This archive of cigarette commericals, sent in by Kay W., makes some interesting comparisons of vintage and contemporary cigarette ads.
First, they compare vintage ads that try to sell cigarettes by pointing to the fact that they suppress your appetite with contemporary-ish Virginia Slims ads which seem to suggest so indirectly.
Second, they compare vintage advertisements that argue that some brands are smooth and good for your voice with the contemporary “Find Your Voice” campaign:
Third, this set of ads nicely shows how the association of glamour with cigarette smoking has transcended history:
Last year the British Heart Foundation released this ad (found at the Mail Online) encouraging people to get a half hour of exercise each day:
It sparked some complaints, presumably because it says sex so openly and has a naked man in it. But it’s kinda neat to see an ad that shows middle-aged people with bodies that don’t necessarily fit our cultural beauty ideals, and acknowledging that they have sex. Of course we know people in their 40s and 50s have sex, but the images we get of women in those age groups being sexual usually depicts them as MILFs, not average women. I think many people are comfortable with the idea that men would be having sex later in life, but we often see them paired with much younger, hot women, not women their own age.
I went to BHF’s website. There is a page called Sex and Heart Disease. They also have a DVD available about sex and recovering from heart disease.
You might use these for a discussion of older couples and sexality, and how uncomfortable we are thinking about older people having sex in our culture. It would be a good topic to tie in to myths about sexual activity among older people. According to this Washington Post article, about 75% of people aged 57-85 who have partners are sexually active. About half of those aged 75-85 who are sexually active report having sex 2-3 times per month, and nearly a quarter have sex at least once a week. And yet our cultural images are generally that either older people don’t have sex at all, or that when they do, it’s gross. We also often assume that all older men have problems with impotence; certainly many do, but it’s not universal and often occurs much later in life that we might expect.
The American Psychological Association has a bibliography of journal articles related to older people and sexuality available here. Although they’re all from a psych perspective, they might be useful for gathering some basic data about the topic.
And, as I tell my students when we talk about aging and sex, I wouldn’t enter Grandma and Grandpa’s bedroom without knocking.
See also this post about a company that used stories of happily sexual older couples to sell mortgages.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Rachel M. sends us this story: The cover for the 1976 Scorpions album “Virgin Killer” apparently not considered problematic enough for censorship at the time, was pulled from a Wikipedia webpage for being “a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18.” The image, included after the jump, features a naked prepubescent girl in a provocative pose:
Josh M., Christine F., and Eric Q. brought my attention to the Medal of Honor series of video games. As far as I know, this is every version of the game currently on the market (that’s twelve total; all images found at this Medal of Honor website). In the game, you are a U.S. soldier fighting in World War II. Notice anything? In every version of the game, thus far, a white man is featured on the cover. I suppose it’s possible that some of the people in the far background in a couple of the games might be non-White, but I don’t think so. The image here is that World War II was an all-White war (or that gamers will only identify with a White soldier).
It is true that during most of WWII, Black soldiers were segregated in their own units. Initially they were not allowed to fight on the front lines, but that policy changed. According to this National Geographic article, Eisenhower desegregated the army for a while toward the end of the war out of desperation for more soldiers on the front lines. Tuskegee Airmen pilots also flew with White pilots on missions. Voice of America says that over a million Black soldiers served in WWII (about half a million were in Europe).
There were also 22 Asian American soldiers fighting for the U.S., according to this New York Times article. Medals of Honor were belatedly awarded to several in 2000 (though at least some had received Medals at the time of the war, unlike African American soldiers). And the Department of Veteran’s Affairs estimates that up to half a million Hispanic soldiers served (the exact number is unknown because the government did not keep track of “Hispanic” ethnicity in the Armed Forces at that time). Finally, 44,000 American Indian soldiers joined the war effort (and according to the Department of Defense, that was out of a population of only 350,000 at the time).
Ok, so it’s a video game. Fine, whatever. It’s probably not a place to look for accurate depictions of anything. And of course there were more White soldiers in the war (though minorities were over-represented compared to their percentage of the overall U.S. population). But not even one non-White soldier on any of the covers? Really?
On the other hand, no African American soldiers were given the Medal of Honor for service during WWII due to racial discrimination. In 1993 the Army commissioned a study on racial disparities in rates of medal awards and concluded that 7 Black soldiers would be given the Medal of Honor, which they received in 1996. So I guess maybe it’s fitting that they’re missing from the Medal of Honor games.
Thanks to Josh, Christine, and Eric!
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Have you ever wondered why many stores now no longer require a signature when you make a purchase of $25 or less with a credit card? Today, I found out why.
It has to do with the pressure to increase employee efficiency. So how do you make employees more efficient? According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, you change practices. Consider:
Then, you start clocking employees. For example:
Daniel A. Gunther has good reason to keep his checkout line moving at the Meijer Inc. store north of Detroit. A clock starts ticking the instant he scans a customer’s first item, and it doesn’t shut off until his register spits out a receipt.
To assess his efficiency, the store’s computer takes into account everything from the kinds of merchandise he’s bagging to how his customers are paying. Each week, he gets scored. If he falls below 95% of the baseline score too many times, the 185-store megastore chain, based in Walker, Mich., is likely to bounce him to a lower-paying job, or fire him.
According to the article, the cost is, in large part, paid by the employee in the form of comfort on the job, the ability to make human contact with regular customers, and having to be mean to old ladies to get them to hurry up.
Jay Livingston has a nice analysis.
MissCegenation (see her take over at Reciprocal Crap Exchange), Miguel E. (of El Forastero), Breck C. (also of Reciprocal Crap Exchange), Rachel N., Laura M.D., and Z. (of It’s the Thought that Counts) all sent in links to Burger King’s “Whopper Virgins” viral video campaign (we’ve never had so many people send in the same thing; clearly it touched a nerve):
There are several interesting things going on here. One is the exoticization of the “whopper virgins.” The taste tests were conducted in Thailand, Romania, and Greenland. We’re clearly supposed to find it charmingly cute that they’re unfamiliar with hamburgers. They don’t even know how to eat them! We get to see people taking their “first bite of a hamburger,” and wonder at their unfamiliarity with how to pick one up and eat it. This short video about the Thailand taste tests illustrates this with the dramatic voiceover about people who have “never even seen a burger. Who don’t even have a word for burger.”
There’s also a certain level of ethnocentrism here; note the comment that these are people who “really live outside of things.” That all depends on what you mean by “things,” which here seems to be defined by exposure to TV and hamburgers. The implicit understanding, of course, is that these are people who live in a backward, “traditional” culture, which is fascinating to outsiders but, ultimately, very bizarre. However, I am sure that if asked these people would feel they live “inside of” many things, just not the things considered important to this marketing team.
You might also use this to talk about the pervasiveness of advertising. As the video makes clear, they went to Thailand, Romania, and Greenland in hopes of finding people who hadn’t been exposed to Burger King or McDonald’s advertising, since it would be “impossible” to find such people in the U.S.
I also think the documentary element to the video is fascinating. I’m assuming the teams did travel to these areas, and the video claims they are all “real people,” not actors (who are, apparently, imaginary). But I have a suspicion that some elements were staged. Of course the taste-tests were staged, but I notice that almost everyone in the videos is wearing “traditional” clothing. I might be wrong, but it doesn’t strike me as the type of clothing people would wear every day–they seem like pretty fancy clothes that you’d wear for special occasions, but maybe I’m wrong. If anybody knows more about how people in these areas usually dress, let me know. Of course, it’s entirely possible that people dressed up in their fancier clothes entirely on their own because they wanted to look nice when being filmed. But I wonder if they were encouraged to dress in clothing that would make them seem more exotic, rather than showing up in a t-shirt (which is, by now, fairly universal, though I’m certain there are still groups who have not adopted t-shirts).
The second half of the video, where the Burger Team goes to villages in each country and makes them Whoppers, is also interesting in the way it portrays the team as philanthropists giving these communities a unique cultural experience. I mean, I guess they are, and I don’t want to fall into the trap of romanticizing “traditional” groups and implying that they should be shielded from “modern” innovations because it would ruin their culture. And it doesn’t seem like the marketing team is really trying to build brand loyalty, since it’s unlikely they’re going to be opening stores in any of these areas (although they do make sure to wrap the burgers in Burger King wrappers). It does, on the other hand, make the video seem more like a documentary and less obviously like a commercial, which adds to its effectiveness as a viral ad. I dunno. Maybe this is just an example of a corporation doing something nice, and I can’t get over my general distrust of marketers.
Another interesting angle you might bring up in discussion is the spread of fast-food culture and standardized, relatively cheap production processes in general, often referred to as “McDonaldization.” There’s also an entire book on the subject of McDonald’s in Asia, called Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (edited by James L. Watson). I sometimes assign the chapter “McDonald’s in Hong Kong: Consumerism, Dietary Change, and the Rise of a Children’s Culture” in my intro classes to talk about cultural change; it’s fascinating how McDonald’s is to some degree undermining parental authority by appealing directly to children and empowering them to demand their favorite meals.
Laura sent us a link to a story about criticism of the campaign, found here.
And just an aside here: What’s the difference between a “village” and a “small town”? The word village seems to bring up certain assumptions about both quaintness and backwardness (and cultural isolation). I grew up in a town of slightly less than 300 people. Nobody ever called it a village. Is it a village if you don’t have paved roads, and a small town if you do? I’m just askin’.
Thanks to everybody who sent the video in!
Bern K. and Megan P. sent us another example of androcentrism (see here, here, here, and here), one that is nicely combined with the representation of women as annoying naggers, and the social construction of diamonds as men’s best friend. Bern writes:
It starts off with promise, showing that it’s ridiculous for a man to buy his wife a vacuum cleaner for their anniversary. It finishes, unfortunately, by suggesting that the only way to get out of the doghouse is to buy his wife diamonds.
In the 5-minute commercial, men are punished by their wives for being insensitive or insulting by being sent to the “doghouse.” In this five minute advertisement for JC Penney, men who have been sent to the doghouse are punished by being forced to do feminine tasks: fold laundry, eat quiche, and drink chai lattes. There is some irony in that the main dude was sent to the doghouse for buying his wife a vacuum for their anniversary. Apparently he wouldn’t want to be caught dead vacuuming… which is exactly why the gift might be considered insulting. After all, when you give a woman a cleaning product for a gift, it means you think it’s HER JOB.
The video:
The website include the sound of a woman nagging and giving inconsistent orders (“speak less,” “talk more”).
How to get out of the doghouse? Buy your wife diamonds (at JC Penney):
I like how it says that she’ll be “screaming and jumping for joy.” Gah, women are so shallow and annoying.
There’s more! The website is interactive. You can actually put people in the doghouse. If you are on Facebook, you can upload someone’s profile picture and have it show up on the website. A fascinating new way to merge advertising and social networking sites.
NEW (Jan. ’10)! JC Penney apparently thought this campaign was so delightful that they updated it. Joel P. sent us the link. It’s really quite obnoxious (for all the reasons discussed above):
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U45oxUyiMc[/youtube]
Jezebel also has a nice analysis.
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.
