Archive: Sep 2008

Brenda V.P. sent in this girls’ t-shirt, available here:

It hurts me, dear readers! It hurts!

Oh, holy hell. I was about to publish this and thought to myself, “at least there’s not a ‘future MILF’ shirt.” And then I thought, “Um…is there?” Oh, yes, there is (found here):

Why do we think these kinds of messages–hey, girls! You can grow up to be an objectified accessory!–are cute?

Thanks, Brenda. Thanks.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

In the U.S. today, when infants are born with ambiguous genitalia, surgeons often operate in order to bring the child’s body into accordance with our expectations for “correct” male or female genitalia, even when the actual morphology of their bodies causes no dysfunction or harm.

Some activists, such as those involved with the Intersex Society of North America, are trying to stop these surgeries.  The Phallo-O-Meter (found here) is a satirical ruler designed to draw attention to the way in which the surgeries force bodies existing in nature into social categories of our own invention (it is attributed to Kiira Triea here).  Here it is:

The ruler is satirical (as you can tell by the tongue-in-cheek “just squeeks by” etc.), but the measurements are based on the kind of decisions doctors actually make.  Indeed, if doctors decide that a penis is “too small” or a clitoris is “too big,” an infant is in danger of having corrective cosmetic surgery.  The point here is: When bodies don’t fit into our pre-existing notions of male and female, we will force them to, even if it involves a knife.  Clitorises that are longer than .9 cm and penises that are shorter than 2.5 must be fixed.  As Martha Coventry says in Making the Cut:

The strict division between female and male bodies and behavior is our most cherished and comforting truth.  Mess with that bedrock belief, and the ground beneath our feet starts to tremble.

In Creating Good-Looking Genitals in the Service of Gender, Suzanne Kessler found that clitorises that were seen as “too big” were often described by doctors in moral terms.  They were “defective,” “anatomic derangements,” “obtrusive,” “embarrassing,” “offensive,” and “troublesome.”

Surgery on intersex infants reflects a taboo on gender similarity; a moral objection to gender sameness.  We must be separated… by at least .6 cm.

Multicult Classics posted these two Spanish-language Fruit of the Loom ads.  They are an extra nice example of the way that color is used to communicate gender:

Text: “Your world, now much more feminine.”

See also this post of kids with their stuff, these pictures of the Toys ‘R Us aisles, these breast cancer PSAs, and these guns marketed to women.

It’s obvious to us, today, that pink is for girls.  But it wasn’t until about the 1950s that our current gendered color scheme became widely accepted.  Before that, the colors were reversed.  In this excerpt for a vintage advice column (found here), we learn that:

“…the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl.  The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy; while blue, which is more delicate and dainty is prettier for the girl.”

Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (found here):

This commercial I recently saw on Comedy Central for Progene male enhancement supplement warns men who are “not 20 anymore” that, without their product, they won’t be able to satisfy a woman.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tphU_5g1A-w[/youtube]

Here’s a screenshot of a graph from the video which purports to show how men’s sexual performance declines with age:

Of course, we women “know it’s not your fault,” “it’s natural.”

Obviously you could could use this for a discussion of the increasing scrutiny men’s bodies are put under (much as women’s long have). But it’s also a good example of the way sex is often discussed; the implication here is that the only way to satisfy a woman sexually is to be able to have sex like a 20-year-old man, and the emphasis is clearly on penile-vaginal intercourse as the main source of sexual pleasure (though it does come with the handy DVD about the female orgasm). I might also use it when I talk about the ways we construct biology and treat some “natural” processes as inevitable and unalterable while attempting to change others.

For the unbelievers, I know this ad may very well look fake, but I swear to you I saw it on TV. Multiple times, because it was during a show I’d recorded, so I had the opportunity to rewatch it to my heart’s content.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Seemingly just seconds after the news leaked this weekend that current Alaskan governor Sarah Palin was McCain’s pick for vice president, merchandise appeared to capitalize on her conformity to current white bourgeois beauty standards. [Thanks to Shakesville’s Sarah Palin Sexism Watch for alerting me to the existence of this stuff.]

For example, I found this bumper sticker on zazzle.com, a site where users can upload their own images for use on T-shirts, stickers, baseball caps, etc. The caption above the sticker says, “This year, vote for HOT!” See screengrab below.

“MILF” is a slang term for “Mother I’d Like to F**k.”

This [and the many other examples that I’m sure will be added to this post] would be useful in an ongoing discussion about the deployment of gender in this year’s presidential elections, especially comparing/contrasting the popular portrayals of Hillary Clinton with those of Sarah Palin.

The AFP disembodies Palin in a “news photo” published on September 1. When body parts of male candidates are shown, they are identified as, for example, “the hand of Candidate X was seen waving.” However, in this example, Palin is identified as her legs. [Again, hat tip to Shakesville for photo and commentary.]

Caption accompanying photo reads:

Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin stands on stage during a campaign rally in O’Fallon, Missouri on August 31. Palin got comfortable in her new role as a vice presidential candidate as she made the Republican case to stay in power. (AFP/Robyn Beck)

Dubi K. sent us the following picture that has been making the round on the Internet [it is reportedly the icon for a Facebook group called “I’d Bang Sarah Palin!”]. It is a manipulation of a photo of a woman in a bikini with a gun. Palin’s head is superimposed on the woman’s body. Snopes, clearinghouse on Internet memes and urban legends, summarily debunks the picture’s supposed authenticity and supplies simiilar examples.

An opinion piece, “The Dominatrix,” by Gary Kamiya on Web magazine Salon is advertised on the front page [as of September 9, 2008] with the following poorly done Photoshop of Palin as a stereotypical dominatrix, bringing America [as moose?!] to heel:

Note the equation of a powerful, assertive woman with non-heteronormative, kinky sexuality that some people find morally repugnant. My point is not to start a debate on bdsm, but to show that this picture and the accompanying article make the tired old connection between a powerful woman and “perverted” sex.

Laura C. sent in a link to this image (found at Carrion Bag) of Palin supporters:

Might be good for a discussion of the ways in which sexualization of Palin is coming from both opponents (see here) and supporters, and the ways that women may actively take part in sexualization that trivializes women as a group.

Thanks, Laura C.!

Finally, there are now action figures of Sarah Palin. The one below is the “Sarah Palin School Girl Action Figure.” Setting aside how I feel about Sarah Palin personally and politically, I hate to see a woman’s political power attributed to how sexy she might be. There are already dozens of groups on Facebook about how “sexy” or “hot” Palin is, and they have thousands of members.

NEW FEATURE!

We crafted four sample class assignments using Sociological Images.  One for a lower-division class and three for an upper-division class.  Check them out here.

By the way, if you have crafted assignments using our blog, we’d love to publish them here!  Please send them along!  Email us at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

AND BACK TO THE OL’ BEHIND YOUR BACK:

A series of toys by Playmobil, sent in by Kirsten D., were added to our post illustrating what it means to be a neutral versus a marked social group.  See it here.

We add another beer commerical to the three we posted trivializing love, sex, and relationships in favor of beer. This one was pointed out in our comments by Pharmacopaeia. Thanks!

Daniel B. sent in a picture of the Spanish women’s Olympic basketball team in the infamous “slant-eyed” pose (meant to make them look, um, Chinese) and we added it to this post that showed the Spanish men’s team in the same pose. We added another image he found of the Spanish tennis team in that same pose to this post showing the Argentine women’s soccer team doing it too. Then we sat around and scratched our heads and wondered if every Olympic team felt the need to pose like that before leaving for Beijing.

We added a Budweiser ad in which foaming surf on the beach forms a phallus pointing to a bikini-clad woman’s crotch to our post on “subliminal” sex in ads.  (Somehow a month rarely goes by without a new addition to this particular post!)

We added a Mini Cooper ad that brags about the car’s “carfun footprint” to this post about the commodification of environmentalism. While it would be great if a car’s effect on the environment actually became a major selling point, when you look at the Mini’s gas mileage ratings (which I report in the post), it’s not clear that the “carfun footprint” is much more than a tagline.

We added another commercial, sent in by Corey, to this post about Just for Men’s Touch of Grey line, a product that allows the user to decide how much grey they would like to leave in… something we can’t image a woman’s hair dye company ever offering, since women don’t get to benefit from the “distinguished look.”

We added Paris Hilton’s humorous response to this post about John McCain’s campaign ad that associated Barack Obama with Hilton and Britney Spears in an attempt to portray him as a lightweight with no experience.

Elizabeth sent in a PETA ad that compared slaughtering animals to the beheading of a man on a Canadian bus. We added it to this post about the use of Holocaust imagery in PETA ads and who claims the right to use horrific incidents (both historic and current) in their attempts to frame social issues.

In the contemporary U.S., the feminist movement has been so thoroughly intertwined with the pro-choice movement that the rhetoric of choice has become a common way to talk, more generally, about women’s liberation.  And women’s liberation, as we have demonstrated (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), is frequently co-opted for the purposes of selling women all sorts of products (including those in decided conflict with mainstream feminism, like this one and this one).

A reader, Tracy in Canada, saw these ads at Sears.  In them, the phrase “the right to choose” is used to invoke feminist ideals and applied to the right to select a “gift adapted to your beauty concerns.”

NEW! (Nov. ’09): Kristyn G. sent in this commercial for a cable company in India that also co-opts the right to choose…in this case, the right to choose her own husband:

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.