Peter Hessler, at the New Yorker, discusses the practice of outsourcing art to China. According to Hessler, Chinese people, mostly from the countryside, are trained to paint copies of photographs or paintings en masse and those paintings are sold to tourists elsewhere in the world.

Painters pose in their workspace:

Paintings to be sold as souvenirs somewhere in the American West:

Venice?

See more at the slide show.

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

The Oral Cancer Foundation released this video last month, just a couple of weeks before the FDA was scheduled to vote on approval of the ‘male’ Gardasil vaccine.

Whether you’re pro- or anti-vaccine, you might wonder why has FDA testing of and approval for Gardasil’s use on males lagged three years behind the female-only “cervical cancer” vaccine? Most of us who have followed Gardasil’s development were not surprised when the FDA recently voted to approve its use on boys and young men for the prevention of genital warts. However, this limited focus on male genital warts ignores the growing number of medical studies which have shown causal connections between two cervical-cancer causing types of HPV (covered by Gardasil) and a variety of cancers that can have devastating health consequences in female and male bodies.

In light of this body of research, many were dismayed by the fact that the CDC decided against recommending routine use of the Gardasil vaccine for boys.  A NYT article reported that this committee will likely consider data on Gardasil’s ability to protect against male cancers when it meets again in February.

As more Americans learn about the causal links between HPV strains covered by Gardasil and serious (sometimes fatal) oral and anogenital cancers, it will be interesting to see if U.S. boys/young men get vaccinated at as high a rate as girls/young women.

To educate people about the risk of oral cancer from sexually-transmitted HPV, the Oral Cancer Foundation released this video:

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Adina Nack is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University specializing in medical sociology, gender inequality and sexual health.  Nack’s book, Damaged Goods?  Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases came out in 2008.  You can see an earlier post of hers, about sexually transmitted disease and stigma, here.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Cate M. emailed us about the promo for the movie “The Killer Inside Me,” saying,

The level of violence is at NSFW levels and quite possibly one of the most ‘trigger warning’ vids I’ve ever seen used to promote a non-horror film.

We get a lot of submissions about sexualized violence toward women, so I thought, “well, ok, we’ll see.” And then I watched it, and at 1:15 in had to pause because I was already horrified. Here’s the whole 5:42 promo. It’s Not At All Safe for Work, and you won’t want to watch it if scenes of sexualized brutality toward women would be a trigger for you. And also, I guess, Spoiler Alert, if that’s your main concern.

UPDATE: The promo keeps being taken down; here’s a link that works for now, but I don’t know for how long.

Clearly, Casey Affleck’s character is a sadistic asshole (the cigar on the guy’s hand), but in the promo, at least, the graphic, sexualized violence is reserved for women…who also appear to like it, at least for a while. Jessica Alba gives in to him, and apparently starts a relationship with him, after he pulls her pants down and whips her. Perhaps that’s because she’s a prostitute; of course she’d like a dominant man who plays rough, right?

The thing is, you could make this movie and tell the same story without actually showing all the violence in such a graphic way. Movies imply things all the time. It’s a choice to show this type of violence toward women as a form of entertainment…and to show the women liking it.

See our posts on increases in violence toward women on primetime TV, sexualized violence on TV crime procedurals, and the movie “DeadGirl.”

Kay, a student at a University in Munich, sent along an invitation for a Corps Isaria fraternity, or or “Burschenschafts,” party. The cover for the invitation reads “Isarias Gute Kinderstube” which, she explains, “translates literally to good nursery and means something like being well raised, knowing how to behave.”

When you open the invitation you see a naked woman, covered only by a teddy bear, alongside baby-related items (a Snuffalufagus, a rocking Zebra, and a crib) and party-related items (a disco ball, a stag’s head, and high heeled shoes):

Kay explains that the copy, “Das Corps Isaria gibt sich die Ehre und laedt zur eskaloesesten Pyjamaparty der Stadt” translates into something like “The Corps Isaria is honored to host the most risque sleepover in town.”

The invitation is another example of the infantilization of women. Or, as Kay put it, a “mixture of the male gaze and child porn fetishism.”

For more infantilization of women, see here, here, here, here, and here, and here.

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

Ilari Sani sent in this vintage ad encouraging Americans to eat vegetables and “Toughen Up.”  Today salad is definitely considered “girl food,” and there are plenty of vintage examples in which meat was connected with strength and toughness (and, more generally, masculinity; see below).  This ad tries to contest that idea.  I wonder if the effort was successful in its day, or if it fell flat alongside the meat = real food narrative.

For vintage examples of meat being connected to masculinity, see here and here.  For contemporary examples, see here and here.

Found at Vintage Ads.

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

Parents Television Council just released their new data comparing the incidence of violence against women and girls by CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX during prime time sweeps in 2004 and 2009 (report here).  They found a 120% increase in depictions of violence against women and girls amidst a steady rate of overall frequency of violence.

They write:

Cumulatively, across all study periods and all networks, the most frequent type of violence was beating (29%), followed by credible threats of violence (18%), shooting (11%), rape (8%), stabbing (6%), and torture (2%).  Violence against women resulted in death 19% of the time.

Violence towards women or the graphic consequences of violence tends overwhelmingly to be depicted (92%) rather than implied (5%) or described (3%).

So those’re the numbers, how about some examples of the normalization of violence against women: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, and forty-three.

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

Farrah F. sent us a link to an article on the website for Forward, a newspaper aimed at the American Jewish community. The article looks at the gender gap in pay at Jewish community organizations. According to the article,

…a Forward survey of 75 major American Jewish communal organizations found that fewer than one in six are run by women, and those women are paid 61 cents to every dollar earned by male leaders.

Incomes of leaders of the organizations they surveyed (data is from 2008 unless otherwise specified, and women are highlighted in blue):

The Forward’s survey was drawn from the most recent public records or, if that information wasn’t available, from the organization itself. The median salary for men was $287,702, while the median for women was $175,211, amounting to a ratio of 61 cents to one dollar.

More from the article:

Women comprise about 75% of those employed by federations, advocacy and social service organizations, and religious and educational institutions, but occupy only 14.3% of the top positions. Of the 11 female leaders identified in this survey, three are in interim roles.

In another article, Forward discusses family leave policies at Jewish organizations, finding that relatively few offer paid leave:

UPDATE: A few people have asked why I chose to post about these particular organizations. The short answer is: because that’s what I had. My interest here wasn’t in the religious aspect, but in the gender disparities in volunteer/community organizations; I suspect these same trends occur in a lot of similar organizations, not just Jewish ones. I wish I had info on a more general set, but I so far haven’t been able to find a study like this one, but for a wider array of organizations. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to post it.

Hat tip to x-ray delta one, via Copyranter.

NEW! (Dec. ’09): Larry (of The Daily Mirror) found two images of Earhart from 1937 in the L.A. Times photo archives. In both Earhart was asked to pose in flirty or cutesy ways that it’s hard to imagine a famous male pilot being posed in:

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