Archive: Jul 2010

This ad, spotted by Stephanie DeH. in a physical therapist’s office, asks viewers to donate blood with the argument that it’s “easier” to save a life than to save the world:

Text:

Saving the world isn’t easy. Saving a life is.
Just one pint of blood can save up to three lives.

The ad commits two fallacies.

First, it compares saving the whole world (or maybe every tree in the world) with saving just “a” life.  Saving a life may, indeed, be easier than saving the whole world, but it’s not a fair comparison.  Saving the whole world is hard, but about as hard as saving every life on it.

Second, it suggests that we have to choose.  “You could try to save the world,” the ad says, “but it’s pretty hopeless.  It’s much easier to save a life.  So put down that tree and donate blood.”  Giving blood, then, is placed in competition with environmental activism as if (or because) volunteerism is a zero sum game.

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.

Andrew M. sent us a link to an interesting post by Lewis Denby at Beef Jack about the video game APB. The game lets you customize the characters in a variety of ways, including height and weight. Denby noticed something interesting about the customization, however. Here’s a male figure with the weight at the maximum level:

As Denby points out, it’s pretty unusual to have main characters that give the option of not being super muscular and slim, so this is pretty surprising. Perhaps less surprising is what he found when he maxed out the weight scale for a female character:

While she’s certainly larger than most women in video games, the maximum body proportion for her seems quite a bit thinner than the maximum allowed for the male character, and she still has an hourglass shape. So you’re given the option to customize the characters’ bodies, but it appears you get less choice for the female figures than the male ones. The question is why; did the designers think this is as large as anyone was likely to ever want a female character to be? Were they, for whatever reason, more concerned about female than male characters being too much outside the video game norm, to the point of limiting customization options? Some other reason for this disparity? If it were due just to technical design issues, I don’t see why it would be possible to give more weight range for the male character than the female one.

Beef Jack contacted the company for comment but, it being the weekend, they’re still waiting to hear back.

The website If It Was My Home (and yes, they know about the grammar error) allows you to get a better grasp on the size of the area affected by the BP oil leak.  They use National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s daily updates on where the oil will reach in the next 24 hours and allow you to use Google Maps to position it anywhere you want. It’s easier for me, at least, to get an idea of the dimensions of the area we’re talking about when I can imagine it on an area I’m familiar with than seeing it on a map of the ocean.

Here’s the oil leak area centered over Las Vegas, where I live:

The darker the shade of gray, the denser the oil. Here is the current NOAA surface oil projection for the next 24 hours; red indicates places oil may hit shores:

Today’s 72-hour projection, which shows the range extending qute a bit to the west, and more affected shoreline:

Thanks to Kate W. for the link!

Related posts: using the oil spill to advertise cheap flights, should we clean up oil-soaked wildlife?, the Gulf oil industry, BP buys Google search terms, BP gives Florida money for advertising tourism, protesting BP, and the power of images of environmental disasters.

Tom Megginson alerted us to an interesting example of “astroturf” activism.  After complaints from religious groups, the New York City transit authority took down the following ads from buses running through largely Hasidic Jewish communities:

Georgi Vodka saw the move as a marketing opportunity and hired models to wear the bikini pictured in the ad and pretend to protest the censorship.  Playing on their nudity, their signs had slogans such as “MTA should butt out of bikini ads.”

To contrast this with genuine grassroots campaigns in which “regular” people come together to try to change something about their society, sociologists call this type of marketing “astroturf” activism, fake protests arranged and paid for by companies.

So first we have a religious community expressing its displeasure to the city regarding an advertising campaign they find offensive.  They organize, in true grassroots fashion, to have the ads removed from the buses that travel through their neighborhoods.  Then a company hires people to put on a counter-protest, in true astroturf fashion, turning what was a simple case of collective action into (an apparent) social conflict.  But, as is characteristic of astroturf movements, Georgi isn’t doing it in an effort to shape society into a form that it finds good and beneficial (as the Jews are, whether you agree with their opinion or not), they’re simply trying to make money.  And they’re willing to deride the Hasidic community if they need to.  In fact, Georgi spokesperson Todd Shapiro told Fox News that they have:

…no intention of resting until their controversial campaign is blasted across the backside of all buses that travel through Hasidic Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn… Georgi Vodka now plans to drive the billboard through these forbidden areas…

This is a good example of how even protest has been co-opted by marketers.  Our rights as citizens to mobilize can seem ineffectual and trivial when solid efforts, like that of the Hasidic community, are mocked by more powerful organizations.  Further, “non-profit” organizations funded by companies or industries make it difficult to know if any given protest is grassroots or astroturf, such that all activism is suspect.

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.

Fluid hair salon released this ad to let people know that it is donating all clipped hair to the oil recovery efforts in the Gulf:

The ad is a perfect example of the way in which entirely-unrelated messages get inexplicably translated into half-naked women looking uncomfortable.  Why not advertise donations to oil recovery with clean beaches, or dirty beaches, or oil booms, or rinsed off birds, or smiling shrimpers, or actual hair-based oil spill mats?  Why in heaven’s name slather a perfectly clean woman in goop that looks like oil and make her crawl in a marsh?

Because half-naked women who are dirty, disgusting, and uncomfortable are high-fashion.  Because we love to see women on their knees in the mud.  To a great extent, elite fashion imagery involves putting women in gross situations and pretending that it’s cool.  These images assault their bodies and their dignity.  So how else would an elite salon advertise its good-doing?  Female punishment is the language of fashion. Fluid just speaks it fluently.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. sent us a link to a story at Slate about (mostly European) “national personifications” — that is, human figures used to represent particular countries, their citizens, or ideas of the national character.  Personification is contentious in that it aims to represent a diverse society with a single person, often representing a simple idea.  Accordingly, we sometimes see divergent, or even conflicting, personifications.

Many personifications in Europe and areas once colonized by them connect the nation to noble ideas and values through the use of Latin-derived names and the use of robes, poses, and other elements of classic statues and paintings to adorn a female figure. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Britannia (an emblem that first emerged when Britain was still ruled by Rome) is a goddess-like figure wearing a Roman-style helmet who has, over time, come to represent the nation and the idea of liberty:

The U.S. has a similar figure, Columbia:

More popular characterizations also emerge, often representing the national character not through goddess-like imagery but as an Average Citizen.  For instance, much more familiar in the U.S. than Columbia is Uncle Sam. He differs from many other national personifications in that he doesn’t represent the U.S. citizenry or the idea of the nation in general; he specifically represents the U.S. government and is best known for wanting “you” to join the military, buy war bonds, and such:

And in addition to Brittania, the U.K. is also personified by John Bull:

According to the Slate article, John Bull presents the British people as middle-class, smart in a common-sense way, and also somewhat suspicious of authority — that is, John Bull is a personification that separates the citizenry from government (the source of authority) to some extent, and thus has been used in many political cartoons to question government policies (whereas Uncle Sam has often been used to advocate them, since he represents the government itself).

Going a step further, Portugal’s Zé Povinho, a working-class personification, actively mocks the powerful, including political elites:

Competing personifications may be used by different political factions. For instance, those in favor of and opposed to Irish independence used female emblems of Ireland. Opponents of Irish nationalism used the figure of Hibernia, represented as the younger sister of Brittania and in need of her sister’s protection from the brutish (male) nationalist forces:

Nationalists responded with Kathleen Ni Houlihan, “generally depicted as an old woman who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die to free Ireland from colonial rule, usually resulting in the young men becoming martyrs for this cause”:

The gender element in these competing personifications is interesting: in both cases Ireland is a woman in need of protection, but who see needs protected by (a stronger sister or men) and from (men in both cases) differs.

So here we have just a small handful of national personifications that may coexist fairly harmoniously while serving different purposes (say, Brittania and John Bull) or actively conflict (representations of Ireland). Various groups in a nation (political elites, different social classes, rebels, etc.) are unlikely to identify equally with a single personification; thus, the figures used to represent a country or its citizens can become sites of political or cultural contention, defining who has the most legitimate claim to being the backbone of the nation (the middle-class John Bull, the working-class Zé Povinho) or framing independence or other political movements.

Kristi P. sent us a link to a story at OMG! from Yahoo! about Christina Hendricks, who is famous for playing the curvaceous Joan on Mad Men. The article title includes “‘I Felt Beautiful’ Gaining ’15 Pounds’,” and the article discusses how Hendricks feels about her body.

Notice the contradiction in this screencap?

That’s right: throughout the article on how Christina Hendricks loves her non-waifish body there are links to stories about “incredible star slim-downs,” getting a “celebrity six-pack,” and how to get a “last-minute bikini bod.” So even in a story about a person reveling in her body, the message is clearly conveyed that your own body is not good enough, and to make it better, you probably need to make it thinner.

This headline for this Listerine ad from 1951 reads, “Let the tide take her out… I WON’T!”

Translation:  “I’d let a woman with bad breath die before I would go on a date with her.”

If that wouldn’t scare you into buying Listerine, I don’t know what would!

Source: Vintage Ads.

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.