Sex Assault’s “New Paradigm”

From the Christian Science Monitor:

US military's new tactic to curtail sexual assaults: nab serial 'predators'

To combat sexual assaults, military officials shift tactics to focus on ferreting out serial predators. Here's why they're increasingly convinced that relatively few people in the ranks commit the bulk of such crimes.

Caveat:  the article deploys the weasel words “sexual assault” throughout; we the readers are encouraged to assume “rape”, but in fact this category covers everything from rape to ass-grabbing.

By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer / February 24, 2014

Washington

The Pentagon, under pressure to show progress on bringing down rates of sexual assault, is putting new emphasis on ferreting out serial predators within the ranks, as military officials become increasingly convinced that relatively few people are responsible for the bulk of sex crimes.

The new direction is being driven by anecdotal experiences of some commanders, as well as by research showing that in certain semi-closed settings – such as college campuses – as many as 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by serial offenders.

“We think it tends to be, more often than we’ve believed before, ‘serial predators’ with more than one victim,” retired Maj. Gen. Margaret Woodward, who earlier this month left her post as director of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, said in an interview. “If you get rid of just one of these predators, it’s pretty significant.”

Some perpetrators have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of victims in a lifetime, says [former director of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office retired Maj. Gen. Margaret] Woodward, citing studies by psychologists who are now doing consulting work with the Pentagon.

This is either true or it isn’t true.  On the one hand, I’m leery of contract psychologists pushing the Next Big Thing, but on the other, it’s not inherently implausible that drunken sluts are a minority taste.

However . . .

This necessarily involves a revamped approach – one that turns away from education campaigns that caution potential victims to use the “buddy system” or to dress conservatively on nights out, and more toward aggressive investigation of suspects in order to find other possible victims and help resolve 'he said, she said' claims.

This is important because the latest research finds that most sexual assaults are not simply a result of "mixed signals" stemming from, say, an evening of heavy drinking. “Understanding and accepting that [idea of serial perpetrators] make people understand that ‘he didn’t just drink a little too much,’ ” says Woodward.

But that is, in fact, the profile.  From the Dayton Daily News (via Military.com):

Seven of the alleged Wright-Patterson assaults occurred in dormitories, five in military housing and 20 occurred off-base, according to Office of Judge Advocate data. The reported offenders were 26 active-duty airmen and six reservists, statistics showed.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base reported 32 alleged sexual assaults involving adult victims from 2010 to 2013, according to the 88th Air Base Wing Office of Staff Judge Advocate.

Fourteen of the reported victims requested prosecution of the alleged perpetrators, 11 victims did not. Three who reported assaults recanted the allegations, and the status of five others was not known, according to figures.

Among the reported victims, 15 were active-duty service members, three were reservists, four were military dependents and 10 were "non-base connected civilians," Wright-Patterson reported.

Eight of the victims were between 18 and 20 years old, 16 were between the ages of 21 and 24 and eight were 24 or older or the age was unknown.

Twenty-six of the reported incidents involved alcohol, five did not and it was unknown if alcohol was involved in one incident, authorities reported.

So while exactly none of these alleged assailants were “serial perpetrators” over the last four years, 81% of the incidents involved abuse of alcohol.  I don’t slight the satisfaction that comes from seeing one’s enemy receive his comeuppance, but wouldn’t it be better all around if these 26 women didn’t elevate their risk of victimization by their behavior?

Returning to the CSM article:

Today, military law enforcement officers investigating sexual assault crimes are increasingly being trained to dig into the history of the accused, rather than mainly into how the alleged victim behaved in the hours before the alleged assault.

“Obviously you’re going to investigate the incident, but we need to investigate the alleged offender, too,” [Pentagon consultant Dr. David] Lisak says. “Are there any other victims?”

“The biggest thing I’ve seen in our investigators is going from a bias toward investigating the victim,” he says. “If you go into the case with the mind-set that false allegations are rare but [that] perpetrators will perpetrate more than one crime – now that’s power. You may actually find incidents in the perpetrator’s past. It’s easier to prove five assaults than one.”

Looking again at the Wright-Pat data, anywhere from 9% (the recantations) to 34% (the requests not to prosecute) of the 32 initial reports were, legally speaking, false.  That’s not exactly “rare”.  But I will stipulate that smart “serial predators” might be seeking out or creating the circumstances where the boundaries of consent become blurred.

The shift toward digging harder into the backgrounds of sex-crime suspects may in turn put less emphasis on potential victims and their behavior.

“For many years, the way we tried to combat sexual assault was we taught our potential victims to be ‘harder targets,’ if you want to call it that,” [commander of the Eighth Fighter Wing at Kusan Air Force Base, Col. S. Clinton ] Hinote says. The admonishments were never to walk alone, always to have a buddy, don’t get drunk, don’t go out with people you don’t trust, or don’t wear provocative clothing.

“Some of these are unwritten rules, but everyone knows the rules,” Hinote says. The problem “is that if a victim violates one of these unwritten rules and comes forward, there is a possibility that someone might say, ‘Well, what were you wearing? Were you drunk? Did you go out without a buddy? Did you have a plan for getting home?

Except knowing the rules and following the rules are two different things.  For instance, I’m pretty sure that all the men know that “sexual assault is really, really bad” by now.  And yet at least some men are still doing it, and some women are making themselves vulnerable to it.

“This can pretty quickly transform into victim-blaming,” he adds.

Actually, no.  The reason these questions are important is because the criminality of the event depends entirely on the victim’s communicated state of mind.  Nobody is trying to “blame the victim” in the sense of saying, “you deserved what happened to you.”  What any good faith investigation is going to try to find out is, “are you the kind of person, and do you live the kind of life, that makes your expressed or implied consent in this instance likely or unlikely.”  Because that is what will determine the guilt or innocence of the accused.

If investigators find other victims, “that will bolster credibility in a ‘he said, she said’ scenario,” notes the Air Force’s Woodward.

True enough, and I entirely agree that the “sexual history” of the accused ought to be no less at issue than that of the victim . . . but no more either.  And it bothers me that they are presented here as alternatives rather than complements.

MLMs and Me

Via Steve, this NYT article on the dueling diversity-mongers betting billions of bucks over the future of Herbalife inspired me to write of my own exposure to “Network Marketing”, a.k.a. multi-level marketing (MLM).

My grandparents were Amway salesmen back in the late 1970s (at least, I think it was the 1970s, but it might have been the early 1980s), recruited by friends into the organization.  They eventually left with a garage full of not-especially-effective laundry detergent, which we were still using well into the 1990s.  I myself was too young to have any appreciation for the Amway business model, although I was old enough to know that Amway products weren’t very good.

I have a stronger recollection of the visit the Shaklee Vitamin people paid to my parents house circa 1980 (plus or minus a couple of years).  As my parents explained later, a (somewhat distant) professional friend of my father called and asked to come by to discuss “a personal problem”.  Invited over to the house, he arrived with what turned out to be a higher-level Shaklee pitchman.  My parents, whose Scots-Calvinist resistance to salesmen puts my own to shame, wouldn’t allow them in the house before asking them straight out if they would be required to buy or sell anything.  They were assured that this was not the case.

I sat in on their presentation, and received my first exposure to  the MLM method of marketing goods to consumers.  For those of you new to the concept, MLMs recruit recruiters of recruiters, an endless chain of representatives who build “downlines” fueled by personal consumption of the MLM’s products, some residual became the sales commission for the “uplines”.  So the Shaklee reps weren’t exactly lying:  my parents had they become involved, would theoretically have not been required to purchase any products, nor would they be selling products as such.  They would have been Shaklee representatives recruiting  further levels of Shaklee representatives.  So while someone obviously would have to buy something for anyone to make any money, no individual would be required to.

Flash forward to the early 1990s at a sizeable military town in the Southwest.  An associate from work called and asked to come by my apartment.  The words “personal problem” may not have been spoken, but that was definitely my impression at the time.  And as in the Shaklee experience, my friend served as a stringer for a higher-level rep who made the bulk of the pitch.

“So . . . it’s a pyramid scheme,” I observed at the conclusion.

“No it isn’t!” exclaimed the rep with no small animation.  “We have a letter from the FTC saying we’re obeying the law!”

“I don’t care about the FTC,” I replied calmly.  “I’m saying that, structurally, the money-making enterprise you are pitching here requires an ever-expanding base of consumer-marketers recruiting and ever-expanding base of consumer-marketers.  Definitionally, this is a process that must end in saturation, leaving the bottom of the pyramid consuming products but not actually making any money.”

We went around and around on this point without much progress.  Several times, I disavowed any interest in being a salesman of any sort but expressed interest in seeing the product catalog.  Several times, the rep replied that while they would be willing to show me the catalog at some future date, what they really wanted was for me to recruit.  Since I worked with the stringer, I think I may have eventually seen a catalog; I am certain I never purchased anything; few of the products advertised were ones for which I was in the market, and none were price competitive.

Flash forward a few months later.  I received my second pitch for network marketing.  A “friend” (in the sense that we attended the same young-adult Bible study group) invited me downtown to a restaurant to discuss a “business proposition”.  This sounds relatively honest, but my specific impression was that it was a business that he himself was creating.  I won’t quibble over definitions, except to say that MLMs encourage their reps to think of themselves as “business owners”.

Our dinner meeting was somewhat frustrating.  I was treated to a list of interview-type questions about my goals, financial objectivds, etc., followed by a fairly lengthy and very general lecture on “residuals”, i.e. profit margins.  It was frustrating because (a) I didn’t see myself as applying to join his “business” and (b) the ECON 101 struck me as pretty obvious, yet my “friend” wouldn’t skip to the part where he actually told me what the business was.  At the end of it, he invited me to another meeting where it would all be explained.  “Why don’t you explain it to me now,” I suggested.  “Sorry, but that’s not how I do business,” my “friend” said.  “If you’re really interested, you’ll come to the meeting.”

I was pretty irritated by this point, but since I didn’t yet smell an MLM and, being single, didn’t really have anything better to do with my evenings anyway, I eventually came to the public school auditorium with 1000 other potential recruits for the “meeting”.  The ushers carefully sat us in the front; the recruiters sat in the rows in the back, making slinking out early extremely difficult.

The “meeting”, as you might expect, was conducted in the spirit of a revival meeting by a man that, I swear, was a spitting image of Wayne Newton.  Apparently, every one in the room worked for him.  There was a long inspirational talk about “financial independence”, the revelation that this was indeed an MLM, and a final revelation that this MLM was called “Amway”.  It was not long after “Amway” that I decided that, conspicuousness be damned, I was walking out the door, but I want to share the one visually striking evidence as to what the opportunities in MLMs really are.  At one point, Wayne Newton asked everyone who had achieved the first level of network growth to stand up, and the back half of the auditorium duly rose.  The first level of growth would earn its recruiter, IIRC, $6 per month in commissions.  Wayne progressed through the levels until reaching the level of “financial independence” at which we could quit work:  $20K per year.  (This isn’t as absurd as it sounds:  in the early ‘90s in the Southwest, there were a whole lot of people scraping by on less than $20K, including, just barely, me.)  There were, I think, two individuals in the back left standing at this level of success.  Everyone else in the auditorium was supporting those two people, who were themselves supporting Wayne Newton.

Those two recruiting attempts within the first six months of my residence were the most aggressive.  Other attempts would follow over the next two years, but they were much more conversational.  By the time I returned from Japan two years after that, my professional status had lifted me out of the target demographic, and/or the enthusiasm for MLMs had cooled in the face of much better job opportunities.

In preparation for this article, I set about researching Shaklee’s multiple run-ins with the FTC.  I failed at this research; indeed, it appears that Shaklee has successfully purged the entire internet of its malodorous legal history.  But I eventually came across this exhaustively compiled political, legal, and regulatory history of MLMs.  The article deserves to be read in its entirety if you have several hours to devote to it.  But I wanted to comment on a few summary points I gleaned.

• The standard MLM pitch as my parents received it from Shaklee and I received it from Amway is, according to formal FTC interpretation of the law, illegal.  This, frankly, had not occurred to me at the time.  I did not believe that anyone was, strictly speaking, lying to me about the income opportunities since the improbability of realizing those opportunities was so immediately obvious.  But as Steve points out, MLMs attract – and exploit – the bottom half of the bell curve, while I sit firmly in the top 5%.  The author writes:

  Most recruits will join because of the "business opportunity" and because they are led to believe the products are not only in high demand but are unique ("always!"), exclusive ("absolutely!"), elite, upscale, innovative, super-concentrated, miraculous, healthier, more environmentally friendly, etc. When the business opportunity fails, they either accept the theft because they've had it drilled into their heads that only losers quit and settle on believing that they're buying these products at some tremendous discount because they're in a "buying club", or quit and feel so guilty they fail to understand they've been robbed. Now imagine an entire legion of MLMers paying for millions of these overpriced, uncompetitive products just so they can participate in a compensation plan they believe is leveraged to help them earn a reasonable part-time supplemental income if not a vast fortune, and you've got MLM's gravity-defying money funnel, which is more aptly compared to a vacuum cleaner sucking the income stream from the bottom up.

• The FTC wields incredible power.  During the Clinton administration, the FTC under Robert Pitofsky pre-emptively shut down a string of MLMs, forcing them on pain of bankruptcy to sign Consent Decrees without ever having to bring a criminal case in court.  You don’t have to love MLMs to be bothered by unaccountable power.
• Contrariwise, MLMs in the 2000s went to some lengths to cozy up to Republican politicians in the name of “free enterprise”.  You don’t have to hate MLMs to be bothered by the prostitution of your philosophy for the bottom-feeders of capitalism.
• We live in a hyper-regulated economy.  As the article makes clear, everything has a set of regulations governing the minutiae of its behavior.  Franchises are regulated.  Buying clubs are regulated.  Independent contractors are regulated.  Commissioned and direct sales are regulated.  And of course, employment is regulated.  Post 2008, I am somewhat less sympathetic than I once was (though not entirely unsympathetic) to the argument that this regulation is as bad in principle and practice as some libertarians will often insist.  But I am pretty sure that no good can come from having the regulations and then allowing MLMs to exploit (or create, or merely assert) loopholes in those regulations to operate with impunity on the grounds that they aren’t actually a buying club, or a franchise, or a sales force.

The Best of OSU/UMI Sociology

From CBS Cleveland:

Study: Violent Video Games Encourage Racist, Aggressive Attitudes Toward Blacks

Benjamin Fearnow

March 21, 2014 9:56 AM

Everything but the abstract is behind a paywall, so I’ll have to comment on the strength of the article.

“Our research suggests that people who play violent video games as violent black characters are more likely to believe that blacks are violent people,” writes a research team led by Grace Yang of the University of Michigan and Brad Bushman of the Ohio State University. “Playing a violent video game as a black character reinforces harmful stereotypes that blacks are violent.”

The study examined the effects of playing violent video games as a black avatar (versus a white character) on racial stereotypes and aggression. Games such as Grand Theft Auto V and Saints Row 2 allow players to choose the race of their character, and the study findings suggest that a player’s aggression against others is increased “immediately afterwards” in some cases, “even more than playing a violent game as white characters would.”

Multiple problems.  First, the experiment only included white test subjects.  The avatar effect of violent video games on black subject attitudes compared to white subject attitudes remains uninvestigated, but I will speculate that it would add unwanted nuance to the study’s conclusions about how racist white people are.  But nobody cares about black racism, so . . .

Second, gamers apparently chose their own avatars rather than had them assigned randomly.  So the door is open to selection bias.

After playing the games for 20 minutes, participants who played as black avatars were more likely to link photos of black faces with weapons, while those who played as white characters associated white faces with objects such as mobile phones.

Okay, but if your point is to show the effect of the video game, then you should show the associations with blacks by both groups of players.  In other words, ask your control group (playing white avatars) the same question asked of the test group (playing black avatars).  As reported, this study doesn’t really measure the effect of video game avatar at all.

They were also asked to respond to statements measured on a “symbolic racism scale” such as, “If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.”

Okay, so this sentiment is pretty dumb, but it strikes me as the exact opposite of racist.  In fact, if you believe the races are equal, then equal effort should produce equal results.

Participants were also tested on a seemingly unrelated food preferences test in which they tested hot sauce, and then were asked how much another person would like the spicy food.

Among players of the violent game, those who used a black avatar gave their “partner” more hot sauce compared to those who used a white avatar. The black avatar participants gave the hypothetical food “partner” more than double (115 percent) the amount of chili sauce than participants who played as white avatars.

The researchers suggested this element of the study was “particularly noteworthy,” because “this increase in aggression occurred over and above any increase in aggression among participants playing the violent game as a white avatar.”

This finding is interesting, but I would be reluctant to use hot sauce as a proxy for aggression in these circumstances.  It would be more useful if they were asked to add some arbitrary amount of actual hot sauce to actual food about to be eaten by an actual person who had actually told them already that they didn’t like hot sauce.  That would be a credible aggression proxy.  But making it all hypothetical isn’t.

In addition to negative attitudes held toward black people, the study noted that women and police were depicted negatively in a way that may have aggressive effects following gameplay.

“Police are portrayed as brutal. Players witnessing or enacting these violent actions may develop a distrust of police,” write the researchers. “Other violent games portray women in a sexualized and stereotypic way” that may impact male attitudes toward women in their real lives.

This is sheer speculation, not a study.

According to FBI data on violent crime and murder rates, in 2012, an estimated 1,214,462 violent crimes occurred nationwide, an increase of 0.7 percent from the 2011 estimate. Of the 12,765 murder victims in 2012 for which supplemental data were received, most (77.7 percent) were male.

Concerning murder victims for whom race was known, 51.1 percent were black, 46.3 percent were white, and 2.6 percent were of other races. Race was unknown for 130 victims. Of the offenders for whom race was known, 52.4 percent were black, 45.2 percent were white, and 2.4 percent were of other races.  The race was unknown for 4,077 offenders.

As these numbers should make obvious, Hispanics (i.e. Mestizos) are lumped in with the white numbers

Down the Rabbit Hole

In an excellent analysis of the arguments, law and precedent involved in Hobby Lobby free-exercise case by Stanford prof Michael McConnell, this obiter dictum jumped out:

[T]here is something Alice in Wonderland-ish about the government’s position. According to the government, there may be some employees who need contraception, who can’t use one of the 14 kinds of free contraception provided under Hobby Lobby’s plan, and who might be deterred from buying Plan B, ella, or IUDs with their own money. Yet the government also argues that, in order to avoid the burden on its religious exercise, Hobby Lobby should drop its insurance coverage, pay a fine, and force its employees to obtain coverage on a government exchange. In that case, all 13,000 employees would lose excellent health insurance and be forced to buy their own insurance on an exchange. That imposes is a far greater burden on Hobby Lobby’s employees. The government strains at a gnat while swallowing a camel.

As we observed during oral arguments, no amount of Alice in Wonderland-ism is beyond the motivated credulity of SCOTUS’ female justices.  But in general, the Supreme Court has shown itself remarkably insouciant about vastly greater destruction wrought by its decisions as long as the burden is borne by the wrong kind of white people.  Civil Rights law, and in particular the school desegregation cases, completely destroyed countless working-class communities as residents and parents were forced to flee violence-prone blacks, at costs greatly exceeding those imposed by the loss of employer-provided health insurance, as bad as that is.  And all to leave communities and schools almost as segregated as they were before.  Yet what legal scholar or politician working today calls for their reconsideration?

Standing in Line

USA Today writes:

Despite losses at federal district and appeals courts, groups including the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners Foundation back the effort by New Jersey gun owners to legalize gun possession outside the home.

Not quite. The appeals court score is presently the Second and Fourth against the Seventh and a three-judge panel of the Ninth.

But the article is mostly an idiotic attempt to pass off a former SCOTUS judge's opinion that we change the existing wording of the Second Amendment as relevant to what the actual SCOTUS rules on the actual Constitution.

The Ninth Circuit is presently considering whether to allow the state of California and HCI to "intervene" in the case Peruta vs. San Diego for the purpose of requesting an "en banc" (full circuit) review of the panel's ruling. Basically, the panel had ruled against the San Diego sheriff's policy of only issuing carry licenses to individuals facing an extraordinary threat, beyond that suffered by the general population, to their physical safety. The sheriff's office, while not reversing its policy until the District Court determines the specific remedy in light of the Circuit's finding, has elected not to appeal the Circuit's decision. In order for the case to proceed any further, someone has to take over the sheriff's role as the defendant, a role for which the state and HCI have volunteered.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that the sheriff's policy was a good-faith interpretation of the intent of state law, and in fact the plaintiff is not contesting the state's intervention. It is contesting, and in its brief totally eviscerates, HCI's claim to standing to intervene. It is gratifying to watch a liberal group on the receiving end of standing rules that normally handicap conservatives in cases from California's failure to defend its prohibition on gay marriage to 0bama's serial lawlessness. If anything, HCI's case is far weaker than ours. Notwithstanding the law's intent, the San Diego sheriff has full operational discretion over the policy at issue. It could, in fact, have adopted a shall-issue policy much as, say, the El Paso County sheriff had adopted one in the '90s prior to Colorado's passage of a shall-issue concealed carry law. For the San Diego sheriff to choose not to defend it's own policy is very different for the executive branch of government's subverting the will of the legislature, or the people. It will be interesting to see if the standard suddenly gets lowered for HCI's benefit.

Thoughts on the German Homeschool Family Case

On the German homeschool refugee case: I agree with everything EW has written here, and will express my satisfaction that under the weight of public pressure the DHS has reversed itself and granted the family asylum status. And I also believe the case was correctly decided.

In the context of a middle-class country, and in particular one where the public education system has become a vehicle for uniform and specific official hostility to the values of a plurality (if no longer a majority) of the families whose children it purports to serve, the right of families to homeschool or otherwise privately educate their children should be legally recognized. America has come to respect this right; Germany, to its discredit, has not, and given the family's well-documented and widely-reported struggle with the German authorities, and given as well that there are no countervailing factors that would prevent them from making a positive contribution to America, the DHS should have granted them permission to stay.

But the asylum process is rife with enough fraud as it is. Consider homeschooling in the context of a developing rather than an already-developed country. It may be the case that a poor country, with no agenda other than providing for the education of the populace, establishes compulsory education with no homeschooling exception on the not-unreasonable fear that such an exception would be widely abused to keep children working in the family chum-grinding business (let's say). It may be that there are families in our under-developed country for whom public school would be a gross imposition for religious or other reasons, and a well-managed asylum program would look honestly at this question. Are your reasons for wanting to homeschool specific or general? Do you have an individualized history of being legally pursued by your home government? Are you otherwise assimiliable into American society?

But I really don't want the judiciary trying to impose those kinds of rules, because it's so easy to predict the result: every subject of the poor country with the least interest in immigrating to the U.S. would have presumptive right of entry into America. All they would have to do is claim that they want to homeschool their children! Now the SCOTUS might hand down rules by which such claims might be evaluated, but granting any kind of substantive right of asylum to foreigners would still present a huge difficulty in managing the immigration on behalf of American values and interests. Yes, I know: 0bama's not doing that, but then it wouldn't irrespective of a contrary decision. And some future administration might now be allowed to.

Alpha Beta in Film

I watched the movie Rush, Ron Howard’s mostly true account of the 1976 Formula One season and its principal antagonists, McLaren’s English racer James Hunt and Ferrari’s Austrian driver Niki Lauda.

Ron Howard deftly executes a stunning movie turnabout.  When the film opens, we the audience are led to believe we are watching a movie that back in the 80s would have starred Tom Cruise playing the dashing by-the-seat-of-his-pants racecar driver / fighter pilot facing a generic ice-in-his-veins opponent. And in the hands of Chris Hemsworth, Hunt is exactly that. But slowly, the movie reveals itself to be every bit the story of Hunt's careful, calculating, rat-faced opponent (Daniel Bruhl).

This is no mere good-guy-bad-guy story; rather, it is a remarkable demonstration of the upsides and downsides of alpha and beta personalities. Hunt was handsome and charming, here and in real life. He also drank heavily, abused drugs, drove away his wife (into the arms of Richard Burton) with his verbal abuse and shameless philandering. In other words, all alpha, zero beta. This stands in contrast to Lauda, a man who wasn't much to look at even before the accident that left his face a mass of scar tissue. He was also singularly lacking in social grace, telling even his friends and colleagues without restraint what he thought of them (apparently, not much). He obsessed over the minutiae of automotive engineering, to his racing success. A nerd, in other words. But in the movie, he and his wife are loyal and protective of each other. (In real life, this is more mixed: his fifteen-year marriage had to survive at least one affair that produced an illegitimate son.)

Howard's account of Lauda's initial courtship (if you can call it that) is one of the most compelling demonstrations of "nerd game" I have seen in a movie. Niki hitches a ride with Marlene after a party and promptly starts telling her everything wrong with her car's engine based on the sound. Marlene, who doesn't follow Formula One, is clearly put out at the presumption of this little man, and doesn't give him any credit when the car duly breaks down. But the ice starts to melt when they are picked up by a couple of racing fans who recognize him and prevail upon him to drive their car the rest of the way; she warms up once his fame and driving skills have been demonstrated.

This film is relatively unusual for Ron Howard in the level of profanity, nudity and explicit sex. But here we see the turnabout: initially enticing, Howard shows it to be empty and destructive.