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Clippings – November 25th, 2024 TSP Media Report

Mallory Harrington on November 25, 2024
  • Benika Dixon (Assistant Professor of Public Health at Texas A&M University), J. Carlee Purdum (Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston) and Tara Goddard (Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning at Texas A&M University) wrote an article for The Conversation on how jails and prisons fail to protect incarcerated people during natural disasters. “People who are incarcerated can’t take protective actions, such as evacuating or securing their belongings,” they describe. “They have no say in decisions that the system makes for them.” Carceral facilities are often not evacuated due to facility designs that make it difficult for people to exit quickly or a lack of available sheltering locations. Natural disasters can also exacerbate physical and mental health problems for incarcerated individuals.
  • An article in the New York Times arts section discussed various depictions of pregnant women in arts and advertising. The story quoted Kathryn Jezer-Morton (Sociologist and Columnist for The Cut) on how celebrities and influencers pose for photos while pregnant. Jezer-Morton credits Demi Moore’s famous 1991 Vanity Fair cover photo with popularizing “bump hands,” a pose in which women place their hands around their stomach, “creating a meaningful enclosure around appropriate fatness” and emphasizing the bump “to reassure the viewer that underneath this one protrusion is a thin person.”
  • In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science) prompts readers to “look to the tradwives, podcast bros and wellness influencers” to understand how president-elect Donald Trump’s ability to tap into the aesthetics of online spaces may have helped him win the election. McMillan Cottom describes that online groups don’t map cleanly to traditional political poles and are racially and ethnically diverse. “Trump did not win over [ ] minority and young voters because he figured out how to appeal to their identity,” McMillan Cottom argues. Rather, “he excelled at tapping into the information ecosystems — social media, memes and the cultish language of overlapping digital communities — where minority and young voters express their identity. That is a meaningful difference.”
  • This week, Brazil celebrated Black Consciousness Day, a new national holiday honoring Black struggles for freedom in Brazil. Edward Telles (Professor of Sociology at the University of California Irvine) commented that although Brazil has the largest population of people of African descent of any country outside the continent of Africa, Brazil’s Black population has been “invisibilized until recently.” Telles explains that leaders in Brazilian media, government, and businesses were almost entirely White, but “that is slowly beginning to change.” This story was covered by The Washington Post.

Pantene Urges Women to Stop Being Sorry—But Were They in the First Place?

Hope Uggen on July 2, 2014

It seems that female empowerment is an advertiser’s new best friend. Just look at Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches, Always’ #LikeAGirl, and CoverGirl’s #GirlsCan, each boasting millions of views: now Pantene is getting in on the action with its new commercial, Not Sorry.

The ad challenges women to stop apologizing reflexively. In general, viewers have reacted positively, but, as one article in The Atlantic suggests, there may be more to the story of “sorry.” The author suggests:

“One of the major problems with all this—besides the one embedded in the insistent equation of apology with weakness, and stubbornness with strength—is that “sorry” is, at this point, pretty much meaningless.”

So, is “sorry” meaningless or misunderstood? Take sociologist Erving Goffman’s characteristics of an apology: “expression of embarrassment or chagrin; clarification that one knows what conduct has been expected and sympathizes with the application of negative sanction; verbal rejection, repudiation, and disavowal of the wrong way of behaving along with vilification of the self that so behaved.” The Atlantic points out that these qualities aren’t present in the average, off-hand apology, like the ones featured in the video.

Of course, the author continues, the reflexive apology may just be an additional use of the word, rather than a constant expression of patriarchal oppression. In 1997, Deborah Levi proposed four types of apologies:

  • “‘Tactical” (acknowledging the victim’s suffering in order to gain credibility and influence the victim’s bargaining behavior)
  • “‘Explanation” (attempting to excuse the offender’s behavior and make the other party understand that behavior)
  • “Formalistic” (capitulating to the demand of an authority figure)
  • “Happy-ending” (accepting responsibility and expressing regret for the bad act)

Still, Pantene’s commercial doesn’t seem to show any of these kinds of “sorries.” Instead, one New York Times article specifies these apologies as “gestural.” Linguist Deborah Tannen tells The Times,

“Language almost never means what the dictionary definition says; it’s used the way others use it — as a ritual. But those who don’t share the ritual tend to take the words literally. Since American men don’t tend to use ‘sorry’ this way, they mistakenly take women’s use of it literally, as an apology.”

It seems sorry might be misunderstood by both apologizers and the recipients of those apologies—heartfelt or tossed-off. Ending women’s casual response apologies might promote empowerment, sure, but the very concept of the over-apologizing woman may actually be nothing more than a stereotype,as The Atlantic asks, is the notion of women as being overly apologetic could be “yet another label, yet another double standard that sticks, stubbornly, to women?”

Making Dairy Manly

Andrew Wiebe on March 8, 2013

Powerful Yogurt AdHey fellas! Craving a little yogurt, but worried about your masculinity in the dairy section? What a dilemma. Luckily, Ned Resnikoff with MSNBC has some great news. A new product, Powerful Yogurt (aka, “Brogurt”), is being marketed just to men. One of the company’s ads heralds a new day in gender equality:

Your wife and sister aren’t the only ones who can take yogurt to work with them. Protein-packed Powerful Yogurt can help fuel you through your workday or even that pick-up game with the guys.

Resnikoff readily admits that he is new to “the sexual politics of fermented milk” and other nonsensical things so he cites an expert on the topic, Sociological Images’ Gwen Sharp, who has been tracking products that reinforce or create irrational gender stereotypes. As can be seen Sharp’s Community Page, Brogurt is just the latest product to be so heartily gendered it looks like a parody. (See also: manly candles in manly scents. For men.)

The proliferation and marketing of these products reinforces a stereotype problem. Needlessly gendered products are clearly trying to capitalize on gender norms we hope are well past their expiration dates.