Jacob Christensen

I’m a sucker for these things. According to my Swedish colleagues, the “electoral compasses” offered by newspapers and TV-stations make young voters choose the Swedish Centre Party.

It didn’t quite work in my case:

To me, the evolving Bavaria Babes story raises some interesting questions about the role of the spectators at major sports events. Just to recap: During the break of the Netherlands-Denmark game, attendants seized a number of Dutch (and, if my Dutch is worth anything) South African women dressed in tight orange dresses and handed them over to the police. It seems that some of the women are now even facing some kind of criminal process in South Africa.

Their crime? Being part of a stealth marketing stunt arranged by the Dutch brewery Bavaria – while the dresses didn’t carry a visible Bavaria brand, they had been sold or distributed by the brewery and used in different publicity events. The problem was that the beer advertising slot at the 2010 Fifa World Cupâ„¢ had already been sold to Anheuser-Busch, the US company which produces the (US) Budweiser brand. And as we all know, a world cup is not big enough for two beers.

So, presumably, wearing a Budweiser-branded (orange) dress would have been acceptable to the arrangers – in fact, they would have enhanced the value of the Budweiser sponsorship as TV viewers would have seen attractive Budweiser-dressed women having a good time.

And this brings us to my central point: Leave aside all talk of a party of nations, people coming together and what not – to FIFA and the partners/sponsors/advertisers, the spectators are just props designed to enhance the experience for TV viewers (like me) around the globe.¹ In fact, the people who go to major sports events are what dear old Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov called useful idiots because they pay for the trip and entry to the stadiums themselves in order to act as cheerleaders for the sponsors.²

It would be much more honest if the sponsors – whose arrangement this really is – hired the spectators and provided them with relevant outfits. In that way, the full costs of advertising would be carried by the sponsors. And there would be less risk of third parties getting a piece of the cake as the seats had already been distributed among paying sponsors.

1. You are free to insert a comment on the relationship between programming and advertising [↩]
2. Actually, the term seems to be post WW2 but never mind: The myth is too good. [↩]

My profound insights into the changing nature of the Danish welfare state in general and the Social Democrats and SF in particular can be found here. Well, look closely and you’ll find it.

On a slightly more serious note, the interview raised an issue: Do I have to report a one-line mentioning in our “activities” system? After close considerations, I decided not to – just as I don’t list blog posts or comments on other blogs in my activities list. But I’m sure that a number of bureaucrats at the Ministry of Research have considered this closely, just as the committee at SDU which constructed the reporting system. And I wasted some time checking if this was something I ought to report and my head of department subsequently review.

Isn’t the brave new academic world wonderful?

Én ting er, at man forbyder et enkelt produkt, men nok så interessant her er, at gulvsprayen bygger på nanoteknologi. Det gør et stigende antal produkter – eksempelvis visse typer af solcreme, byggematerialer og selvfølgelig den populære afspiller iPod Nano.

(My emphasis)

Link. Marks.dk is on the trail.

Just in case anybody wondered, The Daily Mail reminds us about the mode of thought motivating today’s “Little Englanders”.

Case in point: The Mail’s character assassination of Nick Clegg – never mind his policies or political efficacy…

The multilingual Lib Dem leader was born to a Dutch mother and a half-Russian father, and employs a German spin doctor.

and it just gets worse:

Mrs Clegg, a Roman Catholic, admits that she refused her husband’s plea to give English names to their three sons, Antonio, Alberto and Miguel.

(My emphasis)

The word we’re looking for does indeed begin with an X. But in a way it is fascinating that something so noxious can be published in a mainstream newspaper.

I wonder how the Brits would react to a similar report in Bild-Zeitung. Or perhaps not.

HT: Next Left. (1), (2).

Så här skulle jag kunna hålla på varre dag. Men till slut slår man dövörat till och slutar helt enkelt att ta några undersökningar som presenteras i medierna på fullt allvar.

Marie Demker despairs over the use and reporting of surveys in media. It is not just a Swedish issue, y’know.

Now let me get this straight: The Social Democrats are formally demanding the continued production of satire on national tv channel DR2? Politiken is writing editorials on the subject?

Never mind the effects of the financial crisis, the housing bubble and job losses: Here, politicians and media join in a united front.

Now what did Kurt Tucholsky write? Ah yes:

Der Satiriker ist ein gekränkter Idealist: er will die Welt gut haben, sie ist schlecht, und nun rennt er gegen das Schlechte an.

I do suspect, however, that Tucholsky had another kind of satire in mind.

Once upon a time, Berlingske Tidende was known as “Auntie Berlingske” (yes, just like the BBC). This was because Auntie was supposed to be a nice little old lady who would only talk about the things nice little old ladies would talk about. Obviously, sex was NOT part of the package.

Times change. Somebody at Berlingske got hold of a Reuters story about the sex lives of young English women and decided that … well, let’s look at the facts:

We are dealing with research commissioned by a British pharmacist and the results are only reported in a very truncated form so for a social scientist it is almost impossible to draw some valid conclusions but according to the Reuters article, for a sample of 3000 24 year-old English women the average number of (male?) sex partners was 5,65. This was an increase from 1,67 in “the 1960s” and 3,72 in “the 1970s”. No references are given for the later figures.¹

Let’s see: We do not have any information about when English women have their sexual debut – in Denmark the median age for the first intercourse has remained stubbornly fixed at around 16,5 years so the median Danish 24 year-old would have had some eight years of sexual activity behind her.²

If we return to our English lasses, I suspect that the share of 24 year-olds with 0 partners is minimal while we will have some extreme values on the other side of the average, so the median³ is probably below 5,65 – let’s say 3 or 4.

Would a 24 year-old with 3-4 sex partners strike you as being unusual? I mean: This looks a bit like the number of steady boyfriends a lot of young women will have had at that age. And it would also strongly suggest that most sexual activity involving a partner takes place in medium-to-long term relationships.

Inquiries into sexual activities always face a fundamental problem: Can the answers be trusted? Even if you are filling out a paper questionnaire, answers may be guided by norms. No, you did not vote for the Danish People’s Party last time and no, you did not have sex with five guys every night the last time you went on holiday in Bulgaria. (What? You did? You pervert! Voting for the Danish People’s Party really…) Okay – the suspicion is that women in particular tend to underreport sexual activities in general and the number of partners in particular.

Anyway, the results made the brains of several (female?) journalists on Berlingske Tidende’s newsdesk explode and they had to take to the streets to … well, if they had only stuck to doing that then they would have some of their reputation left, but no: They had to do a vox pop where the Danish people tells their unfiltered version of what goes on between the sheets.

So what goes on? “No no, the number is far too low … I’ve heard about … I know that my younger sister’s friends … ” etc, etc.

May I suggest that Tine Damg̴rd contacts my cousin Henrik Lassen who has studied how tales wander through the ages (You can listen to him here Рeven if he is not talking about sex) and who would be able to show exactly what is wrong with these answers.

But do we know anything about the number of sex partners young Danish women have? We do, even if the research is four years old, and the results suggest that the median and average number of sex partners may be a bit, but not excessively, higher among Danish women compared with the English. You can get the report here – go to pages 43-45. The numbers are not immediately comparable, but my best guess is that we could be looking at a value in the range between 5-10 partners for 24 year-old Danes – and remember that if a 24 year-old woman has had 10 partners since making her sexual debut at the 16,5 median, that is (only) a little over one new partner per year.⁴

So maybe the truth about the sex lives of young Danes is that despite all talk of one-night stands, hook-ups and whatnot, most have sex with steady partners and that a kind of serial monogamy is the name of the game.

Paradise Hotel⁵ and Sex and the City are fantasies (and people in a relationship have more sex than singles, for some weird reason) and anyway we all know that other people lead more adventurous lives – in and out of bed.

PS: Epidemiology can be fun. For instance it can show that Danes and Swedes are not attracted by each other in real life.

1. Actually, the pharmacy is trying to sell HPV vaccinations to your daughter [↩]
2. What does this mean? It means that if you collect a representative sample of Danish girls aged 16 years and 6 months, half of them will not have had intercourse [↩]
3. Corrected from mean. Ouch! [↩]
4. If she was taking a new guy home every month we would be looking at a figure in the order of 100 partners. How likely is that in real life? [↩]
5. Remember that the cast of PH is … a cast deliberately chosen by the production company. They are not representative of 18-25 year-olds. [↩]

Instead of adding another comment I will point interested readers to two worthwhile comments (use Google Translate if necessary):

Jacob Mchangana, Karen M. Larsen.

While I agree with Mchangana but not Larsen, Politiken and Tøger Seidenfaden will have to address the point made by Larsen.

No, I’m not personally offended by the drawing, but feel free. Grind an axe with Tøger.

Gene Kranz allegedly said: “Failure is not an option.” This also goes for the attitude of the Danish Liberals and Conservatives with regard to national commercial radio: Just because all previous attempts to run a national commercial radio network have failed, failed and failed again, there is no reason to think that running a commercial network in Denmark will end in failure. Well, is there?

From a political science perspective the interesting question is what, if anything, politicians and bureaucrats have learnt from previous failures. And why (not).

The first thing we can note is that the Liberals and Conservatives want that commercial radio channel. Why? Well, hmm.. yes… Okay: They want a competing channel so that that Socialist-Leftist-Communist behemoth called DR (these days DR is an acronym for … nothing) can be blasted into oblivion one channel at a time. Maybe there are other reasons, but never mind: The point is that promoting a commercial national network is an ideological priority for the parties – and please do not ask me why they keep forgetting that commercial local radio has proved viable in Denmark for the past twenty years.

Second, what is the cost for the government of private companies going out of business? Okay, so the Ministry for Cultural Affairs lose some expected income from fees for access to the sixth network (actually, the ministry will forfeit any demand for fees this time), but what is the real cost to politicians and bureaucrats? Nothing. Zero. Nada. The issue is so much below the radar of the political agenda that there are no votes to be lost on promising national commercial radio. Sure, there are some administrative costs, but who cares?

So my prediction is that as long as we have a Liberal-Conservative government, successive ministers of Cultural Affairs will try and try and try … and forget the wisdom of Adam Savage: “Failure is always an option”.