The point about the difference between the mean and median is well-taken. I asked Professor Gale to address this complaint and have updated the post with his response. Thanks to everyone who raised the issue!

Thanks, Anonymous -- I've since rephrased that sentence.

Anonymous, I don't believe that I ever criminalized his behavior. In both posts, I made a point of not stating my personal position on the issue. But, I'm happy to in response to your letter: I find myself in the camp of those torn between denouncing him for being an unmitigated creep and defending his constitutional right to freedom of expression.

Thanks for posting the link to the press release, DairyStateMom. It was actually released the day after I wrote this post -- otherwise I would have included a link.

Thanks for pointing out the mistake. We've made a correction to the post.

The issue isn't just that Unilever is offering up a healthy message for women on the one hand and unhealthy images on the other. It's that they're very specifically attacking purveyors of unrealistic and flatly sexualized images of women, while producing those very images themselves. I also don't think these separate advertising campaigns have to be geared toward the same audience in order to be hypocritical -- the Axe ads are exactly the sort of advertising so strongly reviled in the latest TV spot for Dove's campaign.

Of course it isn't surprising that there is hypocrisy in the corporate world! I agree with a reader who wrote above: "Unilever's surface hypocrisy is actually balanced by a deeper consistency of corporate responsibility."

The good in all this is that, despite the fact that Unilever is shamelessly attacking negative advertising images of women (which they too produce) as a marketing ploy, those positive images of women from the Dove campaign are out there. And, damn, it's good news when advertisers begin to see healthy images of women as good for business.

Actually, the abuse case mentioned in my post involved a 12-year-old boy, not a 17-year-old, having sex with a 24-year-old female teacher. Regardless, as Allie mentions above, it doesn't matter whether the victim is a sexually active teenager -- it can, and rightfully should, still feel like abuse and betrayal when a trusted authority figure crosses that line.

If a serious discussion about women in business is well within the purview of "Life's Work," why does the column belong in the Style & Fashion section to begin with? I guess you could argue that this piece was ill-suited to the column as a whole, or the column is ill-suited to the section.

Nope, not at all! We're in total agreement on this one.

We've been experiencing some technical issues with the site. That post disappeared for a while, but it should be back now.

Broadsheet has consistently railed against those cases you mention of women being "raped, beaten, starved" throughout the world. We've consistently railed against the hijab and the burqa, too, in cases where women are coerced into veiling or are punished for going uncovered. All I've said here is that I'm uncomfortable with discussing the hijab in black and white terms. I have no interest in defining for a woman who freely chooses to wear the hijab what the practice means to her.

I never referred to the hijab as a "grey area," I said that I'm a shades-of-grey kind of girl -- meaning, I prefer not to think in strictly black and white terms, that there is a range when it comes to women's experience of the hijab. Also, I certainly never argued that the hijab is empowering when women are forced to wear it.

As a reader pointed out early on in this thread, Viagra isn't medically analogous to LibiGel. In fact, it would be difficult to develop a drug for women that was actually medically equivalent to Viagra, given men's and women's very different sexual systems. I intended to make a cultural, rather than medical, comparison between the drugs -- but I can see that wasn't clear.

In the article, it says: "The problem occurs among American Muslims at the same rate as other groups, activists say, but is even more sensitive because raising the issue is considered an attack on the faith." I've tweaked the wording in my post to make the source clearer.

Lynx, glad you raised that question. They actually found that the majority of Spanish women fit into one of those three body type categories. My wording confused that info, though, so I've tweaked the wording. Thanks!

Indeed. We caught the typo and corrected it.

Calcareous beat me to the punch in responding to your letter, Palmetto. As Calcareous notes, the DoJ study looked at sexual assaults over the time span of nearly 7 months -- not the entire span of a female student's college career. Not to mention, the study estimates that there could be more than 350 (not 35, as you stated) rapes at a college with 10,000 female students.

Achilleselbow, I should clarify. It isn't that the participants were correct 72 percent of the time; it's that 72 percent of the participants were correct more than half of the time. I wasn't referring to the 72 percent figure as being "slightly better than half," but the fact that just over half of those participants' guesses were correct.

On another note, I agree with your speculation; I had been thinking the same thing myself. In fact, there's plenty else I would have liked to have discussed about the study, but these video clips do have time constraints and, unfortunately, it wasn't something I had time to write about this week.

I should clarify. It isn't that the participants were correct 72 percent of the time; it's that 72 percent of the participants were correct more than half of the time. I wasn't referring to the 72 percent figure as being slightly more than half, but the fact that just over half of those participants' guesses were correct.