Sex Dolls, Female Soldiers and Yahoo Ads

Elise at After School Snack has a post up about a Salon article, Just like a woman, reporting that "Thousands of men are shelling out $6,500 for hyper-realistic dolls that answer all their needs -- and don't talk back" that is truly nauseating in its description of dolls that come back for repair
after being found "hacked to pieces in a dumpster", "The jaw in the doll was still in her skull, but behind her neck. Her hands were ripped off and fingers were missing. Her left breast was hanging on by a thread of skin, like your bra strap," and "Another time, an Asian undergraduate student at a university in California dropped his 1-year-old doll off for repairs. Fiero says the young man told him that his parents bought him the doll so that he would stay at home and study rather than go out chasing women. Fiero's photographs of the damaged doll make me cringe: Her leg was torn off, revealing the steel hardware of her hip joints; an arm hung by an inch of silicone flesh; two fingers were severed; and the cleavage between her buttocks was torn into a ragged crevasse."

It's difficult to understand whether these individuals are acting out on the dolls and thus avoiding assaulting real women, acting out on the dolls as a prelude to assaulting real women, or what their damage is; but it's absolutely disturbing to read.

And while we're on the topic of inappropriate treatment of women, read The Salt Lake Tribune article by Matthew D. LaPlante, Sex is a fact of life among Americans in uniform.

"What a lot of these women don't understand, because they are young or inexperienced with sex before they came out here, is that it is the same back home, too," she says. "Men want a girl to be easy, but they don't respect a girl who is easy. So whether we're in Iraq, or Salt Lake City, or New York or wherever, this is our reality.

Which brings me to a weird advertisement that kept showing up for my Yahoo mail account every time I logged in for the past few weeks. Perhaps there's something I don't understand here with the lantern and its symbol, but why is a faceless, chesty woman behind a lantern appropriate for a virus cleaning advertisement? The more I saw of this advertisement, the more it bugged me - arms, boobs, lantern head, zap 'em, arms, boobs, lantern head, zap 'em, over and over...it just creeps me out. Am I supposed to assume she has a virus and is hiding in shame? What the hell is going on and when is a faceless woman an appropriate advertising motiff?