Citizen Parables and Dmitriy T.M. alerted us to this month’s French Vogue.  According to Jezebel, it features exactly zero black models.  It does, however, contain several images of Dutch model Lara Stone painted so as to look black.

The photos are being condemned as contemporary blackface.  I’d like to open it up to discussion:

1.  Is painting a white model so as to look black the same thing (in some important and significant way) as the derogatory minstrelsy with which blackface (with white mouths and red lips) is associated?  Is the intent (dehumanization) the same?  Is the effect the same?   Why or why not?  If not, could it be that we are as inured to racism now as they were then?

2.  Is the real (or part of the) problem the lack of actual black models?  That is, if there were black models in the magazine, would we read these images differently?

3.  If we saw models of different races being painted various colors, would the white model painted black cease to be significant?  Or, because of history, should this always (for the foreseeable future) be off limits?

4.  Is this “edgy” (and, therefore, fashion forward) exactly because it references historical blackface?  In that case, should fashion play with such topics?  Can people in the fashion industry do so responsibly?  And, if so, what would that look like?

More examples and discussion of contemporary “blackface” here, here, here, here, and here.  Also, Bugs Bunny.

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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.

We’ve collected many images of the gendering and sexualization of food, where foods are turned into sexy female bodies or are shown alongside sexy women. Miriam sent us a link to Brick House Tavern & Tap, which markets itself as a Hooters-lite for-the-guys restaurant. The menu includes some sexualized elements, and is based on a clear gendering of items. Clearly it’s objectifying women (check out the website), but what interests me is the message we get about masculinity.

There are salads for men and women; the male version includes two types of meat and boiled egg:

Men are supposed to control things; foods are described as dominant or submissive. I presume the “man-cave” dish would fall into the dominant category:

Men’s foods are unhealthy. Steamed, rather than fried, options? Those are for the ladies:

Real manliness is associated with guns:

UPDATE: Reader Lisa says,

I thought the “gun show” reference was to biceps – e.g. men have muscles and women don’t. (e.g. Do you have your tickets to the gun show? har har har)

That makes total sense. I’ve had the good luck to never have heard that particular joke until now.

There’s also a class element:

And desserts are “the happy ending,” with “double d” cupcakes and “sweet, innocent” (girl)-next-door apple crumble:

It’s a common theme (see Lisa’s post on frozen dinners): real men need big meals with lots of meat. They don’t worry about health–they want you to deep-fry everything, dammit! Trying to eat a healthy, low-fat diet is for women. And foods are depicted as parts of women’s bodies (“double d”) or associated with sex (“the happy ending”).

See also Campbell’s ad saying beef soup is for men only.

Ryan A. sent in this image of a letter (found at Letters of Note) sent to the Postmaster General in 1934, in which men ask for women to be fired so that men can have jobs:

Notice that work is depicted as an oppressive burden for women (“…in place of making slaves of them let them be ladies”). Men, on the other hand, are entitled to take employment from women if they are in need of it to avoid being “bums” (and apparently it’s ok to make slaves of them).

Now, don’t get me wrong: I actually have sympathy for the psychological distress these and other men must have felt at the time. When manhood is highly associated with the ability to support a family on your income alone, job loss and poverty is not just embarrassing, it is a threat to your very identity as a man. The plea for jobs to help young men “make a name for themselves” is partly a call to let them become responsible adult men in good social standing, rather than bums (a term loaded with moral judgment).

So I have sympathy for the men struggling with the feeling of failure that came with joblessness. But it’s still noteworthy that the letter indicates a sense of entitlement to women’s jobs (much like veterans returning from World War II felt toward women who had taken jobs outside the home). Women, presumably, had a husband to support them and it was his duty to not be a bum so that she wouldn’t need to take a job from another man.

U.S. civilians, by virtue of geography and geopolitics, have rarely experienced war firsthand. The possibility of the destruction of our infrastructure or civilian casualties on our land has remained remote. Today, for example, though we are waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, non-military Americans do not expect to personally suffer (with the significant exception of harm to and the loss of loved ones).

That civilian populations can experience war in vastly different ways is illustrated by this photograph:

It is the early 1920s and the Soviet Union has been at war with much of Europe for several years. In the photograph, children practice their response to being gassed in an attack.

The Vietnam War was the first televised war and some sociologists credit the visual images returning from the war for increasing opposition.  But the idea that an understanding of the horrible, destructive, and deadly effects of war would require the mass media is predicated on U.S. geographical detachment.  That is, the mass media would be less necessary if the war was happening on our soil.

Earlier this month, the U.S. military hardened its rule against publishing photographs of dead or dying U.S. soldiers.  The rule for embedded journalists states that:

Media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action.

This separates U.S. civilians from war in a second way, by politics.  So a civilian population can be isolated from its own wars by geography or by politics and, largely, the U.S. is separated by both.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for this great photograph.

For more posts discussing the impact of war on civilians, see license plate patriotism, sex protest, war is boring, WWII civilian sacrifices (carpooling and staying off the phone), war and euphemism, framing “their” deaths, the silent ranks, U.S. non-news about war, and reframing the “atomic bomb” (the evolution of the term and mushroom clouds have a silver lining).

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

From statehealthfacts.org using data from 2006:

At the website you can scroll over each state to see the exact number. The overall rate for the U.S. is 10.2 per 100,000. The high is in the District of Columbia, at 20.6; the high among states was 19.3 in Louisiana. The lowest rate is in Hawaii–2.5 per 100,000.

I don’t know what’s going on in the U.S. Virgin Islands–the table has a rate of 43.2 per 100,000. Perhaps that’s statistical noise in the estimate due to the fact that the territory has a total population of only about 110,000, which might distort rates given per 100,000 population.

I am also embarrassed to admit that until this very moment I thought the Virgin Islands were somewhere in the Pacific, probably near Tahiti. Turns out it’s in the Caribbean. Huh.

This last week New York Times suggesting that older woman/younger man relationships were on the rise.  But I wouldn’t get too excited just yet.  The data below shows that the percentage of men marrying women ten and especially five years younger is decreasing and the percentage of women marrying men ten and especially five years younger is increasing.

It all looks very dramatic until you check out the y axis.  Notice that the y axis for the “husband older” graph is zero to 35%, but the y axis for the “wife older” graph is zero to 10%.  This makes the data for men look more impressive than it is.  Not that 8 or 10 percentage points is insignificant, but it would be far less impressive on a zero to 100 scale.  The data for the women, especially sitting right next to the “husband older” table, look far more impressive than it is.

Only about 6% of women are marrying men five years younger or more.  That’s a two percentage point increase since 1960.  Not exactly a cougar revolution.  One in four men are still marrying women five years younger or more.  And, though it appears that they’re not marrying women five years younger or more as frequently, the age distribution of the remaining 69% of marriages is left invisible and most of them probably involve women that are somewhat younger than their husbands.

So, yes, today women are more likely to marry younger men than they were in 1960.  But the presentation of the data (the inconsistency in the y axis) makes the degree of difference seem larger than it is.

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

Lindsay H. sent in a Kingsford Charcoal ad, in which we learn the proper cooking roles for men and women–men cook outside, women cook inside:

It’s just like how men are supposed to do their cleaning outside by mowing the lawn! Glad we cleared all that up, and also instructed women how to avoid embarrassing their male partners in front of their guy friends.

I have argued elsewhere on this blog that the fact that companies don’t sell make-up to men is a triumph of gender ideology over capitalism.

That said, a few companies are trying to sell make-up to men (and their strategies are really something else, see link above).  It turns out, however, that they’re not breaking new ground, as this vintage ad shows:

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