Tits at Oxford and Harvard

The worst ad in the world, and why Ruskin was a creep.

There’s a targeted ad that keeps popping up on my Google. I bet you’ve seen it too. It is the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous targeted ads I see. It says “the company that’s harder to get into than Harvard” and features a beautiful young woman, with a winning smile, her gaze fixed slightly upwards off-camera.

Here it is:

It also comes in another, sultrier variety:

There is so much wrong with this ad.

Let me break it down.

First of all, I don’t even know what it wants from me. Is it a job offer? Is it offering me its services (whatsoever they might be)? Who knows. I assume the ambiguity is intended to annoy, to piss people off, to engender some response (even negative) in order to stall the endless scrolling.

We’re such an enigma, you don’t even know what we are! Here is a picture of a self-sure woman, too beautiful and clever for her own good. Quick, why don’t you stop and hate/perve/puzzle on her for a second! Oh, while I have your attention, check out our stupid company that summarises books for you so you never have to long-read anything ever again. Doesn’t that sound awful? Now why don’t you go write a Substack about how annoying this ad and our company is, thereby obliquely affording us even more indirect publicity (we know your readers will google us, thanks for the stats).

See? I am so annoyed at myself for taking the bait. If this ad ran with a preppy-looking handsome dude, it would sink beneath the waves. The perceived neutrality of the default male isn’t so good at generating click-throughs, I reckon.

Second, it’s premised on a non-sequitur: the thing most wanted by the most people has the most intrinsic value. Let’s be clear: Love Island and Walmart receive more applications and so are famously harder to get into than Oxford and Harvard, respectively. But intrinsic value? The vast number of Walmart wannabe minimum wage employees is indicative of the dire state of the American economy, not the intrinsic value of Walmart.

The nonsense that Blinkist is somehow special because it has large numbers of applicants has been so thoroughly dismantled elsewhere in Internet Land that I won’t rehash.

Oh ok, I will.

Over on Tw***er, Gergely Orosz has pointed out:

“For applicants vs hired, almost every tech company will be below Harvard’s admission rate. And Blinkist seems to be either very inefficient at interviewing - wasting times of both parties, or they include recruiter screens as “interviews”.

Either way, this is one of the weirdest ads I’ve seen.”

These are all brilliant points and reason enough to concur that this is indeed the weirdest ad I’ve ever seen. But there is something else I haven’t seen anyone mention yet, at least not in the context of this ad, and it pisses me off enough to write an entire screed on it.

The thing that pisses me off most about this ad is that it feeds a quiet, insidious presumption that elite educational institutions like Harvard or Oxford are full of beautiful women who are there because they are beautiful, not because they are intellectually valuable.

This isn’t a new observation. It goes back to the earliest days of women in higher education. According to Vera Brittain in The Women at Oxford: A fragment of history:

“When Cambridge opened its Local examinations to girls, the magazine published an anonymous article archly suggesting that the examiners would be unduly influenced by a pretty face.”

Who wrote this poison? The nasty implication, to discourage and do down uppitty young women, is:

You didn’t do well in your exams because you’re clever; it was just your face or your tits. Now, back in your box.

It’s the exact same narrative in this ad, the assumption unspoken: Harvard is full of beautiful women and that’s because, ladies, if you got in, it’s ultimately only because someone in power, and let’s face it, some man in power, liked how you looked and fancied you and that’s why you got in.

To be fair, I don’t know if Harvard does in-person interviews like Oxford. I know I’ve always had imposter syndrome and assumed I got into Oxford when I was seventeen at least partly because someone must have fancied me at interview.

Isn’t that fucked up?

Now:

1. This is obvious nonsense. These places are full of clever women, not beautiful women. This is because clever women come in all shapes and sizes, which have nothing at all to do with their cleverness.

2. The assumption that Oxford (for example) is full of beautiful women pours salt into the casual misogyny of my male undergrad counterparts, who spent their time bitching and moaning about how impossibly ugly and studious and bluestocking-y Oxford women as a whole were when compared to the general populace of women outside Oxford.

It’s just insult upon insult. Women only get in because someone fancies them. No, actually no one fancies them.

And let’s not forget, they’re also just not clever enough.

Here’s Ruskin — yes, beloved Ruskin, he of Velvet Crab fame:

“I cannot let the bonnets in… The three public lectures will be chiefly on .. such things of no use to the female mind, and they would occupy the seats in mere disappointed puzzlement.”¹

Well.

Disappointed puzzlement is *exactly* how I feel when I read that quote. His Velvet Crab is so beautiful. What a knob-head.

But this ad makes clear that this particular impostor feeling is not peculiar to me. It’s pervasive. It’s an insidious thread running through society that tells women that any success we might have is not because we’re brilliant but because someone fancied us along the way.

People are more comfortable with the beautiful successful woman, loathsome as she is, because her success is at least explicable and can be attributed to her face. An unfanciable successful woman in contrast is so much more threatening; she must actually have some value beyond her face! How confusing.

The brilliant thing of course is that, at least in Oxford, letting women in only happened when its Fellows ceased to abide by the monastic celibacy rule and were finally allowed to marry in the 1870s.

“The spectacle of all of its Fellows rushing headlong into matrimony at once will make everyone in Oxford die of laughter.”²

At which point, presumably at least a few of them realised that women might have brains under their bonnets — or at least could no longer deny their common humanity (cohabitation will do that) — and, lo! The first women were admitted to Oxford.

So, in fact, the joke’s on me. The first women to get into Oxford did get in because someone fancied them.

I give up.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to do things, and sink quietly in the waves, with the perceived neutrality of the default male?³

Wouldn’t it be nice to not internalise deep-rooted questions about whether your life’s achievements were just because someone wanted to fuck you?

Still, you know, at least Ruskin came around eventually. In a letter he wrote to the head of Somerville College (one of the ladies’ colleges) in Oxford after a visit, the old creep wrote:

“So glad to be old enough now to be let come and have tea at Somerville.

And to watch the girlies play at ball.”⁴

Jesus.

But, you know, this was the 1870s. It was ok to be a dirty old perve then, pedalling the tired trope that the overriding contribution of a successful woman is her pretty face or her tits.

What’s Blinkist’s excuse?

1. Quoted in The Women at Oxford: A fragment of history by Vera Brittain, as being taken from Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, volume iii, page 447, from a letter by Ruskin to Sir Henry Acland in the Aland Collection in the Bodleian.

2. Quoted in V. Brittain, as being taken from an article in An Oxford Portrait Gallery. 

3. If you want to read more — depressing, countless — instances of the default male, I refer you to Caroline Criado Perez and her amazing Substack Invisible Women, the latest of which is here: https://substack.com/inbox/post/115415749.

4. V. Brittain, p.58.