Sociological Images

I was inspired by the blog I Hurt I Am In Fashion to revive this 2008 post.

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This New York Times fashion slide show offers image after image demonstrating our society’s bizarre infatuation with posing women looking awkward, even deformed, frightened, compromised, uncomfortable, even in pain.

I am unsure what to make, particularly, of the interest in images in which women are in dirty and uncomfortable, even painful, places and positions (see the “Maiden Voyage” spread with women in the shipyard in the NYT slide show linked to above). Do we hate women that much? Or is it about something else (also)?

Marie Claire Italia:

W Magazine:

V60 Magazine:

The Ones2Watch:

Fashion Gone Rogue:

Fashionising:

Neo2 Magazine:

Examples from 2008:

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

YetAnotherGirl, Andrew, Rosemary, Nathan Jurgens0n, Dolores, and Ann K. all sent in an ad for Belvedere Vodka that should be listed in the annals of bad ideas. The ad shows a gleeful man grabbing a distressed-looking woman who, we are to presume from the text, must not be going down smoothly (via Feministing):

Because how is it not funny to present your product in a context that says sexual assault is funny?

Online criticism of an ad that seems to be making a joke about forcing women to engage in sexual acts led to the company pulling the ad and issuing an apology of the passive “sorry if you were offended” type:

The company’s president also apologized when speaking to CNN about the controversy (via The Consumerist):

It should never have happened. I am currently investigating the matter to determine how this happened and to be sure it never does so again. The content is contrary to our values and we deeply regret this lapse.

The company also made a donation to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN).

Phil Villarreal, who posted about the ad and the apology at The Consumerist, suggests that the ad may be even more cynical than it at first appears:

The cynical might wonder whether or not the campaign and apology made up a coordinated effort to draw attention to the brand.

Intentionally invoking outrage, then making an apology and symbolic corporate donation as marketing strategy. Any readers with marketing expertise have any insight here? We often see cases of companies desperately trying to control the negative effects of controversies. When does a controversy hurt a brand and when does it serve as a marketing opportunity?

UPDATE: Reader Tom points out that it turns out to be a still from a parody video that someone at the company then reposted (via Adland):

Somebody on their social media team obviously created (or found) and posted it thinking it was an amusing parody. And that person has probably been found and fired.

But it is unlikely anyone officially *in charge* of the brand actually saw and approved this.

As Tom says, this brings up a separate issue: the challenges to companies of managing brand image in a world where one person in the organization can quickly disseminate something via the company’s social networking sites to thousands or even millions of people with much less oversight than a traditional ad campaign would get, especially when viewers make little distinction between images included in tweets or Facebook updates and those in billboards, print ads, etc.

The other day I came upon a post by Margaret Lyons at Vulture pointing out the frequent use of rape jokes in sitcoms this season. A number of sitcoms, especially Two Broke Girls, Whitney, and Work It included scenes where rape served as a punchline. Lyons explains what particularly bothers her about this is that references to rape are being used simply as a “shorthand for outrageousness,” a way to cue the audience that they’re watching a show that is bold and daring, that will say anything!

The post includes a video of clips of a lot of these rape-joke scenes from this season, showing how frequently and casually they’re included. Clearly, these could be particularly upsetting for some readers:

I’ve been thinking about posting the video for a couple of days, but then Jeremiah J. sent in a link to a post that captures what I find problematic about how rape is used in TV and movies so much better than I ever could. Film critic and screenwriter Drew McWeeny posted a lengthy article at HitFix about reaching the breaking point in his ability to watch gratuitous rape scenes in movies. McWeeny explains,

It seems to me that somewhere along the way, it was decided that the easiest way to make an audience uncomfortable was to have someone rape a character onscreen.  I must see 30 films a year where somebody needs to have “something bad” happen, and the go-to impulse.

…the point has been more than made on film that rape is a terrible thing, and at this point, if you’re not contributing some new idea to the conversation, then you are literally just using it as a button, something you push to get a response, and that unnerves me.

I think McWeeny’s points are relevant to a discussion of sitcoms’ use of rape jokes as well, because in both cases rape is often being used as a “button,” a lazy, predictable way to get a reaction from an audience and mark the show or movie as one that’s audacious and pushes boundaries. You really must read McWeeny’s full original post, as he eloquently explains why this matters.

Feminists have done a powerful job of making the sexual assault of women by men a public issue.  Male victims, though, have remained largely invisible. In fact, one in ten victims of sexual assault is male.  Most of these men are raped by other men.

The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network is attempting to raise awareness of this issue.  As part of their campaign, they are sponsoring this really interesting two-minute video made by my colleague, Dr. Broderick Fox, professor of Art History and Visual Arts at Occidental College:

UPDATE: In the comment thread, Umlud posted a provocative paragraph from an article by Christopher Glazek at N+1 that I thought was worth including:

In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

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

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control recently released a report on domestic violence and sexual assault in the U.S. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010 Summary Report presents the results of phone surveys (targeting both landlines and cells) of 18,049 randomly-selected adults conducted in 2010. The results are predictably depressing: 18.3% adult women have experienced rape (defined as attempted or completed forced penetration) in their lifetimes (for men, it’s 1.4%):

Undermining the stranger rapist myth, the report found that the vast majority of perpetrators were acquaintances or partners of their victims.

As has been found in other studies, Native American women are more at risk than other racial group for sexual assault; in this study, those identifying multiracial had the highest rates of all:

Almost a third of women who are raped are victimized before they’re 18, while over a third are young adults aged 18-24:

Risk of rape varies significantly by state, though in no state did fewer than 10% of women report being raped. Virginia had the lowest levels of victimization of women, at 11.4%; other states on the low end include Tennessee, Delaware, and Rhode Island. Worst was Alaska, at 29.2%, with Oregon not far behind at 27.2% and Nevada at 26.1%.

The report also include information on stalking and domestic violence; 16.2% of women and 5.2% of men report at least one incident, overwhelmingly from an intimate partner, while over 30% of women and 25% of men have been slapped, shoved, or pushed by a partner.

It is a singularly depressing read about the state of men’s and women’s intimate lives.

Cross-posted in Portuguese at Conhecimento Prudente.

Rape reporting, prosecution, and conviction rates across the country are appallingly low, but it’s easier to get away with sexual assault in some places compared to others.  Pennsylvania is one of those places. In Pennsylvania, expert testimony isn’t allowed in the courtroom.  Instead, jurors frequently rely on abundant, harmful rape myths.

We shouldn’t be that surprised, then, that earlier this week the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) aired an ad plainly promoting the idea that women are to blame for being raped.

The ad shows a young woman sprawled on what appears to be a bathroom floor, underwear down at her ankles, with the caption, “She didn’t want to do it, but she couldn’t say no.”  The victim blaming here couldn’t be any clearer, right down to the illogical language suggesting that the victim both had agency (she is to blame) and lacked agency (because she couldn’t say “no”).

Crafted by the Neiman Group, this ad was part of a larger $600,00 campaign — two years in the making — to raise awareness of the ill effects of drinking.  Several different themes were proposed, but this was the “winner.”  Another ad in the same campaign holds a rape victim’s friend responsible for her rape.

The PLCB pulled the ad campaign in response to hundreds of messages from concerned citizens, some of whom claimed they were traumatized by the image/message.  However, a statement from the PLCB shows that those in charge still don’t comprehend the problem:

“We feel very strong, and still do, that when we entered the initial discussion about doing a campaign like this it was important to bring the most difficult conversations about over-consumption of alcohol to the forefront and all of the dangers associated with it—date rape being one of these things.”

The PLCB is right that alcohol and “date” rape (a term that trivializes rape) go hand in hand, but not because women are responsible for the criminal actions of the approximate 6% of men who perpetrate this crime.  Instead, perpetrators exploit cultural narratives — like the idea that intoxication = miscommunication and that “date rape” isn’t “real” rape — to repeatedly commit this crime.  In a recent study of college students, 4% of men were found to be serial rapists; they committed an average of 5.8 rapes each.

In short, sexual assault is committed by (often serial) perpetrators.  Yet ad campaigns like this will continue to ensure that sexual assault will continue to be the only crime in which society treats the victim like a perpetrator.

University of Minnesota doctoral candidate Chris Miller sent in a fascinating episode of Siskel and Ebert, a long-lasting TV show devoted to reviewing movies.  What is amazing about this episode is the frankness with which the movie critics — Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert — articulate a feminist analysis of a group of slasher movies.

The year? 1980.

First they describe the typical movie:

A woman or young girl is shown alone and isolated and defenseless… a crazy killer springs out of the shadows and attacks her and frequently the killer sadistically threatens the victims before he strikes.

They pull no punches in talking about the problem with the films:

These films hate women.

They go on to suggest that the films are a backlash against the women’s movement:

I’m convinced it has to do with the growth of the woman’s movement in America in the last decade. I think that these films are some sort of primordial response by some very sick people… of men saying “get back in your place, women.”

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One thing that most of the victims have in common is that they do act independently… They are liberated women who act on their own. When a woman makes a decision for herself, you can almost bet she will pay with her life.

They note, too, that the violence is sexualized:

The nudity is always gratuitous. It is put in to titillate the audience and women who dress this way or merely uncover their bodies are somehow asking for trouble and somehow deserve the trouble they get. That’s a sick idea.

And they’re not just being anti-horror movie.  They conclude:

[There are] good old fashioned horror films… [but] there is a difference between good and scary movies and movies that systematically demean half the human race.

Watch for yourself:

It’s refreshing to hear a straightforward unapologetic feminist analysis outside of a feminist space.  Most everybody loves movies and Siskel and Ebert were about as mainstream American as you can get.  Where’s the feminist analysis now?

Full transcript after the jump:

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