The people over at Sociological Cinema did an interesting experiment, searching Google images for the continents. Tell us what you see:
“European”:
“North American”:
“South American”:
“African”:
“Asian”:
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.
Laura McD. sent in an extra-disturbing sexist ad from Turkey. The ad, for Biomen shampoo, uses the ever-so-common marketing tactic of shaming men for any association with femininity. The voiceover says:
If you’re not wearing women’s clothes, you shouldn’t be using women’s shampoo either. Here it is. A real man’s shampoo. Biomen. Real men use Biomen.
So far, so predictable. But this ad has drawn intense criticism because the exhortation to avoid girly stuff is recorded over historical footage of Adolf Hitler:
Via AdWeek.
According to Adland, it was still airing as of a couple of days ago, despite complaints from Turkey’s Jewish community and other groups, but JTA reports it was finally pulled.
It is common around election time to hear politicians talk about how they are standing up for ”America,” as if we all had similar interests and were well served by the same policies. Sounds nice. The problem is that it is just not true.
Want evidence? Look at the distribution of gains from our current economic recovery. According to a New York Times summary of a recent study of inequality:
In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.
Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.
The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.
Moreover, ”the top 1 percent has done progressively better in each economic recovery of the past two decades. In the Clinton era expansion, 45 percent of the total income gains went to the top 1 percent; in the Bush recovery, the figure was 65 percent; now it is 93 percent.”
It is hard to celebrate economic expansion when we have an economy structured in such a way that the income generated by our collective efforts ends up in the pockets of a very few.
Matthew Yglesias posted an image from an infographic released by the Census Bureau showing differences in the U.S. population between 1940 and 2010. This section of the graphic focuses on changes in the industries in which the U.S. workforce is employed. For instance, in 1940 23.4% of Americans worked in manufacturing, down to 10.4% in 2010:
Education, health, and social services have emerged as a major employment sector. On the other hand, while agriculture is a minor sector today (in terms of % of people employed), in 1940 nearly 1 in 5 people worked in agriculture. As Yglesias says,
…this drives home the fact that the initial exclusion of agricultural workers from Social Security [as part of the New Deal in the 1930s] was a really major compromise.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that when we find certain traits sexually attractive in others it may be because they signal reproductive fitness. It goes something like this: People who have been sexually attracted to traits that tell the “truth” about genetic superiority have been more likely to choose mates with superior genetics and, therefore, have been more likely to produce healthy offspring that live to an age where they, in turn, can reproduce themselves. Accordingly, nature has selected for individuals attracted to people who display signs of genetic excellence.
Culture throws a wrench in this theory because human can create their own systems of meaning, collectively convincing each other that certain traits are desirable regardless of the relationship between the trait and reproductive fitness. The thinness ideal for women is an excellent example. Judging by pop culture, heterosexual men have a strong preference for very thin women. In fact, however, the weight idealized in mass media is not conducive to reproductive fitness; women won’t ovulate or menstruate below a certain weight because their body recognizes that it can’t support a pregnancy.
A new study — by Leigh Simmons, Marianne Peters, and Gillian Rhodes — offers another tantalizing piece of information regarding the relationship between attractiveness and reproductive fitness. Pre-existing research shows that men with lower voices are judged more sexually attractive, so the authors decided to measure one indicator of their reproductive fitness, sperm count.
The results? Voice attractiveness is related to sperm count, but in the opposite direction expected. Men with higher voices, in fact, have higher sperm concentration, not lower.
The jury is still out about what this means, but it’s an intriguing addition to the ongoing conversation that social and biological scientists are having about how culture and nature interact to shape human experience.
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.
YetAnotherGirl, Andrew, Rosemary, Nathan Jurgens0n, Dolores, and Ann K. all sent in an ad for Belvedere Vodka that should be listed in the annals of bad ideas. The ad shows a gleeful man grabbing a distressed-looking woman who, we are to presume from the text, must not be going down smoothly (via Feministing):
Because how is it not funny to present your product in a context that says sexual assault is funny?
Online criticism of an ad that seems to be making a joke about forcing women to engage in sexual acts led to the company pulling the ad and issuing an apology of the passive “sorry if you were offended” type:
The company’s president also apologized when speaking to CNN about the controversy (via The Consumerist):
It should never have happened. I am currently investigating the matter to determine how this happened and to be sure it never does so again. The content is contrary to our values and we deeply regret this lapse.
The company also made a donation to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN).
Phil Villarreal, who posted about the ad and the apology at The Consumerist, suggests that the ad may be even more cynical than it at first appears:
The cynical might wonder whether or not the campaign and apology made up a coordinated effort to draw attention to the brand.
Intentionally invoking outrage, then making an apology and symbolic corporate donation as marketing strategy. Any readers with marketing expertise have any insight here? We often see cases of companies desperately trying to control the negative effects of controversies. When does a controversy hurt a brand and when does it serve as a marketing opportunity?
UPDATE: Reader Tom points out that it turns out to be a still from a parody video that someone at the company then reposted (via Adland):
Somebody on their social media team obviously created (or found) and posted it thinking it was an amusing parody. And that person has probably been found and fired.
But it is unlikely anyone officially *in charge* of the brand actually saw and approved this.
As Tom says, this brings up a separate issue: the challenges to companies of managing brand image in a world where one person in the organization can quickly disseminate something via the company’s social networking sites to thousands or even millions of people with much less oversight than a traditional ad campaign would get, especially when viewers make little distinction between images included in tweets or Facebook updates and those in billboards, print ads, etc.
Cross-posted at Global Policy TV.
Recent research has unearthed the interesting finding that most Americans dislike atheists. In fact, they strongly dislike atheists. Surveys suggest that they’d rather share a beer with almost anyone, even members of historically-hated groups: homosexuals, African-Americans, or Muslims (yes, even after 9/11). This phenomenon is new in American society, as I’ll discuss below, and reflects a significant change in our social alliances.
But first, consider this data published by Penny Edgell and her colleagues in the American Sociological Review (full text). It reveals that Americans believe that atheists, more than many other groups, are not likely to agree with their “vision of American society.” Atheists topped the list, beating out the second contender, Muslims, by 13 percentage points. Likewise, among the types of people Americans would not want their children to marry, atheists come first, beating out Muslims (again) by 14 points and African Americans by a full 20.
This dislike for atheists, by the way, isn’t on the wane. While dislike of gays and lesbians has been easing, racism has become increasingly unacceptable, and religious diversity has become less contentious, intolerance for non-believers has held steady.
An even more recent article revealed that the reason people dislike atheists so much has to do with trust (cite). Many people are skeptical that someone who doesn’t believe in God would do the right thing, given that they don’t imagine that a higher power is watching them and keeping score. Atheists were more distrusted than Muslims, Jews, gay men, and feminists. The only group that was as strongly suspected of bad behavior as atheists? Rapists.
What is interesting in all this – above and beyond a clear prejudice against atheists – is the change in how Americans think about religion. Until recently, members of different religious saw each other as enemies, not friends. American history is characterized by “long-standing divisions among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews” (Edgell et al.). Many of us can remember how significant it was to elect the first Catholic president (something we take for granted as unremarkable now) and we are on the precipice of nominating a Mormon to run on the Republican ticket.
Indeed, historical data shows that Americans have been increasingly willing to vote for a Catholic or Jewish Presidential Candidate (as well as an African American and homosexual candidate), but their willingness to vote for an atheist is lagging behind:
The take home point has to do with shifting social alliances. Now that most Americans have abandoned a strong dislike for members of other religions, it’s possible for The Religious to emerge as a socially-meaningful identity group. In other words, once members of different religions begin to see each other as the same instead of different, they can begin to align together. Suddenly atheists become an obvious foe. Instead of one of many types of people who had lost their way (along with people of different faiths), atheists could emerge as uniquely problematic. It is the building of cross-religious alliances, then, that undergirds the strong dislike for atheists specifically.
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.
Cross-posted at Ms.
Abby F. and an anonymous reader let us know about an Acuvue contact lens commercial aimed at teens that reinforces both gender and racial stereotypes. The teens look forward to their futures. For the boys, these involve future career success — notice the African American teen dreams of being a famous athlete, while the White boy’s future involves moving up the corporate career ladder. And what does the girl’s life hold? A boy who currently ignores her will want to dance with her.
As the submitters said, the boys are future role models and leaders, while the height of the girl’s future is that she gets to be desired.
UPDATE: James McRitchie, who posts at Corporate Governance, linked to our post last week and has spoken to someone in the PR department at Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Acuvue. The company has since pulled this particular ad, and provided this explanation, which James posted:
The Acuvue Brand Contact Lenses 1-Day campaign was designed to portray defining moments in teens’ lives that often involve the desire to wear contact lenses rather than glasses, such as when playing sports, in social situations, and at life events (i.e., moving to a new school). As the campaign evolved, we continued to ask teens and their parents to share their thoughts about how wearing contact lenses could play a role in helping teens achieve their dreams. We received thousands of responses that helped us add new ideas to the campaign.
We recently received feedback about one ad in the campaign that regrettably appeared to reinforce stereotypes. While this was clearly not our intent, we appreciate consumer feedback and have removed this ad. We are currently reassessing elements of this campaign so that we can continue to share how contact lenses can play a role helping teens’ realize their hopes and aspirations.
I think James makes a very good point in his post as well:
I’m sure kids have all kinds of dreams that play into society’s stereotypes. Many little girls love Barbies and dream of being a princess. Many young black boys hope to be NBA stars. How does J&J reflect the dreams of its customers while ensuring they don’t reinforce stereotyping?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these representations in and of themselves, if they existed among a diverse array images of other dreams boys and girls of all races should aspire to. Unfortunately, however, they don’t exist in a vacuum; they appeared in a cultural context in which young women are told, via a variety of messages that they encounter over and over again, that their primary concern should be their attractiveness to boys and where African American teens often find themselves valued for their athletic ability more than their academic successes. When you live in a society with gender and racial inequality, sometimes messages intersect with existing stereotypes in ways that reinforce negative messages just because of their pervasiveness; figuring out how to negotiate such potential problems is an ongoing challenge for all of us concerned about racial and gender representation.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
