Amelie M. drew our attention to a comment by actress Olivia Wilde.

In an interview, she explained:

When people saw “The Black Donnellys” (2007), they didn’t know it was the same girl from “The O.C.” (2003). I’m a natural blonde, but I feel like a brunette. I feel like people treat me now [as a brunette] how I should be treated. People used to be shocked, when I was blond, that I wasn’t stupid. I used to get these comments that I swear people thought were compliments. Like, ‘Oh! You’re smart!’ – like they couldn’t believe it.

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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.

Wonderful Pistachios has a new video featuring Levi Johnston, the guy famous only for nearly becoming Sarah Palin’s son-in-law when he and Bristol got pregnant. Here’s the video:

Hah! Because teen pregnancy and stuff = hilarious! If you’re the dad, anyway. I’m trying to imagine this video being made with a teen mom instead. Also, the silent Black man as an accessory to the White star is a great touch.

This just seems to be in terribly bad taste to me. Also, it’s an awfully long way to go to get to make a “do it” joke, and I’m not sure most people would get that the “protection” is the pistachio shell. I had to watch it about 3 times before I figured it out.

UPDATE: Apparently I didn’t actually figure it out. Reader DC says,

I think the “protection” they’re talking about is the black guy that’s supposed to be a bodyguard of some kind. The “does it” part is about cracking open the shell.

Duh. That makes sense. I mean, it makes sense that’s the “protection” they’re talking about. The video is still dumb.

And Ella says,

The guy is his real life body guard “Tank”. This may sound entirely unnecessary, but out of perverse curiosity I read the GQ feature about Mr. Johnston and the story is actually quite sad. It does delve into why he has Tank in his life.

The company really likes to say “do it,” apparently, as they do on this page letting you know there’s an app for your iPhone. An app where you crack pistachios.

This ad’s unabashed assertion that a mushroom cloud can have  a “silver lining” reminds me of our posts on the evolution of the word “atomic” and Miss Atomic Bomb (1957).

Via Vintage Ads.

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

Dmitriy T.M. sent a link to a Cracked list of misguided products. Among them, was a discussion of a doll I remember from when I was a kid: the Cabbage Patch Kid Preemie.  Cabbage Patch Kids were all the rage.  The preemie version, a supposedly prematurely born “kid,” was a sort of spin off.

Cracked points out one of the ironies here:

So What’s the Problem?

You know what’s not all that cuddly? A one and a half-pound infant fighting for its fragile life in a coffin-shaped incubator with more tubes and machines attached to it than Weapon X. Don’t forget the bandages that keep the light out of its underdeveloped eyes, or the little heating beds it has to lay in because it can’t maintain its body heat. Toss in some weeping parents and a couple of nurses probing and prodding its frail little body and you’ve got the must-have toy of the season.

Given this deserved critique of the product, what exactly is it about the idea of a premature baby that would make Coleco think it would appeal to children and their parents?  I think this commercial gives us a clue:

The Cabbage Patch slogan, “You can give them all of your love,” is an excellent example of what this doll is really about: socializing young girls to be nurturers focused (apparently exclusively) on children.

In this case, what could possibly require more nurturing than an infant?  A premature infant!

The Cabbage Patch Kids website, where you can still buy preemies in addition to kids and babies, says that this premature version of the doll “will require extra attention and lots of Tender Loving Care. Be sure to spend lots of time with these tiny ones once you adopt.”  As Grandma reminds the girl, “Preemies need extra special care.”  And the girl responds in a way that implies that a baby that needs “extra special care” is even more rewarding than a baby that simply needs special care. The more self-sacrifice is required, the happier a girl will be.

Some deep and disturbing socialization indeed.

Oh and also, I couldn’t help but also share this doozy with you, from the description of the Preemie doll:

These small babies have no hair, but come with a choice of eye colors in blue, green, brown, and Asian.

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

Over at Everyday Sociology, Karen Sternheimer discussed one of Malcolm Gladwell’s arguments in his book, Outliers.  She explains:

While the American ethos of success suggests that it is the result of talent and hard work, Gladwell examines factors that sociologists refer to as social structure—things beyond our individual control—to understand what else successful people have helping them on their journey. Let’s be clear: skills and hard work are important, but so is timing.

One of the examples Gladwell uses is the strange concentration of wildly improbable success in birth cohorts (people born around the same time).  Sternheimer summarizes Gladwell’s argument as to how timing and geography shaped the ascendence of Gates and Jobs:

Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested [and talented] in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers, the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post.

Sternheimer goes on to argue that members of Generation X may have a special advantage over earlier and later cohorts.  This figure shows that the number and rate of births peaked between the 1950s and then dropped precipitously during the period in which Generation X was born:

Those of us born in Generation X, then, would have had the advantage of schools designed and staffed for many more kids, leading to small class sizes and more resources for each kid.  Sternheimer writes:

As Gladwell describes, children born after booms… have the benefit of smaller class sizes. An unprecedented number of schools were built for Baby Boomers in the years before I was born. When my cohort was ready to go to school, there were newly-built buildings waiting for us, especially for people like me who lived in well-funded suburbs…

When I was in elementary school in the mid 1970s, there were so few students that many classes were combined: first and second graders had the same teacher, as did third and fourth graders. Looking back, this provided me with some unusual opportunities.

Being able to think through this intersection of biography and history is how C. Wright Mills describes as “the sociological imagination.”

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

U.K. men’s magazine Asylum promotes itself, women’s objectification:

Thanks to Giorgos S. for sending along the screen shots!

Other examples in which women are products here, here, here, here, 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.

Brandon H. let me know about two viral Smirnoff videos that humorously illustrate some of the differences (perceived and real) between “old money” families and the newly rich.

The old money/East Coast version:

Argyle sweaters! White pants! Pearls!

The nouveau riche West Coast version:

Massages! Spray tans! Collagen implants!

Of course, there’s other interesting stuff going on here, too–the typical “women as background dancers/accessories” theme, the lack of non-White people, the way that moisturizer and lip balm is associated with a laughable masculinity. Of course, by current popular ideals of masculinity, both of these groups of men come up lacking, and in fact, rich men are often both idolized and portrayed as intellectual but not really “manly” (which is reserved for hard-workin’ midwestern types).

Also: Joe’s Crab Shack, what does rich look like?, masculinize your sissy upper-class dogs with Alpo, women as prizes for rich men, representing the working class at Honfest, evoking class with literary references, upper-class luxury in ads, communicating class in Cadillac ads, “class is forever“, and old money is old-fashioned.

As you are most likely aware, last week director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on an outstanding warrant for his arrest in the U.S. He fled to Europe in the 1970s after being charged with giving prescription drugs and liquor to a 13-year-old girl, then raping her. He plead guilty to a lesser charge of improper sexual conduct with a minor (and said he wasn’t aware she was 13 Reader Lucy pointed out that while he at times claimed not to have known her age, he later acknowledged that he did), then left the country and generally avoided countries with an extradition agreement with the U.S. (and skipped the Academy Awards when “The Pianist” was nominated).

Anyway, the reaction from Hollywood has been generally supportive of Polanski. Many film industry notables signed petitions last week opposing his extradition and asking that the charges be dropped. Melissa at Women & Hollywood suggests that this might be, in part, because:

…the issue touches close to home for many a director who has probably employed the “casting couch” and may have committed an action similar to Polanski’s sometime in his career. Plus, I’m sure there is pressure being applied to people to get on board and support the artist.

In an example of how many in Hollywood are defending Polanski, Whoopi Goldberg explained on The View that it wasn’t “‘rape’ rape”:

Notice that part of her defense (about about 0:30) is that they’d had sex before, which seems to preclude the possibility that he could have raped her (and assumes that those previous times were consensual and that sex with a 13-year-old is okay as long as it was consensual).

At about 2:05 she appears to make a sort of cultural relativist argument, saying that we’re a “different kind of society,” while in other places, including “the rest of Europe,” 13- and 14-year-olds are sexualized. That is, of course, entirely true (that girls at 13/14 have been treated as marriageable/sexual, not that this is specifically true “in the rest of Europe”), both historically and now (my great-grandma married a 22-year-old man when she’d just barely turned 15). There are a lot of interesting points there, but Goldberg doesn’t seem to be making a complex argument–she seems to be saying “in some places this would be okay, so we shouldn’t punish him.”

At 3:15 they discuss the responsibility of the mother, asking what kind of mom would let a young girl go alone with an older man. It’s a very appropriate question to ask. And my guess is: lots of parents in Hollywood, if the older man was an influential director who said he had set up a photo shoot for a major fashion magazine for your daughter. That, of course, is horrid; at the very least it’s extreme denial (“oh, he’s so nice, he just wants to help her get her big chance because he sees something special in her”), at worst it’s actively offering sexual access to your child for a chance at stardom.

I can’t see, however, that it in any way changes the situation regarding Polanski. And the use of excuses like “they’d had sex before, so it couldn’t be rape” is stunning to me.

Melissa at Women & Hollywood adds:

The thing about the Polanski case and why it is resonating across the country and the world is that lots of people don’t like the double standard that Hollywood is showing here. Hollywood is liberal when it feels like it like with the environment, but not when it comes to women.

Also check out Jillian York’s discussion of Hollywood’s support of Polanski.

Jezebel has a video of Chris Rock on the Jay Leno show criticizing the support for Polanski, one of the few celebrities to very openly do so.

UPDATE: Here’s the ever-awesome Jay Smooth on the topic:

In a random tangent, when I was searching for the video clip from The View I saw another version posted to YouTube with this description: “Disgusting Obama-type of Morals/Values—Whoopi Goldberg DEFENDS Roman Polanski: It Wasn’t Rape-Rape.” It reminded me of my recent post about Rush Limbaugh’s description of “Obama’s America,” in which Obama has become the symbol moral decay.