I’ve been looking forward to the New York Times review of the movie Bratz for the past five weeks, which is to say ever since I first saw the trailer before Ratatouille, turned to Melissa with my mouth agape, and said “I think I’m going to throw up.”

Alas, the review came out today, and it seems that the grey lady saw fit to devote only three paragraphs to this cesspool of popular culture. I was hoping A.O. Scott would heap abuse upon the movie and all that it signifies for a good two or three pages — especially given the Times’ time-honored “Kids today!” tradition — but instead we have the same predictable criticism that could have been levied against any other movie intended for preteen girls: the movie promotes an ultimate ideal of physical attractiveness; the diversity of the cast is belied by an underlying reliance on stereotypes; the movie promotes the very materialistic paradigm it pretends to question; the script is dull and unoriginal.

I’m unsatisfied with the three-paragraph treatment. I loathe Bratz dolls (which I see as a sign of the impending apocalypse if ever there was one), but more than that I loathe the laziness that seems to accompany modern preteen cultural production, where “Why bother cooking dinner when they’ll eat stale pork rinds?” seems to be the reigning motto. So I think Bratz deserves a more thorough takedown, one that impugns not only the quality of the movie but of the cultural beliefs that inform its success.

To that effect, let’s begin with a breakdown of the trailer. I’d recommend you watch the trailer first, if only so you can see how much it resembles an SNL skit. So go ahead, watch it. When you’re done banging your head against the wall, come back here.

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New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd took a brief sojourn from the Op-Ed pages this past Sunday, writing a feature article for the magazine section entitled “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” In the article, Dowd ponders the question of whether feminism is dead; in support of this thesis she cites an apparent increase in adherence to traditional gender roles and seeming apathy in response to social inequality.

What surprised me most about the article — aside from the fact that, when not making up cutesy nicknames for politicians, Dowd can write eloquently and thoughtfully and almost completely non-irritatingly — was a statistic she provided in a section on “power dynamics.” Dowd writes: “A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman’s chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.”

Holy crap. That’s quite the staggering figure, and it certainly bolsters Dowd’s assertion that “the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men.” But statistics are funny things sometimes. They carry with them an air of factuality, of incontrovertibility — if the numbers say it, it must be the case. And to an extent that’s true; statistics are descriptions of observations, and as such they don’t lie (assuming the numbers aren’t fudged).

The problem is that statistics can easily be abused and misinterpreted, and they all-too-frequently are. Researchers are usually pretty good about discussing the limitations and caveats of their own findings, but journalists — propelled by the goal of making information newsworthy — are notoriously bad at letting numbers speak for themselves. Since most of us rarely read the actual research articles, most of us never question the secondhand assertions framing the data.
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