product: cars

Readers responded so positively to our post featuring the lego ad from the 1980s that was just so… human.  The girl in the ad reminded us how hypergendered advertising has become.  I offer the ad below in the same spirit (from Vintage Ads).  Three people, who look like people, saying stuff about tires:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Larry Harnisch of The Daily Mirror sent in this 1910 ad that suggests electric cars are appropriate for women because they’re clean, quiet, and easy to drive:

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Also: Sarah Haskins on marketing cars to women, women choose Chryslers over men, Ford says cars liberate women, it’s ok if your wife wrecks your VW, break the glass ceiling with a Jeep, get revved up with a Cadillac, and the Dodge La Femme.

I spent a day in Salzburg this September with a man from Dubai.  We had a wonderful time comparing perspectives.

Dubai, he explained, was a wildly modern, multicultural city.  The default language in public was English due to the international population.  He was a stockbroker who had gone to college in London and gone part way through an MBA.

He interacted with veiled, Middle Eastern women and non-veiled Western European women daily.  He seemed to have no qualms with the two styles of presentation, considering them simple choices; they were unpoliticized and carried no deeper meaning.  To him, women who veiled were simply religious, like the men he knew who would not drink alcohol, and himself when he would not eat meat improperly slaughtered.

In any case, women in Dubai, he felt, were liberated.  As an example, he explained how there was now a woman’s taxi service.

“A woman’s taxi service?”

“Yes, with women drivers.”

You see, it is not proper for women to be alone with a non-relative male and, so long as all taxis were driven by men, women (who also do not drive) could not run errands or visit friends.  They were largely neighborhood-bound.  To my friend, a woman’s taxi service was liberation.  And, indeed, from the perspective of their rules, it must have seemed like freedom indeed.

I was reminded of this chat when Happy A. sent in a link to a story about a new women’s taxi service in Mexico.  The taxis, painted pink, are driven by women and only women can hire them. The taxi service isn’t designed to allow women to travel, but to allow them to travel without the threat of harassment and assault.

Women’s groups, however, have called the taxis insulting.  They suggest that the girly pink, the protectionism, and the make-up mirrors in the back seats seem to encourage the very objectification that makes women targets in the first place.

Pink Ladies, in the U.K., rationalizes its service with the same protectionism:

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And, in Moscow, they have Ladies Red Taxi:

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I think these examples, considered together, do a really good job of undermining any absolutist ideas about what is good for women.

The situations in the different countries are dramatically different.  Women’s taxis improve the quality of life for women in Dubai (who can afford them) much more significantly than the taxis in, say, the U.K.

A radical feminist bent on destroying the system altogether may say that such taxis reinforce a gender binary and are easily co-opted by patriarchy (I wonder whose errands women are doing in those pink taxis?), a reformist feminist may say that the move is a good option for women both there and elsewhere, if not actually an end to male domination.

I think both are good points.

Does the fact that the Mexico service is run by the city and the U.K. service by a private company make a difference?  In the first case it is driven by concern for women’s safety, in the second case it is driven, at least partially, by profit.  Should people be profiting from women’s vulnerability?

Is a woman’s taxi service inherently feminist and liberating?  Or is it always sexist and demeaning?

I’m  not sure what I think about women’s taxis, but I like how cross-cultural comparisons like these remind us that context matters.

Click here for another sociologist’s take on the extent to which the pink taxis should be seen as liberating for women.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

At first I thought that this vintage Honda ad was aimed at women who wanted to do lots of “things.” And then I realized, no, despite the fact that all the women look alike, the ad is actually aimed at men who get to have “things,” like “Michelle and Tammy and Alison.”

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Selected text:

But what would you rather have? Automatic transmission, air conditioning, and a 400-horse-power engine?

Or Michelle and Tammy and Alison?

More examples of women being conflated with things here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Found at Vintage Ads.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Los Angeles is widely reviled as the city in which no one walks. But Los Angeles is not the most car dependent city according to this data:

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Via Matthew Yglesias.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I love that this vintage ad suggests that Chrysler cars are for the young at heart. When I think Chrysler, I think of grandparents.

But no, “youth is a state of mind” and, according to this ad, it involves “a purposeful look,” “clean” “lines,” “no excess ornamentation,” and “safety.”  And ice cream, of course.

What a different social construction of what being young is all about!

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NEW (Dec. ’09)! Dmitriy T.M. sent us another example:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Filibustering in the U.S. Senate (preventing a vote on a bill with continuous speech–or at least the threat of it, since often now a Senator just has to state that s/he intends to filibuster; if there aren’t 60 Senators to vote for cloture, they often just pretend the filibuster happened without making a person actually do it)–has been increasing over time:

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Why? Greg Koger at the Monkey Cage has a fascinating explanation (via Matthew Yglesias):

So why did the Senate change? The stock answer is that the chamber’s responsibilities grew with the size and scope of the federal government, so it became more costly to sit around watching obstructionists kill time. There is some truth in that explanation. Also, however, senators’ work habits changed. The introduction of railroads, cars, and (especially) air travel made sitting around in the Senate chamber so…boring. Tedious. Totally lame. During the mid-20th century, the Senate increasingly became a Tuesday-Thursday club, and individual senators began insisting that major legislation be kept from the floor to accomodate their travel schedules. A serious attrition effort would mean cancelled speeches in Manhattan and Chicago, no trips to the Delaware coast, and waiting longer to return to the ranch back in Texas.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Depending on who you ask, the cash-for-clunkers program was a huge success or a huge failure, given that the demand was so enormous that it ran out of vouchers almost immediately.  It’s almost as if fuel efficiency is finally starting to matter to the U.S. consumer after a decade or so of SUV-worship.  However, this vintage ad for Volkswagen bus reveals that this is not the first time that U.S. car buyers have been concerned about efficiency:

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Text:

The special paint job is to make it perfectly clear that our Station Wagon is only 9 inches longer than our Sedan.

Yet it carries almost 1 ton of anything you like. (Almost twice as much as you can get into wagons that are 4 feet longer.)

Or eight solid citizens, with luggage.

Or countless kids, with kid stuff.

The things you never think about are worth thinking about, too.

You never worry about freezing or boiling, the rear engine is air-cooled.

You can expect about 24 miles per gallon and about 30,000 miles on your tires.

And you can forget about going out of style next year, next year’s model will look the same.

The most expensive VW Station Wagon costs $2,655. It comes in red and white or gray and white or green and white.

And you won’t ever have to go around painting sedans on it to show how small it is.

Just Park.

Via Copyranter.

See also this ad for Volvo from 1974.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.