Archive: Jan 2009

First, thanks to all of you for making 2008 a great year for Sociological Images!  Our list of 152 blogs that link to us is one tiny way that we try to show our appreciation.  Browse through our list, if you like, and if you link to us in your blogroll and aren’t on there, please send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org to let us know.

Second, as usual, we have been up to some stuff behind your back!  Here it is:

Remember how the swastika didn’t used to connote total evil?  Neither did we. We added several more examples of pre-Nazi uses of the swastika to this post.

The Canadian Centre for Diversity put out an interesting PSA along the lines of the U.S. “I am African” campaign (so brilliantly parodied).  Find the link here.  Thanks to Julie C. for sending it in!

Our post about rape as hyperconformity to masculine norms sparked a ton of comments, many of them negative.  Maybe these screenshots of a whole series of recipes for a drink called the “Liquid Panty Remover” will influence you one way or the other.   Enjoy!  (Thanks to an anonymous commenter and Vidya for pointed us to a hoax billboard that led us to discover these.)

We added another example of an image of sexualized dominance, this time women’s dominance over men, to our post on the theme.  Thanks to Stumblng Tumblr for the submission!

Still on the topic of sex:  Laura at The F Word posted a video of a commercial that just begged to be added to our post on ejaculation imagery.

You wine drinkers are all sissies!  We added another set of ads to this post on messages about masculinity in Jim Beam ads.  Also on the theme of masculinity, we added a Gillette shampoo ad that tells men to “take charge” of their hair to this post about masculinizing beauty products.  And a reader sent us a link to more antics from Dmitri the Lover (I feel gross just writing his name).

We added a series of furnishings shaped like female bodies–mostly tits and asses really–to a post on in-no-way-theoretical objectification. Click here for the post.  Here’s a teaser just for fun:

Relatedly, we added an image of a pole-dancer alarm clock from a catalog to this post featuring the “Bitchcruiser.”  Yeah, you gotta take a look at that one.

On the theme of using women’s bodies to “sell” stuff, here’s another image showing how PETA sexualizes women as a way to advocate vegetarianism.

On gender and socialization, we added a screen shot of an Amazon webpage showing what to buy “for her” and “for him” to our post about gendered holiday gift marketing (sent in by Sofia A.) and we added an image of the video game Imagine: Babies to this post about how Miss Bimbo socializes girls into traditional gender roles.

Speaking of banal stereotypes, Jasmine sent us some more examples of truly boring uses of stereotypes.  This time they are used to promote eye care.  Find them here.

We added an image comparing a Brazilian brand of rum to Brazilian waxes (you know, those kinds of waxes) to make the claim that the brand is authentic to this post.  Because there’s nothing more authentic than a woman waxed to look like a child.  What!?

Finally, what better way to end our list than with a post about animals, “love,” and babies!  A bonded pair of male penguins at a zoo were replacing the eggs of male-female couples with rocks and sneaking off with their eggs.  The zoo keepers helped them legitimately adopt and now everyone’s happy.  We added a picture of this couple to our post about actual “homosexual” pairings among animals.

Recently Lisa posted some photos of what resource extraction looks like. I thought I would show a different side of this phenomenon: what an oil bust looks like. I grew up in the Middle of Nowhere, Oklahoma. The area has been through two oil booms, one in the 1920s and one in the 60s through the 80s.

But with any energy boom eventually comes the energy bust. I took some photos I took showing what communities looks like if their economy is disproportionately based on oil and the oil companies leave, which were reproduced at Business Insider.

Oil wells that have never been installed sit around on empty lots, slowly rusting. Many oil wells that were in use at one time now sit motionless. Because of high oil prices in the last few years, some oil wells have been put back in production; it’s the first time since I was a kid that you can look across pastures and see many of the oil wells actually pumping. Pipes crisscross the landscape, often slowly tumbling downhill from lack of maintenance. When they get old and rusty enough they start breaking apart, leaving jagged edges that occasionally lead to trips to the doctor for a tetanus shot. An old storage tank, long past any usefulness, slowly rusts.

In an energy bust, real estate prices plummet. If there aren’t many other industries in the area, there’s no way to attract buyers, and houses flood the market as people move looking for work. Houses, many of them perfectly serviceable, slowly decay from lack of upkeep. Families that became wealthy from oil lose their fortunes. The house below was owned by a family that became wealthy from the 1920s oil boom. When that oil bust hit, they lost everything. Their house sits far out in the country and slowly crumbles. Downtowns die and the buildings sit empty and deteriorate over time. Towns don’t have enough children to run independent schools, so rural school districts consolidate. This school was sold off and a local resident told me that it has been, at various times, a bed and breakfast, internet cafe, and beer-only bar, between bouts of sitting empty.

Ponca City is centered around the Continental refinery plant. Continental was owned by Conoco until 1984. There used to be a significant Conoco presence in the town, and as with Bartlesville, it has faced hard times since the Conoco-Phillips headquarters moved to Houston. Some neighborhoods were polluted by the refinery, leading the company to buy out homeowners and tear down the houses (some owned by private individuals, others by the Ponca tribe). In one area where this occurred, the land is now a park. Local residents have heard that Conoco is planning to tear down a lot of its old administrative buildings so it doesn’t have to pay insurance or maintenance costs, meaning there will be even more large swaths of empty land scattered around the city.

There’s nothing exceptional about the experience of these communities. They simply represent a story played out in many towns as oil booms fade and corporations move their headquarters to larger cities. Now, as the Keystone XL pipeline project goes forward, many such communities gear up for their next ride on the energy roller coaster.

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