In further flame-haired news, the British Advertising Standards Authority upheld its first ban based on offensiveness to a group's hair color today after pulling Virgin Media's ad for a dating show that asked, "How do you spot a ginger in the dark? Looks or personality, who wins?" Virgin explained that the campaign was meant to "challenge people's perceptions of attractiveness and encourage decisions based on personality as well as looks".

Coming so soon on the heels of last month's Facebook motivated "Kick a Ginger Day," which resulted in the schoolyard beating of a California child, well, it's enough to make one's Viking blood boil over.

Redheads have been feared and reviled since the Middle Ages, of course. Looking for a fall guy for your blighted crops? That dame with the devil hair looks pretty suspect, don't you think? But this new spate of gingerism – yes, there's a word for it -- seems to stem from an old episode of South Park that was a satire of the very thing it has become. In a classic, hate-speech filled half hour about people who look different, Cartman declared, "Ginger kids have no souls." Good one South Park! Flash-forward a few years, and I have yet another reason to get my ass kicked today by people with no sense of irony.

I don't take the red rage so personally, because I'm a ginger not by birth but by Clairol. But while I find it entertaining when South Park suggests a connection between red tresses and being "vile and disgusting," I also think it's pretty freaking sad that any corporation would get traction out of the notion that a) Santa has work harder to love us and b) that we represent some triumph of personality over looks. You tell that to Julianne Moore! Or David Caruso! We happen to be a thriving specialty porn genre, I will have you know.

There will always be those who judge a pale, freckled book by its auburn-tressed cover. And when there's nobody left to make fun without seeming politically incorrect, people will still make fun of redheads. Soon there may not even be redheads to make fun of – in 2007, National Geographic reported that natural born redheads – who represent only two percent of the world's population -- are dying out, and may be extinct within a few generations.  In the meantime, the Weasleys and Tori Amoses of the world will do their best to stand tall. Just watch out for those famous tempers. As one of literature's great gingers, Anne of Green Gables, said, "You'd find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair. People who haven't red hair don't know what trouble is."

"That would be rape culture," Anna North at Jezebel reminds us. The kind "in which people are quick to deny or explain away a rape as soon as it's reported." Also, the kind in which "violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent... women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself" and "both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes," according to the authors of "Transforming a Rape Culture." For a stomach-churningly long list of other defining features, please see Melissa McEwan's "Rape Culture 101", or try Jaclyn Friedman's "This Is What Rape Culture Looks Like." Or, you could just read the local ABC station's coverage of what happened after those two witnesses intervened in the rape of a 12-year-old girl by a 14-year-old schoolmate.

Marquita Dones, "one of four paid site supervisors at El Cerrito's Portola Middle School," believes that the girl was too quiet to have been a real victim. "If she was being raped, why didn't she scream? Why did these students have to come up and tell us that somebody's down there?" she asked. Her colleague Mustapha Cannon added, "It was hormones going wild... I know the girl and I know the guy. I know... and I know the girl's family. I know for a fact that that girl could've knocked that guy out with one hand tied behind her back." So, despite neither of these people having been there when it happened -- and the fact that under California law, there is no such thing as consensual sex with a 12-year-old -- they're apparently confident that she must have wanted it. 

Obviously, the case hasn't gone to trial, and thus no one has been convicted of rape. But regardless of whether this kid is found guilty, the response of the security guards to the account of the girl and the witnesses is part of a disturbing pattern. Going back to McEwan: "Rape culture is victim-blaming... Rape culture is tasking victims with the burden of rape prevention. Rape culture is encouraging women to take self-defense as though that is the only solution required to preventing rape. Rape culture is admonishing women to 'learn common sense' or 'be more responsible' or 'be aware of barroom risks' or 'avoid these places' or 'don't dress this way,' and failing to admonish men to not rape." In light of the school security guards' comments, I think it's safe to add "Claiming that if the victim didn't scream, came from a questionable family, or would have been physically capable of fighting her attacker under normal circumstances, she must not have been raped" to that list. Also, "Cravenly covering your ass by claiming an alleged rape must have been consensual, when it was your job to make sure nothing like that happened."

For those inclined to look for a silver lining, the fact that two other kids did step in to stop and report this assault is encouraging. But as North says, for the young girl "It was probably too little too late." And the fact that the very authority figures charged with protecting students are now trotting out every victim-blaming cliche in the book to avoid responsibility is just one more outrageous example of how rape culture operates. "She probably wanted it" has become such a standard, accepted response to nearly any reported sexual assault, it's not even a surprise to hear it said about a 12-year-old who says she was raped in front of two witnesses who were moved to seek help for her. And sadly, infuriatingly, it won't be a surprise when that account is taken just as seriously as the victim's -- if not more so.

More precisely, Procter and Gamble is being blamed for Photoshopping the hell out of her face in an advertisement for an Olay eye cream, erasing crows' feet and under-eye bags with the flick of a mouse rather than diligent long-term application of the cream in question. The U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority has banned the ad, on grounds that "the post-production re-touching of this ad, specifically in the eye area, could give consumers a misleading impression of the effect the product could achieve."But interestingly, the ASA rejected the idea that such images might harm women, beyond fleecing them out of a few bucks. 

"We considered that consumers were likely to expect a degree of glamour in images for beauty products and would therefore expect Twiggy to have been professionally styled and made-up for the photo shoot, and to have been photographed professionally," it said. "We concluded that, in the context of an ad that featured a mature model likely to appeal to women of an older age group, the image was unlikely to have a negative impact on perceptions of body image among the target audience and was not socially irresponsible." (Not surprisingly, that's pretty much what Procter and Gamble is saying as well.) But actually, says Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson, who's launched a campaign against out-of-control retouching, "Experts have already proved that airbrushing contributes to a host of problems in women and young girls such as depression and eating disorders."

In November, leading authorities on body image sent a paper to U.K. advertising authorities (available as a Word document here) outlining the relevant research. Over 100 published studies have documented "a detrimental effect of idealised media images" on girls and women -- and increasingly, boys and men. Body dissatisfaction is linked to damaging behaviors such as "unhealthy dieting regimes and problematic eating behaviours (starving, bingeing, and purging), clinical eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia), cosmetic surgery, extreme exercising, and unhealthy muscle-enhancing behaviours in boys and men (such as taking steroids or other supplements). It is also linked to depression, anxiety, sexual dissatisfaction, and low self-esteem." And as for claims that a "mature audience" should be savvy about what goes into creating a print ad, the paper says, "Although most people know in some abstract, general sense that media models are 'artificial' as a creation of make-up artists, hair stylists, and flattering clothing and camera angles, people are typically not aware of the extent to which models are altered, particularly by digital retouching and imaging techniques that reduce or enhance the size of virtually any body part, making eyes larger, waists slimmer, and legs longer and thinner."

Even when you are aware, in theory, of how much is possible via Photoshop, it can still come as a shock to see the difference between that ad and a current picture of Twiggy, or a Vanity Fair portrait of 60-year-old Meryl Streep and a shot of her with only the benefit of professional hair, make-up and photography. Of the latter, Susannah Breslin at the Frisky writes, "I understand Photoshopping. I really do. But I just don't get the point here. Increasingly, it seems like women who really don't need to be Photoshopped to death are getting altered into unrecognizable oblivion." And over time, those of us who consume these images get so used to seeing a particular look, we can lose sight of the fact that it's not only unrealistic for the average woman to aspire to, but literally impossible. Twiggy and Meryl Streep have teams of professionals to make them look their best in person and erase any "imperfections" in post-production, but the rest of us can only shell out for miracle eye cream, cross our fingers, and hate our aging bodies. I applaud the ASA for acknowledging that the Olay ad promised more than it could possibly deliver -- but to say the ad isn't socially irresponsible is to ignore a growing mountain of evidence that images "altered into unrecognizable oblivion" have far-reaching and sometimes devastating effects on real people.

The 48-year-old insurance executive has admitted to taking hotel rooms adjacent to Andrews on three occasions and filming her twice. In addition to posting the material he shot, he also tried to sell it to TMZ.

In court yesterday, Andrews said, "I have nightmares. I walk in crowds and I see him in my peripheral vision. When I'm alone in my house, I have fears he's going to come in and hurt me... My career has been ripped apart, something I've worked very hard for. I am subjected to crude comments, suggestions that I have partnered in this crime. I walk into stadiums, and fans say obscene things to me."

How could anybody treat a woman who'd been the victim of a stalker as complicit the crime? Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that the 31-year-old Andrews is blonde and pretty, a fact that rarely goes unremarked -- or uneditorialized --  in the media coverage of her case.

Yesterday "The New York Post," ever a bastion of taste and restraint, headlined the story as "Andrews Bares Her Torment" and made sure to note Andrews's "four-inch heels." "The New York Daily News," perhaps rusty on their Greek mythology, referred to the "ESPN beauty" meanwhile as a "sportscasting siren."  And we're sure she'll be thrilled to know she's in the running for "Playboy's Sexiest Sportscaster of 2009," especially after earning that top honor last year. Oh, and as Andrews noted yesterday, the videos are still out there.

But the field is not entirely riddled with journalistic peeping Toms. SI.com did a fine job yesterday of describing Andrews's emotional courtroom plea without leering at her. Between Barrett's forthcoming sentencing and Andrews's ongoing campaign for better hotel security, there will no doubt be ample further opportunities for reporters to test their ability to cover stories of voyeurism without stooping to ogle their subjects themselves.

Compare that to an online survey published earlier this year by CosmoGirl.com and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy which found that 20 percent of teens have "sexted." At the time, I wrote about the research and noted that although voluntary polls tend to be self-selecting, "the results seem obvious, maybe even understated" -- because, hey, I still vividly remember what it was like being post-pubescent with access to the Internet and all manner of new technology. According to the Pew study, though, teenagers must be far less pervy and far more well-behaved than they were back in my day.

Well, that or they aren't relying on their cellphones to conduct their naughty business. Remember, the study only takes into account sex and cellphones, which leaves out e-mail, MySpace, Facebook, chat rooms and -- the list goes on. Plus, the study was conducted in late summer and early fall of this year, well after "sexting" hysteria in the media had reached its peak. Considering the extent of parental handwringing and the number of high-profile cases of kids being charged as sex offenders for sending explicit texts, they would have been smart to find another outlet -- and teenagers are nothing if not smart about findings ways to do what they want without adults finding out.