Archive: Sep 2009

Brian Safi offers a fun tripartite typology of (mostly) gay men in advertising: (1) homoeroticism as simultaneously hilarious and disgusting in ads aimed at straight men, (2) coded gay cues in ads aimed at a general market, and (3) parallel ads, differing only slightly from each other, playing in straight and gay media. The second set of ads = especially hilarious. Enjoy.

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

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.

Nice examples of the evolution of the diet industry and the role of businesses in trying to market their products as dietary aids (found here and here):

The fine print:

Everyone knows sugar contains calories.  So it’s hard to think of sugar as a big help in weight control, yet that’s exactly what sugar can be.

When your blood sugar level is low, your appestat is turned up and you’re hungry.  (Probably tired, too.) Just a small amount of sugar, in a soft drink, candy, coffee, or tea, will turn your appestat down.  Then you’re not so apt to overeat, and overeating is really what makes you far.

In addition to helping with weight control, sugar does other good things.  For one, it gives you quick energy.  Sugar is all energy, and is taken into your blood stream faster than any other food.  So when sugar turns your appestat ‘off,’ you might say it ‘turns you on.’  Artificial sweeteners don’t affect your appestat and have no energy value.  Also, sugar tastes good, and so do foods made with sugar.  Stay with sugar.  Sugar’s got what it takes!

Only 18 calories per teaspoon…
and it’s all energy.

NEW (Dec. ’09)!

See also our recent post on marketing disguised as news.

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

You might think that during an economic crisis that leads to job loss, workers might begin to think more positively about unions, seeing them as a possible buffer that would keep each individual worker from being completely on his or her own. But Nate Silver, over at FiveThirtyEight, posted a graph showing the relationship between the unemployment rate and public support for labor unions, based on historical data that goes back as far as 1948, and it’s distinctly negative:

Of course, support for unions has been decreasing in general since World War II, so some of the trend is likely due to that. But Silver says that even after controlling for the overall downward trend in support for organized labor, we see:

…a decrease in approval of 2.1 points for unions for every point increase in unemployment. Both relationships [this one, and the model without taking the overall downward trend into account] are highly statistically significant.

So what would explain this? The obvious answer would be that people must in some way blame unions for job loss–perhaps believing that they have negotiated pay and benefits that are too high and as a result have driven companies out of the U.S., causing people to lose jobs.

Or maybe some workers who were in unions blame them for not negotiating hard enough to keep their jobs–perhaps as people lose jobs, or see those around them losing theirs, they feel that their unions didn’t do everything possible to save their jobs, that union leaders got scared and gave in to corporate demands to allow layoffs. That might explain the decrease in support for some, though today unionization is low enough that it’s not enough to have a large impact on overall levels of support.

Another possible explanation is that during a time of rising unemployment, people simply feel they can’t afford to support unions–that they need a job now, and they’ll oppose unions and collective bargaining if they think that makes it less likely that employers will be hiring. In that case, they may not be blaming unions for unemployment directly, but may think that unions are a luxury that just have to be discarded when you’re desperate, individually or as a nation.

Thoughts?

Tarte is a products sold by Sephora, which has a whole line of “naturally gorgeous” brands:

Naturally gorgeous could mean two things, I suppose:

1.  You are gorgeous without make-up.

LOL… moving on:

2.  Our make-up is natural.

This is what Sephora means.  But if you use their “naturally gorgeous” products, will your gorgeous be natural?  Not necessarily.  As Audrey at Triple Pundit points out, the USDA does not regulate cosmetics, and neither does any other governmental agency.  They can apply the word “natural” to any product because no entity ensures that the word actually means anything.

Audrey continues:

According to their website, their natural products are “formulated with high concentrations of plant-based and naturally-derived ingredients, and fewer to no parabens, sodium lauryl sulfate, phthalates, petrochemicals, and synthetic fragrances or dyes.” And the products in their organic section contain over 70% organic ingredients.

So Sephora says they’re natural.  The Environmental Working Group however, an organization with a wholly different agenda, says that products that Sephora labels natural–such as Tarte, Caudalie, Decleor, and Korres Natural Products–present a moderate to high toxin hazard.

I think this is a really nice example of how difficult it can be to figure out what’s true.  First, language is tricky and it’s used to trick us.  Second, we can’t trust corporations (we just can’t).  They say that they have our best interests in mind, but they do not.  Third, other entities also have agendas.  The Environmental Working Group is a non-profit organization, but it too has an agenda.  Audrey points out that if there is a make-up that doesn’t get labeled as toxic by the Environmental Working Group, she has yet to figure out what it is.

So how do we know?  More problematically, how do we know when there is a question like this to be asked of every single product and service we could buy?  Because even if we had time to do the real research to figure out the answer to the cosmetics question, no one has time to do the research to figure out the answers to all the questions.  And while there are website designed to tell you the answers (like the Environmental Working Group or this one on eco-labels), we still have to look more closely at them in order to know whether their answers are good.  So the work in finding the truth isn’t alleviated, it’s just one step removed.

See also this post on the framing of genetically-modified food by activists and this post on what “organic” looks like.

(Image via.)

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

Kelebek sent in an Australian commercial for Brut deodorant. In it, a male robot transforms various objects (a motorcycle, a drink) into “better” versions, more fitting of a super macho robot. One of the improved items is a Barbie doll/woman:

The woman is, quite literally, an object, to be “modified,” and then posed with his other belongings. And as we see, being “brutally male” is associated with drinking a lot, driving powerful vehicles, having hot women, and probably engaging in the type of risky behaviors that partially explain why men in many industrialized nations live shorter lives than women.

The commercial was pulled from TV by the Advertising Standards Bureau after they determined it was offensive to women. The commercial had to be recut…so that the woman isn’t one of the “objects” in the back of his vehicle at the end. The scene where he modifies the Barbie to be a live woman, and the phrase “reject, modify object,” weren’t removed. And:

Brut brand manager Deane De Villiers defended the ad, saying the robot carried the woman with the utmost of respect “as one would carry one’s bride”.

Yes. If your bride were an object you created to your very own specifications.

And for fun, read the comments to that Sun-Herald article.

This graphic, found at ChartPorn, compares the average number of work hours per year and per week across selected countries.  After the graphic, I listed the countries in order just for fun.

hours/country

27 Germany
27 Netherlands
27 Norway
30 Belgium
30 France
31 Ireland
31 Denmark
31 Spain
31 Sweden
32 Austria
32 Switzerland
32 U.K.
33 Australia
33 Canada
33 Finland
34 Japan
34 New Zealand
34 Portugal
35 Iceland
35 Italy
35 Slovakia
35  U.S.
36  Mexico
38 Czech Republic
38 Hungary
38 Poland
41 Greece
44 South Korea

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

The figure below, borrowed from U.S. News and World Report, shows that the wage gap between women and men, for nearly all age groups, has narrowed significantly between 1979 and 2008.  It also shows that the wage gap is smallest for men and women aged 20-24, grows for men and women aged 25-34, grows even further for men and women aged 35-44, and remains steady after that.

These data are for men and women in the same jobs working full time.  So what would explain this change?  Sociologists have found that much of the growth in the wage gap over the life course is due to the fact that women are held disproportionately responsible for childcare and housework (see some data here).  As men and women start to have children, women (whether by choice or necessity) find themselves sacrificing their careers more so than men.  On the flip side, mothers are discriminated against by employers more often than fathers and women without children. (See, for example, this clip of Gov. Rendell commenting that Janet Napolitano is a good candidate for secretary of Homeland Security because she has no family.) That’s why you see the wage gap increasing during prime childbearing years (25-44), but not afterward.

For more on the wage gap, see our posts on the wage gap for college grads, comparing different kinds of wage gaps, the role of job segregation, gender and the wage gap in different professions.

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

My friend Larry, of The Daily Mirror, found some awesome old ads for Bull Durham tobacco. Here’s the original, with both a map of North America on his side and a scrotum that is partially obscured by still clearly present:

Here’s the version that ran from 1919-1924. Notice the difference?

No more shocking reproductive organs! Also, he doesn’t have a map of North America on his side any more. As Larry says, clearly a subversive plot to try to symbolically emasculate the U.S., probably so the socialists could take over.

I do wonder what was going on during that particular time period that would make marketers at Bull Durham believe that a less anatomically correct version was necessary. Any thoughts (other than it being a subversive plot)?

More recently we saw men’s nipples airbrushed out of a Wrestle Mania billboard. On the other hand, testicles were added to a statue of Civil War General John H. Morgan sitting in his favorite horse, Bess…who, as you might have surmised, wasn’t a male horse and did not have testicles. But, you know, testicles made her look more appropriate for a military figure to ride.