Sociological Images

Dolores R. sent us the newest message from associated with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).  Sponsored by both PETA and the Ministry of Waxing (a pubic-hair removal site), the ad features a fur-covered “wallet” (via Ms.):

I guess it’s just an ad for waxing your pubes, but the logic is so convoluted that I’m having a hard time getting my head around it.  The fur of slaughtered animals is gross/unethical, so you should shave off your public hair?  Pubic hair is gross and that’s how you know wearing animal fur is gross?  Shave your public hair as a token of your objection to wearing fur?  Skin yourself, not animals?

Or perhaps my problem is looking for a logic in the first place.

UPDATE 1: A reader sent in a clarification regarding the relationship between PETA and the Ministry of Waxing, one with its own sociological lessons about social movement organizations.  It appears that the Ministry has donated money to PETA for the privilege of using the “PETA Business Friend logo.”  While PETA has apparently made a deal with the Ministry of Waxing, they legally disclaim any responsibility for how their logo is used and it’s possible that they did not approve this ad.  Details on the program here.

UPDATE 2: Another reader, though, argues that the logo on the ad isn’t the “Business Friend” logo (see below), but the “real” PETA logo.  He links to a page on the PETA website where they endorse the program.  This reader writes:

…PETA isn’t somehow being used against their knowledge; they’re co-promoting it.  There’s no disclaimer, no weaseling out, no “we didn’t know about it”; this is 100% PETA-approved.

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Also in PETA: women packaged like meat and imagined as meat, and in cages, women who love animals get naked (men wear clothes), the banned superbowl ad, and a collection of various PETA advertising using (mostly women’s) nudity.

See also our post on leftist balkanization, or the way that leftist social movements tend to undermine each other.

Two additional cases of a boy being subject to schools rules that don’t apply to girls prompts a re-post. I’ve added the new instances to the end.

Tara C. sent us a link to a story about a 4-year-old boy who has been given in-school suspension (and was threatened with expulsion) for having hair that breaks the dress code for the Dallas, TX, school system:

Dmitriy T.M. sent in another story, this one featuring a 6-year-old named Gareth who was being placed into in-school suspension (i.e., spending all day each day in the principal’s office) because of his long hair and earring.

So, this still you see of him below… that’s what counts as long hair. And, can you spot the earring in his left ear? It’s there.

In another case, 16-year-old Kasey Landrum was suspended for wearing eye-liner on school grounds (after classes were out):

Of course, these aren’t just about enforcing a dress code. It’s a gendered code; girls aren’t required to have short hair cuts, because on girls, longer hair isn’t “distracting,” it’s “normal.”  As is make-up and earrings.  Implicit in the idea of what counts as an appropriate appearance, then, is the gender of the person wearing it.  These cases reveal, further, that girls are allowed more choices than boys because we are more accepting of girls acting boyish than boys acting girlish (in what sociologists call “androcentrism“).

The final case also reveals the importance of intersectionality, or the way that different identities come together in complicated ways. Landrum claims that an ostensibly heterosexual boy was allowed to wear punk-style make-up to school on the same day.  So breaking gender rules is apparently okay if you affirm that you’re heterosexual, and maybe being gay is okay if you don’t break any gender rules, but doing both is going too far.

A post for Love Your Body Day.

Krista, Debbie, and Diego sent in the following commercial for FreeScore. It nicely illustrates our bias against men who don’t live up to idealized standards of masculinity.  That is, men who are short, bald, and soft.

Like a bad credit score, men who aren’t young and handsome are a total drag. Klutzy, a potential serial killer, afraid to stand up for himself… his pain is our last laugh.  Disgusting.

I know a guy, bless his heart, who is unendingly surprised to learn that women do things to themselves to try to be more conventionally attractive.  Most recently he learned that bleach blondes are almost always, well, bleached. He thought it was a common natural hair color for adult women. LOL.

In any case, I thought the photographs below — by Zed Nelson, and sent along by zeynaparsel — were neat. They disembody the tools women use to enhance their beauty, revealing them as undeniably artificial.

Eyelash extensions:

Breast implants:

Hair extension:

Buy the book.

For more from Zed Nelson, see our post on cosmetic surgery and being normal.

In Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery, Kathy Davis upended the common sense view that people undergo plastic surgery because they want to be beautiful or handsome.  Instead, she found that most people sought cosmetic correction because they felt ugly or strange.  They didn’t want to be great-looking, or even good-looking, they wanted to be normal, unremarkable, to blend in with the crowd.

I thought of Davis’ book when I scrolled through Zed Nelson‘s photographic commentary on beauty, Love Me, sent in by zeynaparsel.  There’s a lot to see there, but here I’ve pulled out some of the pictures that I think resonate with Davis’ findings.

“I’m competing with men 20 years younger than me”:

“To be honest I never thought that I needed it [labiaplasty]. But I read about the procedure in a magazine.”

Leg Lengthening Operation:

“Men’s Health magazine (USA) hasn‘t had a hairy chest on it’s cover since 1995.”  Post-chest wax:

Buy the book.

This seems like a good time to reiterate a simple truth: It can be art/fashion/satire/cutting edge etc. and… and and and it can be offensive, trivializing, and triggering.

Eight readers sent in links to an ad for a hair salon called Fluid. The salon, which has a history of using “shocking” ads (like this one after the Gulf oil spill), is attracting criticism for an ad featuring a woman being offered jewelry by a man; she appears to have a black eye.  Six more sent in a link to a Glee star, Heather Morris, in a photoshoot by Tyler Shields, also with a black eye.

Images after the jump (trigger warning):

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At his great blog, Work that Matters, Tom Megginson highlighted a pretty stunning commercial.  In it, a woman in a dilapidated mansion looks disgustedly at a mildly repulsive carpet covering a giant room. She resigns herself to pulling it up, revealing a smooth hardwood floor beneath. And she hauls the mass of fibers to the street, only to return to a room newly covered again.

It’s a metaphor for the Sisyphean task of hair removal, of course. So what’s the solution? Well, it’s not rejecting the obviously unrealistic task of being female and hair-free. No. The solution is laser hair removal.

*I stole this fantastic title from Tom.