Do we have any typography experts left over from those heady Rathergate days? Can you tell me what this is?
Right! It’s the letter ‘S’ from the typeface named “Group Sex,” a TrueType font available at various free font download sites (like this one.)
I am showing you the letter ‘S’ because it is one of the only letters I can show you. All of the glyphs feature naked stick-figures posed into letterforms, but most of them feature great big stick-genitals arising from the male figures. ‘S’ was an exception.
According to my research, this cartoon-smut font has been kicking around the Internet since 1999, keeping a pretty low profile. But it’s in the news now. Last week, a teacher at Pine Tree Elementary school in New York State prominently used this salacious “Group Sex” font in a handout to parents of her third-grade students.
It’s all a misunderstanding, says the school.
[A]t first glance, it’s difficult to make out the salaciousness of the type font. Sources said the teacher had no idea the alphabet was offensive when she downloaded the font from the Internet.
Okay, I’ll grant that these characters don’t look smutty at first glance, especially if you’re not expecting to find anything raunchy. But how do you accidentally download a font clearly named “Group Sex”? And then accidentally choose the “Group Sex” font in your word processing program from your pull-down menu of fonts, until you come to the one named “Group Sex”? Shouldn’t that have been a tip-off? Does this spelling teacher not speak English?
And why does this Times Herald-Record article name three specific persons — the school principal, the superintendent, and the PTA president — but leave out the name of the teacher who printed the handout? Is that weird?
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin isn’t buying the alibi.
AND MUCH DISCUSSION: in the comments to this post. We all think Michelle jumped the gun.
A couple quick Xeno’s Advocate arguments:
A) If this was intentional, how could anyone expect to have gotten away with it?
B) I’ve on many occasions downloaded zips of fonts that “helpful” internet users have compiled, regardless of whatever copyright the font lies under. On other occasions, I have edited said downloaded fonts in a font editor, giving them new names.
C) check the IT department. It’s entirely possible that some wiseacre installed a modified font to the printer in question such that an unsuspecting person would select “comic sans,” and end up with a completely different outputted font on the printer end. Also, check whatever helpful aide did the actual printig and collating, as I doubt it was the teacher in question.
In any case, I’d have to see the computer, the font and the printer to rule out accident.
Malkin was disappointingly careless on this one. If you go to the one paragraph summary at [URL], and click the VERY prominent link to the local paper [URL], you learn that the teacher is a ‘veteran female’ who has been with the district many years.
Instead of pausing for a moment to consider that this was likely an older woman who didn’t see porn under every rock, (and the story goes on to say most of the parents didn’t notice it either), Malkin went for the nasty, unkind snark. Very, very uncool.
Jer, at least one of your scenarios is inconsistent with the testimony we already have. Since you took A through C, I’ll pick up with D.
D) You are being far stricter than I, since I do not need to see the computer or the printer. I would very much like to see the “Group Sex” font available for download somewhere on the Internet, but renamed to something innocuous. And it would have to have been there before Sept. 12, 2006, when these copies were handed out.
E) It is possible for a prankster to switch fonts by tampering with the printer, as you described. But that’s not what happened. We know this because Miss X (for lack of a real name) has already owned up to downloading and using the font. The sources in the news article said “the teacher had no idea the alphabet was offensive when she downloaded the font from the Internet.” These sources are not Miss X’s detractors, they’re her defenders. Why would they say she downloaded it herself if she had not?
F) I know that fonts can be renamed, but if Miss X herself downloaded “Group Sex” and renamed it to “Playful Acrobats” or something, that is hardly exculpatory; in fact it would seal her guilt, proving that she knew the font was unsuitable. On the other hand, if somebody else renamed the “Group Sex” font, and posted it for download with an innocent name, and Miss X downloaded it from that source, it would be exculpatory.
So, there you have it: find the web page where Miss X could have downloaded “Group Sex” but renamed to something G-rated, and you’ll have proved that this could have been an accident.
“And why does this Times Herald-Record article name three specific persons — the school principal, the superintendent, and the PTA president — but leave out the name of the teacher who printed the handout? Is that weird?”
Not if, as the article strongly indicates, this was some older female teacher who again, didn’t see smut under every rock and is understandably mortified.
John: I agree that Michelle has not yet applied her usual rigor to this story. But she does generally update her posts as new information comes to her, and I’m hoping she updates that one.
The article called Miss X a “veteran teacher,” not a “veteran female.” I’m not trying to be a fussbudget, and I know that it doesn’t negate the point you were making, but I do want to see quotation marks used properly in this venue. It helps us all.
Even if Miss X is a completely innocent and understandably mortified old lady, it’s weird not to name her. What would be wrong with a quote like “‘I had no idea! I am completely mortified,’ said a visibly mortified Miss Oldteacher, who is totally blameless.” I would have appreciated reportage along those lines myself.
Err…
Xenu’s Advocate… Stupid thumb keyboard…
Sean:
My “bundled” font theory doesn’t require that the font is even renamed, I just suggested that because malicious behavior is more fun when the target is Mrs. Oldteacher instead of her being the villain, like how the MSM always portrays her. Also, I don’t think her admitting to having downloaded a font invalidates any of my scenarios. If, as she says, she didn’t realize the font in question was bad, why would she specifically remember it? I doubt she said “Oh yes, that font! I downloaded that yesterday from fontsforfree.com! What do you mean it’s bad?” I think it more likely that
a) she’s the only one who uses her computer
b) she has downloaded fonts
c) she scrolled through her list of fonts, ultimately picking one.
In a case like that, saying that you had downloaded the font would in fact be true, without having any particular knowledge of the specific font in question or when and wher e it was downloaded from. If it was there you must’ve downloaded it, right?
Likewise with the scenarios where people are playing a joke on her. Even if the font that came out of the printer isn’t the one she selected on her Macintosh, clearly SHE did it since it was her that made it and printed it, and it would be stupid to try to claim otherwise. For one thing, who would believe her. For another, why would someone without knowledge of how that works (I mean, she’s hypothetically using a Mac afterall… *wink*) expect that there’s even foul play involved?
If she picked a font without realizing it was sexually explicit, do you really think she’d know whether it was the one she picked?
Back to the not-renamed font:
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know the names of most of the fonts on my computer (aside from the obvious ones like Arial, Helvetica and whatnot) and typically browse through them with arrow keys. I type the text I want, then open the font dialog, scrolling through the list while looking at the sample output. I rarely ever look to see what the name is once I pick one, especially if — like in this case — it isn’t something I’m going to need to replicate later.
I’m guessing that she picked the font the way I suggested, using an application such as PageMaker that displays an entire scaled down page on your monitor, making it that much harder to discern any sexy bits in the font. (Even on my 15″ LCD I had to consciously look to determine what was going on in the scan you linked.. On my Sidekick it was impossible to discern.) I bet she wen’t up from Helvetica and got to GroupSex pretty quickly. It’s a nice squiggly dotty font, afterall. Kids like squiggles and dots.
In any case, your date limitations suggested YET ANOTHER plausible theory: If it had to be there before Sept. 12th, then clearly it was made available on September 11th, making it a rather obvious attempt by The Terrorists at wreaking havoc among our school systems by turning our most trusted teachers into sexual deviants.
I bet there’s ton’s of cases of this that we just haven’t heard about yet…
The “arrow-keys” scenario is plausible, and had not occurred to me. But you’ll have to drop your hypothesis that she is using a Macintosh. The Mac OS does not work quite the same as Windows vis-a-vis drop-down menus and arrow keys. On a Mac, if you select a drop-down menu and then depress the down-arrow key, it does not select the next option, it merely highlights it. So you would not see the results of each new font choice on your page with every keypress; you would just see the highlight bar move down to the next font name. Thus, it is more likely with a Mac that you would read the font names and pick one you wanted, or at least one you want to try out.
There is a zero tolerance policy in place in most school districts which allows no excuses for such things. Are the students held to a highers standard than the teachers? What sort of example does that send? That this is even considered to be explainable is just another example of the Brave New World mentality first introduced to us by Aldous Huxley. And so the hyper-sexualization of children continues and it’s okay because she didn’t mean it.
Sean: I feel it’s important to add that I don’t know that Windows behaves the way my scenario implies either.. The last time I was familiar with Windows was when Windows 95 came out, and that was nearly 10 years ago! (da dum dum tschhh) I can’t remember if it behaved that way or not.
Is it a widget behavior problem, or the way the dialog is built that prevents the Mac from behaving this way? Does every application use a system-wide font selection dialog, or is it possible that some applications might behave differently? (I had a Mac for a short period of time a few months back, but must confess to using all the unix/X11 applications I was already familiar with rather than OSX native ones that I wasn’t. Ultimately I was using a Mac as a way more expensive system to run all the applications I was running on my cheaper PC, just considerably more clunkily due to OSX not real’y being designed for such usage, and switched back.)
There is no “system-wide font selection dialog” for the Mac, as such, but the behavior of pull-down menus is consistent across all applications that use the Mac API. (That is to say, just about all Mac applications, very much including PageMaker, InDesign, and MS Word.) So, if Miss X was using a Mac, and if she was selecting a font from a pull-down menu, it would work the same for any word-processing app.
Are they kidding? This is so tame, even pre-schoolers wouldn’t be shocked by it. Granted, it might raise a few eyebrows in Kandahar, but there is absolutely nothing offensive in those letters….
Nice blog, btw, I am linking to it…
Ah..
The software I’ve used presented a dialog with a list of font names on the left, options like bold, italic, size, etc on the right, a text input box below and a ‘preview’ of what the text looks like in the selected font. Arrowing through the scrolling list on the left updates the preview. No menus involved. I’ll see if I can get you a screenshot this evening that better explains (and thus probable-izes my theory.)
I just keep getting back to the lose-lose aspect of this. There’s just no way one could expect to get away with this. If it was intentional it would have been specifically to get fired, and the woman in question seems to have had a long, successful career at this school. I just can’t see anything she’d have to gain by doing it.
I suppose someone should go check out all the other hand-outs she’s made over her career, but really, it seems pretty clear it’s an accident to me.
What gets me is that the media — bloggers especially — constantly “convict” people in situations like this with absolutely no evidence. Last time I checked, our legal system treated people as if they were innocent until proven guilty. There’s no evidence in this case that suggests anything other than an accident. There’s no motive. (Unless she can be proved crazy, of course.)
There’s nothing to gain from doing something like this, and until someone finds that she named the document “file with dirty pictures in it so I can subtley corrupt the minds of my students.pdf,” we need to treat the situation as the misfortunate situation that it is. If the school’s policy dictates that she be fired regardless of whether her intent was malicious, then so be it. She should be fired. But not treated as if she were an evil sex criminal without a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise.
Well, yeah. Of course I was never one of those media people convicting her. I’m the guy that said (see post, above), “I’ll grant that these characters don’t look smutty at first glance,” corroborating her alibi. And I asked what I think is the essential question, namely, How could she download and then use a font named “Group Sex” without suspecting it depicted sex? I reckon there are three possible answers:
I) Miss X is not fluent in English, and so did not understand what “Group Sex” means; or
II) Somebody (not Miss X) duplicated the font and posted it to the Internet with an innocuous name (not “Group Sex”), and Miss X downloaded that duplicate; or
III) Miss X installed and used the font without ever noticing it was named “Group Sex.” (This is the “Jer scenario.”)
Any one of these hypotheses would absolve Miss X of any intentional wrongdoing (though not necessarily of negligence), and while not endorsing any of the three as likelier than the others, I do think one of them is right.
I didn’t mean to insinuate that you were one of the bloggers being unreasonable here, though I did misunderstand your intent.
In the process of taking a screenshot, I discovered that the software I was talking about doesn’t actually behave in the way I said it does. The arrow keys do in fact move the selection down like I said, but the font preview is only ever updated if you actually click on the name. This obviously ups the possibility that you’d read and comprehend the name in the process of clicking. I do think that if you went through a fair number of fonts in a row that the clicking might become automatic, but I’m not going to argue my case any further.
She probably did it on purpose anyway, making my fruitless endeavors to clear her name on principle kind of silly.