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I don't know about Instagram because I don't use it but I'm a guy and I've looked up a dumbell or two on Amazon and read some articles about getting fit and consequently I am actually often hit with ads featuring men with perfect abs, great pecs, and huge arms and legs.

As an slightly overweight guy with no abs and skinny arms (what is now called a "dad bod"), while I do not personally feel insecure seeing these ads I can see why people would.

I feel like the general response to woman being objectified has been to even the playing field by also objectifying men. "Oh? There are too many woman butts in movies? We'll fix it... lets start showing lots of male butts too."

With that said, only one of those ads I feel "sexualized" women. Most of them were less racy than the Macy's catalogs I used to sneak a peak at when I was 6 before the Internet. I only see completely non-sexual fitness and clothing ads in this article.

Do some online mattress shopping. Load different mattresses into your cart and abandon. Etc, etc.

The internet might not forget that you care about hair loss, but the mattress stores will outbid the hair-loss companies.

Oh god. I appreciate your comment, but something about this advice gets me. Is this sort of thing what _literacy_ is now...

Yeah, I share the same sentiment.

Learned a bit more about online ad bidding dynamics, but will continue to browse the internet with JS/cookies disabled by default as well as spoofing info on every request from user agents related to what api's are available with my custom build on a fork from firefox nightly.

So you are attempting to evade tracking by being uniquely identifiable?

The information is "real" in that it is information that has been collected from a sampling of browsers of users from over the internet, or particular subset from local users connected to a nearby public network(s). As long as I'm not logging into something that would personally identify me, for all intents or purposes, I might as well be any number of the people around me connected to a network that I sampled. So even if I enabled javascript/cookies/etc, at worst I would be delivered a sampling of the ads the people around me (or the data that I sampled) were being sent.

I'm also, not on facebook/instagram/twitter etc, so I avoid the downsides of the social media bubble all together. If I "need" to use such services, I'd just create a dummy account, and discard it after.

It's not so much to evade tracking (although it can be effective in some instances), but to dirty the waters/avoid the feedback loop from tracking via ads delivered or the parasitic choices (or lack their of mostly) of others who just do nothing and jump head first into the next available skinner box.

Not like it would be impossible for a nation state actor to move against me.

The thing that drives me nuts is I see ads for a long time after of products I just bought. I already bought the product, why would I want to see tons more ads for it (especially when I saw zero ads before I bought it).

That may be done (even offline), to prevent buyer's remorse and to reinforce your choice of having bought that product — so you don't return it or give it away with a negative view of it. It's all mental manipulation.

Likely not, with the incentives involved in pay-per-click advertising. Your pre-purchase online activity put you in a particular cohort, so Facebook sells "impressions by people in this cohort" to advertisers, who then talk about the cohorts they targeted in impressive-looking reports that convince mid-level executives that their advertising is effective and they should continue to pay the marketing department salaries.

The actual ground reality of "bought a one-off product and doesn't care about future purchasing of said products" doesn't matter. I saw ads pretty constantly for the coding bootcamp I had just graduated from. All that matters in these transactions is checking off the targeting boxes, which everyone involved is pretty eager to do because it makes their numbers look better.

This often occurs if proper exclusion lists are not setup for past purchasers at the SKU level (somewhat of a headache at scale). Instead, often these campaigns might use a duration-based list option.

So for example, you might target an audience of people who viewed a product detail page for 7 days. If you purchased on day 3 and there was no SKU level exclusion list, the targeting has no way to know you already bought it. In this case you might see the ad for a few more days.

That’s great, but doesn’t explain why we get ads for things not during three months of scouring product reviews but only after the purchase.

“Oh! This consumer bought a new car! Let’s show them ads for more cars in case they buy another car on impulse!”

Exactly the point I was trying to make and feel you likely did better! Thanks :)

Likely a combination of poor targeting, budget allocations, prioritizing other audiences, etc. It is much messier than a lot of people realize if they don't do it for a living.

This definitely would sound like a very plausible theory, except most times it's for companies which have only one (or maybe two) products. To me, it seems more likely that they are getting swindled by some ad company helping manage their campaigns, but that could be my bias against many of those types of companies showing.

While that could be a factor, it usually amounts to a combination of poor targeting, and other harder to control factors like loss of cookie data and cross-device tracking challenges that can easily create these situations.

It is much messier to manage in real life than people think.

I went through a series of jokes with mates about buying those several thousand dollar audiophile network cables[0]. Facebook has been showing me ads for these things fairly consistently since about March.

[0] I would put an Amazon link here.. but I don't want to do it to you.

I'm going to do the same and I'm going to click on every single one that comes up. I bet the CPC for those things is obscene.

> The same patriarchal cultural BS about what it means to be a real woman also exists as a pressure against men, it just leads to a different set of insecurities.

I think that's a false equivalence. I'm hoping not to lose my hair, but I also kind of don't give a shit. I didn't grow up with society telling me how important it was to "look my best so I feel my best!" How often do you think Bill Gates thinks about his liver spots? John McCain probably hasn't thought of his hairline in decades. Because society really does not give a shit what men look like, unless they're in one of the few fields where looking good is part of their job.

The closest correspondence is maybe with the focus on guys being good at sports. Yeah, that kind of sucked in middle school, but it's been two decades since anyone cared whether I could make a basket. Heck, even if I was great at basketball now, nobody would give a shit.

The closest correspondence is men being financially successful, along with all the skills and status symbols that entails.

Notice that we're providing free content marketing for an organization whose value proposition is "we'll help you get rich". Men are not immune at all.

Not remotely similar. Men have pressure to be employed, but there is a ton of acceptance and even glorification of average men with average jobs. There is nothing shameful and even something honorable in being an “average Joe.” Contrast with how we treat average looking women. We don’t say “you’re average looking and that’s fine.” We say “everyone is beautiful.” Thats not acceptance, it’s misdirection. That’s not how we treat men. Nobody would say to men: “everyone is rich.” That’d be stupid and untrue. But with women we rely on misdirection so we don’t have to confront the fact that we place so much emphasis on how women look.

I agree. My point was not that it is equivalent in scope (as the kinds of insecurities we foist on women are just brutal), but that I don't think that we would expect to see it come up as simply "half naked men".

I am also "overweight" (at the borderline for being clinically "obese", even), but it isn't something that haunts me every day and makes me question if I will ever be valued as a person again when I look in a mirror the same way we do with women.

Maybe to you, but the younger generation is different.

My cousin is a psychiatrist at a college, who has wishes there was a cure to baldness because so many young men become suicidal from balding.

The social media generation values looks very very highly.

This is not entirely true. Look at the stats for tall men getting promoted, expecting higher salaries over the course of their lifetime, etc. Height is one metric that men are subconsciously judged by, for better or worse, despite having nothing to do with actual leadership skills. Our base instincts still influence us as organisms.

There's an entire episode of the Simpsons premised on Homer getting his hair back and being promoted as a result:

https://youtu.be/XxQX4sh9VqE?t=157

Sure, it's a cartoon, but it's funny because it's true.

I was in highschool when a girl commented to me, "You are going bald." The next couple of years were rough, but eventually, I just owned it. Sure, I'd probably rather have hair than not, but it is what it is. Now in my very early 40s, my beard is more grey than not. Apparently hair doesn't like me. Now I see people with hair all the time in commercials, and in real life. Doesn't bother me. But if I were targeted over and over by ads trying to make me feel bad about being bald, and just go get hair plants already, well...I would not like that at all.

Hell don't even get into the bugaboo that things like Propecia and Rogaine do to make it hard for some men to perform. That right there should be a warning on the damned side of the bottle. Want to talk about something that gives two people body issues, that can be crippling.

How are you going to sell bras without showing some skin? I'd imagine fit and look, as seen on a real person, are paramount in driving purchases.

For that matter, the packaging on men's underwear is pretty sexualized too... always made me feel weird buying it. I just want comfortable underwear :<

Showing ads with a similar body, age and colour to the user might drive sales better.

This already happens to an extent but with sex, age, race, and lifestyle taken into account but it's usually still a conventionally attractive model. You're absolutely right that it increases sales.

I am pretty sure that showing repulsive models would drive sales down. So, stuck with showing okay looking models, at worst.

The advertising industry will find a way to do that regardless of the medium - whether it’s Instagram or whether it’s a shitty blog with AdSense on it.

Your criticism should probably extend to the way the entire advertising industry conducts it’s operations and that’s a massive discussion with an incredible amount of nuance that we probably couldn’t do it justice here.

Yeah, it’s too prevalent. We best not talk about it.

No, we can talk about it - my point was that the conversation is probably more easily had in person or via blogposts where guard-rails can be set so people don’t talk over or past each other. When the topic is so vast, it’s more useful to have specific debate than to have armchair musings back and forth. It’s just more difficult of a conversation to be carried out in the latter form.