey of 550 new mothers, only 45 percent had access to a lactation room that wasn’t a bathroom, and almost 50 percent said their decision whether or not to breastfeed was affected by their postpartum career plans.

And that’s not even considering the many companies that simply don’t install a lactation room on premises, or the companies that do have lactation rooms but actively discriminate against working mothers or punish them for taking pumping breaks. In fact, workplace lactation discrimination lawsuits have also risen 800 percent over the past decade, indicating that while working mothers may now be more comfortable advocating for their rights, America still has a long way to go for pumping to gain widespread acceptance in the workplace.

For many new mothers, pumping, for lack of a better term, sucks

There are so many challenges associated with pumping in the workplace that it is often cited as one of the reasons for exclusive breastfeeding rates dropping off after the first few months of a baby’s life: The experience can be so frustrating that many moms will just stop nursing altogether, WHO recommendations be damned.

And for many new mothers, pumping, for lack of a better term, sucks. It’s uncomfortable (for many moms, it’s actively painful), it’s awkward, it’s inefficient, and it’s cumbersome to lug a giant breast pump to and from work every day. Pumping engenders so many negative feelings in new mothers that there are regular hackathons to build better breast pumps, and a photo shoot depicting a new mom kicking and punching her breast pump a la Office Space went viral last year.

“The dreaded pumping sessions are some of the worst parts of breastfeeding,” Mia Gorrell, the photographer behind the shoot, said in a blog post. “Taking your top off or using a bra with two holes in it, you are a prisoner to the machine that sucks milk out of your breasts multiple times a day. To say you feel like a cow being milked is probably the most accurate description.”

Some breastfeeding advocates have argued that breast pumps provide a Band-Aid solution to a much larger systemic problem: the lack of mandated maternity leave in the United States and, by extension, the lack of respect our society affords mothers in the workplace.

A handful of activists have taken this argument even further, suggesting that breast pumps are far from the feminist panacea they’ve traditionally been marketed as and gloss over the reality of working mothers’ lives. Marketing materials for hands-free, next-generation breast pumps like Evie and Willow, for instance, tend to feature badass supermoms expertly juggling conference calls with cooking dinner; the implication is that hands-free breast pumps give working mothers more free time to fill up with their career and mothering duties, when frankly, they’re already pretty tapped out as is.  

“The idea that women can just cram more tasks into every hour, simultaneously pumping, filing expense reports, and dialing into a conference call, has real allure,” working mom of two Annaliese Griffin wrote for Quartz. “[But] the difficulties of being a working parent, particularly when you’re nursing, cannot be solved by consumer choice alone.”

Breastfeeding stigma is still prevalent — and powerful.

It’s not a small thing that A-list celebrities like McAdams are using their tremendous platforms to normalize images of breastfeeding. Even though breastfeeding rates are rising, and the public health community highly encourages mothers to breastfeed (to the extent, some argue, of shaming them into doing so), stigma around public breastfeeding is still very real and prevalent.

It’s not hard to find viral stories of women being shamed at restaurants or concerts or airports for nursing in public, including from celebrities like Mila Kunis. And until fairly recently, breastfeeding photos were likely to be flagged on social platforms like Instagram for violating user guidelines prohibiting nudity. (In 2015, Instagram started allowing breastfeeding photos following user backlash.)

Breastfeeding and pumping are normal, natural, totally asexual things that many mothers do, and it is important to depict them as such. But there’s arguably a distinction between doing that and depicting pumping as something glamorous and liberating, which is likely at odds with the reality of most women’s lived experiences.

“There has arisen a subset of ‘normalize breastfeeding’ activism that is less about normalizing the everyday lived reality of lactation, and more about normalizing breastfeeding by making it glamorous and aspirational,” Tracy Clark-Flory wrote for Jezebel after Martin, the Sports Illustrated model, went viral. “[It’s] less about advocating for things like suitable pumping accommodations in the workplace—things that meaningfully allow women to ‘DO IT ALL’—than it is making breastfeeding beautiful and attractive.”

And ultimately, McAdams’s photo shoot falls squarely in this category. Were it to be truly subversive, she might’ve been shot not with dramatic eye makeup and a cropped designer jacket, but in sweatpants and an ugly nursing bra at 3 in the morning blearily watching Netflix, or desperately trying to eke out one more ounce in a cramped supply closet before a business meeting.

Diamonds and Versace may look a lot cooler, but for celebrity moms to truly help normalize breastfeeding, it may be more helpful to showcase the reality of what breastfeeding looks like first — or, better yet, to advocate for better policies to support nursing moms.

]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[There’s a black market of limited-edition Disney park merch — and Disney is cracking down on it]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/17/18145114/disney-theme-park-merchandise-flipping 2018-12-17T16:16:54-05:00 2018-12-17T15:30:04-05:00

For die-hard Disney fans, there’s no limit to the amount of money they’re willing to spend on anything mouse-related. Aside from shelling out hundreds of dollars to visit the parks multiple times a year, people will buy anything, from park swag and collectibles to Smellitzer machines that literally pump the aroma of Disney theme parks into your home, to experience the Disney magic. Now, however, Disney is starting to crack down on some of these mega-fans for flipping their limited-edition merch.

According to the local newspaper the Orange County Register, the company has started revoking annual passes for park-goers, which can cost up to $1,149 per person, without warning after finding that they had used their annual pass holder discounts (which range from 10 to 20 percent off) to buy limited-edition merchandise in bulk at the parks and then sold it for a marked-up price on eBay or Etsy.

One annual pass holder said she received a letter from someone associated with the company who said that the park had canceled her annual pass for the year, but she still has to make monthly membership payments of about $71 per month. The representative said she could contact the guest relations department to contest the company’s decision. (Disney did not respond to Vox’s request for comment.)

Disney has been selling limited-edition merch at the park for years, from Toy Story alien-themed popcorn buckets to rose-gold Minnie ears (which were supposedly inspired by similar fan-made merch on Instagram). Traditionally, such items have been sold exclusively at the parks and for a limited period of time; as a result, they tend to inspire massive consumer demand, particularly among the Disney fandom, with people waiting in line for hours for a crack at buying them.

This high demand for limited-edition Disney park merch has spawned a black market of such items on eBay and Etsy, with annual season pass holders buying items in bulk and then selling them online at a marked-up rate. Limited-edition Funko vinyl heads of secondary characters from the Disney attraction the Enchanted Tiki Room, for instance, which were released to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the attraction, are currently available for purchase on eBay for $79.99, or three times the original price.

According to Jim Hill, a veteran entertainment journalist and co-host of the Disney podcast The Disney Dish, flipping Disney merch has been going on for years. While the annual pass holders’ code of conduct officially prohibits buying items with the intention of reselling them, the company had previously turned a blind eye to — or even implicitly encouraged — the practice by releasing such items at big-ticket events like the D23 fan expo, where fans pay top dollar for early access.

“The people who pay the [highest-tier] Sorcerers’ packages at the expo are paying $2,500 to get into that event, and to be honest, 90 percent of those folks are there to get the material, hike back to their hotel rooms, and put it up on eBay,” says Hill. “So I do find it kinda bizarre that this is a hill that Disney has chosen to fight on.”

It’s also of note that the Disney company appears to have targeted annual pass holders, or people who buy annual passes to make multiple visits to the park per year, specifically. Annual pass holders in Anaheim, where Disneyland is located, tend to be locals who are willing to spend hundreds of dollars per person per year (the highest tier costs $1,149) for access to the parks. (Annual passes are also available at Walt Disney World resort in Florida, but due in part to its larger size and the number of high-end resorts on the premises, the East Coast park tends to cater more to out-of-town guests than to locals.)

Disney has what Hill describes as “a weird love/hate relationship with annual pass holders, especially on the West Coast.” Part of this is because locals tend to spend less money at the parks than out-of-town guests do, eating at home instead of buying food at the parks while simultaneously taking up valuable resources like parking. But annual pass holders have also been known to bring Disney negative press due to their unruly behavior.

Earlier this year, for instance, a member of a Disneyland “social club” (a term for groups of annual pass holders who wear denim jackets featuring Disney-branded logos and hang out at the parks) filed a lawsuit against another social club member, which was subsequently covered in the press as a Disney gang turf war. Most recently, an annual pass holder was banned from Walt Disney World after waving a Trump 2020 banner on Main Street, then doing it again on Splash Mountain. (The parks’ code of conduct prohibits “unauthorized events, demonstrations, or speeches.”)

As a result of such behavior, as well as the Disney company’s contentious relationship with the city of Anaheim in general, the Disney company tends to harbor an attitude toward annual pass holders that borders on elitist. “[Pass holders] treat Disneyland like it’s their living room,” says Hill. “To Disney’s point of view, it’s like, ‘All right, we really enjoy the money you spend here, but …’”

To complicate matters, the upcoming spring 2019 opening of Galaxy’s Edge, a Star Wars-themed area of the park that is projected to attract record numbers of guests, has park operations teams concerned that locals will flood to the park and edge out the out-of-town guests. “If you look at this from the Disney corporate side of the fence, they really do want to thin the herd because they want to be sure that when Galaxy’s Edge opens, the average day guest who comes in from 100 miles away gets to experience that, that they’re not frozen out because all of these annual pass holders have gotten there first,” explains Hill.

“If the Disney company said, ‘We need a kidney,’ there’s a certain subset of annual pass holders who are like, ‘Well, we’ve got one for you!’”

As a result, Hill says, Disney has been gradually driving up the costs of the annual passes (a Disney World Silver Pass, for instance, now costs $479, a 9.1 percent increase), angering fans and arguably driving them to try to make up for the rate hikes by reselling theme park merchandise on eBay in the first place: “In their minds, that will help mitigate the rising price,” he says. With this latest crackdown on annual pass holders, many die-hard Disneyland fans feel personally betrayed by a company they’ve not only given thousands of dollars to but have built something of an emotional relationship with since childhood. Some are even speculating that Disney is cracking down on merch resellers to drive customers to its Shop Disney Parks app, which sells many of the limited-edition items at a cheaper price.

This view isn’t universal. Some Disney fans are pleased that the company has started to crack down on black-market merch resellers, arguing that flippers ruin the fun for other fans by buying the items in bulk, thereby ensuring that they’re sold out before others can get their hands on them. That aside, the recent crackdown, combined with the number of fare hikes this year, has prompted some fans to question whether they will have their annual passes revoked if they buy, say, five or six limited-edition items and give them to friends.

But in truth, even though Hill says the Disney company is actively testing fans’ threshold for what they’re willing to pay (and what sort of treatment they’re willing to tolerate) to gain access to their beloved parks, for a certain tier of Disney fan, there’s little that the company could actually do to edge them out.

“If the Disney company said, ‘We need a kidney,’ there’s a certain subset of annual pass holders who are like, ‘Well, we’ve got one for you!’” he says.

]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[There’s a stigma around lube. These brands want to change that.]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18141193/lube-brands-stigma-personal-lubricant-ky-foria 2019-01-03T13:34:06-05:00 2018-12-14T15:20:10-05:00

As a culture, we’ve become more open to talking about sex and sexual health, and for the most part, this has been to our benefit. Teen pregnancy is down. Condom use is up. And despite moralists clutching their pearls over free online porn, the vastness of the digital landscape means there’s a fair amount of sex-positive NSFW content out there: If you’re looking for porn that doesn’t feature women getting choked, slapped, or hit in the face with a penis, it’s never been easier to do so.  

Still, there’s one sexual health product that remains surprisingly taboo, even though it theoretically would make our sex lives a lot better: lube.

When you talk to people about their aversion to lube, the same critiques pop up over and over again: It tastes weird. It smells weird. It “doesn’t seem necessary and it makes everything messy,” as one man told me on Twitter.

Some brands, such as the sexual health startup Sustain and the skin care brand Necessaire, are trying to sell lube to a new generation, using millennial-friendly aesthetics and Insta-savvy digital marketing. But even these companies and their zeitgeist-y branding still have to overcome a common misconception: that lube indicates a less than healthy sex life.

For heterosexual people in particular, there seems to be a great deal of resistance (pun absolutely intended) to using lube. It’s rare to see a tube of KY or Astroglide make an appearance during a one-night stand (as sex writer Maria Del Russo put it, “I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve spotted a bottle of lube in a guy’s nightstand drawer”); it’s even rarer to see lube use depicted in popular culture, even in the grittiest HBO prestige series sex scenes.

Even when lube does make an appearance in popular culture, it’s usually in a mocking context: In the movie Superbad, Jonah Hill’s character makes fun of the virginal Michael Cera for bringing a bottle of lube to a party, while both Rihanna and Nicki Minaj have boasted of not needing to use lube due to being in a perpetual state of vaginal humidity.

The result is that young people use lube inconsistently, if at all. A 2009 sexual well-being global survey found that only 29 percent of more than 26,000 respondents used lube during sex. A 2014 Journal of Sexual Medicine study found that while 65 percent of women reported using lube at some point in their lives, only about 20 percent had used it during a sexual encounter within the past 30 days. (The study was partially funded by Church & Dwight Co., which sells Trojan condoms and lube.)

Katy Zvolerin, director of public relations for Adam & Eve, says that while lube sales have increased slightly over the years due to increased public awareness and more brands entering the market, lube sales still constitute “a very small percentage of our overall sales,” or about 3 percent.

For heterosexual people in particular, there seems to be a great deal of resistance (pun absolutely intended) to using lube

“There’s certainly still some stigma surrounding the use of lubricants,” says Zvolerin. “Some women are too embarrassed to request it. Some men (and I’ve heard this quite often) feel that if their partner isn’t producing enough natural lubricant, there’s something wrong with her or the relationship.” Or with themselves: For Brian M., 33, needing to use lube is a sign that “I haven’t done the foreplay right/enough and she’s not physically ready to go, and I guess we need help,’” he said. “Lube seems like you’re admitting defeat.” (Instead, they use coconut oil.)

This cultural aversion to lube is a problem for many reasons, chief among them that a lot of couples could actually benefit greatly from it. While we tend to think of vaginal dryness as something only the sexually disinterested and premenopausal experience, “not all vaginas self-lubricate the same amount, and vaginal dryness is extremely common and for an incredibly wide variety of reasons,” such as where you are in your menstrual cycle or what medication you’re taking, says Alicia Sinclair, a sex educator and CEO of the sex toy companies Le Wand and B-Vibe. (Some hormonal contraceptives, for instance, have been linked to vaginal dryness, ironically indicating that perhaps an effective way to prevent teens from having sex is to put them on birth control.)  

Insufficient lubrication makes sex not just uncomfortable but actively painful. And painful sex is common: According to data from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, an estimated 70 percent of people with vaginas report having experienced it at one point or another. “Lube isn’t the solution for all sex pain, but it can help many situations,” says Christina Cerqueira, director of digital education for the sex education startup O-School.

Yet for the most part, women stay silent about pain or discomfort during sex, either out of embarrassment or fear of displeasing their partners. In a culture where female pleasure is often considered little more than an afterthought, this isn’t all that surprising — nor is it shocking that there would be stigma around a product that is largely intended to make sex more pleasurable and comfortable for women.

That said, there are a few demographics that are more inclined to be lube-friendly. Among men who have sex with men, there’s a lot less stigma surrounding lube use, in large part because lube is more integral to anal sex than to penis-in-vagina intercourse (unlike the vagina, the anus does not self-lubricate). While not every man who has sex with men has anal sex, lube use is much more common in the gay community, with one study indicating that more than 75 percent of gay men surveyed used lube during the majority of sexual encounters. “It makes bottoming a whole hell of a lot easier,” says Chase, 32, a gay man who says he uses lube approximately 75 percent of the time.

“Lube isn’t the solution for all sex pain, but it can help many situations”

Millennials who grew up in the era of sex-positive Tumblr blogs and female celebrities posting empowering nude selfies on Instagram may also be more likely to view lube as an essential part of a healthy sex life, rather than as a medicinal aid. “When you look at the statistics … around where a category like lubricant is growing, it’s among millennials,” says Kate Fraser, the director of communications for Sustain, which makes organic, water-based lube. (One 2015 survey suggests that 43 percent of millennials use lube, but it’s worth noting that the survey was sponsored by the condom brand Skyn.)

To that end, old-school lube manufacturers are turning their attention to younger consumers. Astroglide, for instance, hosts biweekly Twitter sex education chats and recently launched a campaign, “Life’s Too Short to Fake It,” aimed at encouraging young women to take control of their sexual empowerment. By focusing on the pleasure and sexual satisfaction of women, a rep for Astroglide told Vox, the company is able to connect to a younger demographic.

In recent years, there’s been a new crop of slicker (sorry) brands trying to make lube great again. Last month, the venture capital-backed skin care and wellness startup Necessaire debuted five products, including Sex Gel, a personal lubricant. Encased in a slim white pump-top bottle, with a sleek logo by the guy who designed Jay-Z’s album covers, Sex Gel looks less like a lube and a lot more like the millennial-friendly, minimalist chic skin care from a brand like the Ordinary. The startup Maude has also debuted a $25 personal lubricant, also in a pump-top bottle, with an elegant, modernist design that would seem at home on the cocktail napkins at a Standard hotel bar.

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The goal of startups like Necessaire and Maude seems to be to destigmatize lube by making it seem like any other wellness product, rather than an illicit novelty item to be used in emergency situations. “We thought body [care] did not have to be about just a basic bar of soap,” co-founder Randi Christianson told Glossy. “If you think about it more broadly, what does it start to include? Why does body wash have to be in aisle 4 and lube was at the very bottom of aisle 12?”

Other companies, such as the cannabis brand Foria, are more interested in branding lube as a way to imbue novelty into your sex life, the same way middle-aged couples might buy a pair of fuzzy handcuffs to spice things up. Foria’s Pleasure THC Arousal Lube claims to “enhance tactile sensations while decreasing tension, discomfort and dryness” — or, as one Cosmo headline put it, to “get your vagina high.”

Zvolerin is optimistic that such specialty lubes will help revitalize the market. “I do believe that we will see lube becoming more popular and considered a part of the sex act in the near future,” she says, citing THC- and CBD-infused personal lubricants as an example. The fact that the global sexual wellness market as a whole is poised to experience tremendous growth over the next few years — one estimate suggests that it will increase by 6.7 percent over the next four years — will also likely usher in more players to the personal lubricant space.

But getting consumers to change their habits is notoriously difficult, and getting people to change the way they have sex is even tougher. Even though our culture has come a long way in terms of sex positivity, the bar hasn’t historically been too high: In a country where sexual assault survivors are regularly accused of dressing too provocatively or drinking too much, and where even our vice president doesn’t seem to understand how condoms work, convincing people that lube is crucial to a healthy sex life may be a tough sell. But with the help of venture capital funding and some millennial-friendly branding, we may have a shot at making lubricant great again after all.

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]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[Nancy Pelosi’s red coat is so popular that Max Mara is bringing it back]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/13/18139472/nancy-pelosi-red-coat-max-mara-reissue 2018-12-13T16:33:58-05:00 2018-12-13T13:20:07-05:00
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speak outside the West Wing at the White House after a meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on December 11, 2018. | The Washington Post/Getty Images

On December 11, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had a highly contentious meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to discuss the prospect of a government shutdown and funding for a border wall. The meeting was short but incredibly tense, with Schumer at one point goading Trump into screaming that he would be “proud” to shut down the government to build a border wall.

At the end of the meeting, both parties reached a stalemate, but the Democrats, having convinced Trump to cop to the possibility of a government shutdown, appeared to be the victors. That impression was only enhanced by Pelosi, who was photographed leaving the White House wearing a brick-red funnel-necked three-quarter-length coat with dark sunglasses, looking like a goddamn boss.

Almost immediately, Pelosi emerging from the White House became a meme, with everyone from Pentagon reporters to Moonlight director Barry Jenkins gushing over the coat as a power move:

From Kiernan Shipka’s wool swing jacket in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to Kate Middleton’s iconic red coat with ruffles, red outerwear is currently having a bit of a moment. At first, the provenance of Pelosi’s coat was a mystery; while some speculated it was made by designer Carolina Herrera, the New York Times later reported that the coat was the Glamis from Max Mara’s 2013 outerwear line. (The dark sunglasses were Armani, for what it’s worth.) It’s unclear precisely how much the coat cost, but generally speaking, Max Mara coats retail for anywhere between $1,000 and $2,000.

Inspired by the fervor over Pelosi’s coat, on Wednesday afternoon a spokesperson for the brand issued a press release saying it would reissue the coat for the 2019 outerwear collection. Ian Griffiths, the creative director of Max Mara, told the New York Times: “You develop an emotional relationship with a coat like nothing else in your wardrobe. I can imagine why Ms. Pelosi chose to wear it for this important moment, and I’m honored.”

This isn’t the first time a celebrity wearing an old item of clothing has prompted fashion brands to put it back on the market. Meghan Markle has perhaps played the largest role in this trend; because everything she wears in public tends to sell out immediately (a phenomenon that has been deemed “the Markle effect”), brands will often reissue older clothes she’s worn in public to meet consumer demand.

For instance, when Markle appeared in an interview with the BBC discussing her recent engagement to Prince Harry, she wore an emerald green dress from the Italian brand P.A.R.O.S.H.; the dress sold out within an hour, and was later reissued with the name “the Meghan.”

The jeans brand Mother Denim, which rarely reissues older styles, also reissued its Looker Ankle Fray jeans after Markle was photographed wearing a pair at the Invictus Games in Toronto.

If the same celebrity wears the same item of clothing multiple times, that can also spur a reissue: After Kendall Jenner was photographed a number of times wearing the same white pair of Kurt Geiger boots, the PR consulting firm for the brand convinced it to put the boots back on the market.

Brands have also been known to reissue clothes from previous seasons without celebrities prompting increased consumer demand. It’s become de rigueur for luxury and mass-market brands alike to dip back into their archives and reintroduce older pieces onto the market.

Most recently, Marc Jacobs announced that he would be reissuing many of the pieces he designed 25 years ago in his iconic grunge-inspired collection for Perry Ellis. On the less high-end end of the spectrum, J. Crew reissued its 1980s rugby sweaters for its fall 2017 collection.

Such moves appeal to millennial consumers’ nostalgic impulses and “can strengthen a connection with consumers by emphasizing their long-standing presence,” Deborah Weinswig, the managing director of the retail think tank FWGR, told Bloomberg.

Of course, there’s a simpler, less jargon-y explanation for this trend: Just like every other creative industry, the fashion world often runs out of ideas, and circling back to the archives is an easy and low-cost way to make what’s old new-ish again. Which it’s why it’s so exciting to see a seasons-old trend getting all this organic attention — not as a result of clever marketing or branding, but from the sheer power of virality alone. The fact that Pelosi looks like a bona fide G certainly doesn’t hurt.

]]> E.J. Dickson <![CDATA[Kids’ toys are the latest battleground in the online privacy wars]]> https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/21/18106917/kids-holiday-gifts-connected-toys 2018-12-13T23:51:25-05:00 2018-12-13T13:16:48-05:00

For many people, protecting your privacy on the internet is sort of like eating your vegetables, recycling, or watching Ken Burns documentaries: something you know you should do in theory, but don’t actually do that much in practice.

Yet when companies harvest kids’ personal data and share it with advertisers, the stakes are much higher. Kids don’t know the full extent of the risks of sharing their data with strangers — and without that knowledge, they can’t provide informed consent to do so. According to a new report from the US Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG), many tech companies making kids’ toys are taking advantage of that.  

The report, “Trouble in Toyland,” raises red flags about privacy concerns posed by smart toys, or connected toys that may be sharing kids’ data with third parties. USPIRG cites an investigation by Mozilla, the organization behind the privacy-focused Firefox browser, which has created a Privacy Not Included buyers’ guide to kids’ toys.

Mozilla found that a Bluetooth-enabled robot called Dash shared children’s data with third parties; it also found that the Amazon Fire HD Kids’ Edition, a popular tablet that’s marketed to children ages 3 and up, shares your child’s data with third parties and does not delete the data it stores. The organization offered a sobering warning: “Amazon gets to know your kid’s personal information from the cradle on.”

In an email to Vox, Vikas Gupta, the CEO of Wonder Workshop, which sells Dash, denied the report’s claims. “All of Wonder Workshop’s robots and associated apps have always been compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA),” Gupta wrote. “We never collect, track, or share personally identifiable data about the children using our robots and apps. Due to technical limitations, it is not even possible for the robots to violate privacy laws.”

Amazon also denied the report’s security claims in a statement to Vox.

“Amazon has a longstanding commitment to privacy and data security, and Amazon FreeTime on Fire Kids Edition tablets is compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). We do not share children’s data with third-parties,” a spokesperson said in an email. “Parents have the ability to view their child’s tablet activity by logging into Parent Dashboard (parents.amazon.com) and can delete activity data by contacting Amazon Customer Service.” (Mozilla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Concerns about smart toys and privacy are certainly not new. (Earlier this year, Mozilla expressed similar worries about the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition, encouraging the company to be more transparent about how it uses children’s data.) There’s a great deal of parental anxiety surrounding the smart toys market, a space that encompasses everything from tablets to watches to dissectable augmented reality (AR) teddy bears.

That anxiety reached a fever pitch in 2015, when the Hong Kong-based kids’ toy company VTech was subject to a data breach that exposed the personal information of 6.5 million people, many of them children. The person behind the attack later told Motherboard that he hacked into VTech’s servers essentially as a public service, to expose the company’s “shitty security” to concerned parents. (VTech settled with the Federal Trade Commission for collecting parents’ and children’s data without permission and paid a fine of $650,000 earlier this year.)

The case marked the first time a connected toy company had been fined for violating COPPA, which is intended to protect the privacy of children on the internet; COPPA complaints have traditionally been leveled against website operators.

Perhaps more terrifyingly, many parents are concerned that hackers could hijack Bluetooth-enabled toys and use them to spy on or communicate with children. There’s evidence that this is possible, and not even that difficult. In the past, security researchers have found that toys like Hello Barbie and the robotic Toucan are vulnerable to being hacked, allowing anyone to gain access to data on company servers.

In one instance, security expert Troy Hunt noticed that information stored by the smart stuffed animal company CloudPets had been exposed, allowing anyone to access children’s names, birthdays, and even audio clips of them speaking to the toys. “There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that there are many other connected toys out there with serious security vulnerabilities in the services that sit behind them,” he wrote in a blog post.

In 2016, privacy advocacy groups filed a complaint against the makers of the Bluetooth-enabled My Friend Cayla doll, which comes equipped with a microphone so children can talk to the doll; that data is then processed and translated by an app so Cayla can issue a response. The complaint stated, among other things, that Cayla had the ability to “record and collect the private conversations of young children without any limitations on collection, use, or disclosure of this personal information.”

(Perhaps less egregious — but still problematic — was the report’s concern that Cayla was secretly a shill for Disney, and was programmed to advertise for the Epcot theme park.)  

The German government pulled Cayla from shelves in 2017, arguing that it was classified as an “illegal espionage apparatus”; according to the US website for the doll, it no longer appears to be for sale at Walmart.

“There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that there are many other connected toys out there with serious security vulnerabilities”

The controversy surrounding the doll prompted the Federal Trade Commission to update COPPA guidelines in 2017 to specifically refer to smart toy manufacturers, and the FBI has issued a statement warning parents to consider the cybersecurity risks associated with smart toys. But the technology is still relatively new and the smart toy industry is growing, with one projection estimating it’ll be worth $18 billion by 2023. It’s possible, even likely, that many parents just don’t know the extent of the risks associated with such toys.

Of course, to a degree, none of this is particularly surprising: Even the least tech-savvy consumer knows that we release a great deal of personal data to large companies on a daily basis. And while many of us take precautionary measures such as changing our privacy settings, for a lot of us, ceding our personal data is simply part of the trade-off of living in an uber-connected world.

Even Hunt points out in his blog post that the risks of connected toys are not “particularly any different to the ones you and I face every day with the volumes of data we produce and place online.” But when kids are involved, he says, “our tolerances are very different.” So it’s worth keeping these concerns in mind before you buy a Bluetooth-enabled teddy bear at that Black Friday sale.

Update 12/13: This post have been updated to include a statement from Vikas Gupta, the CEO of Wonder Workshop.

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