I don’t know how “real” any of this is, but this what I’ve been able to collect on this matter…

If you are connected to the internets, you have probably heard these messages left on some unsuspecting woman’s answering machine.

The messages have been attributed to Dmitri the Lover, a professional seducer of women and teacher of seducers of women. Here is a screen shot of his wholly misogynistic website:

Here, too, is a news article detailing how he lost his medical license due to inappropriate sexual advances and has been accused of rape many times ‘n other great stuff.

Thanks to Jason S., Brett W., and CoRri V. for the links and info!

NEW!  Still at it, a reader alerted us to Dmitri’s “meeting” this January:

THERE IS ONLY ONE OPPORTUNITY EACH YEAR FOR HORNY MEN TO SEDUCE WOMEN THIS INSECURE, GROSSLY UNDERFUCKED, AND HIGHLY IMPRESSIONABLE.

More (his emphasis):

As a MEDICAL DOCTOR, Dimitri The Lover is extremely cognizant of the fact that studies have show over 60% of women worldwide suffer from a psychological disorder at some time during their lives.  In Canada’s northern climate, January is the worst month of the year for psychological symptoms, primarily because a decrease in the level of sunlight and shortened hours of daylight cause “Seasonal Affective Disorder”.  Exacerbated by both the post-holiday psychological letdown from unrealistically high pre-holiday expectations, and the effects of alcohol withdrawal on the neural pathways, this condition causes many women to fall into a MILD REACTIVE DEPRESSION.  Therefore, these once proud sluts become insecure and begin to doubt the value of their existing relationships, which even in the best of times are just barely adequate to meet their psychosexual needs.

Culture-sharing, of course, is nothing new. But with new forms of media, they are intensified and, increasingly, we get to see what “they” do with “our” art forms. Jenelle N. sent in this fascinating music video of artists in Bulgaria appropriating American hip hop and, correspondingly, elements of “Black” culture (highly produced and largely invented by music executives) and blending it with more “indigenous” art forms (please do note all of my scarequotes).

This duet is, as Jenelle explains, “between two of Bulgaria’s hottest chalga performers, Azis and Malina called Iskam, Iskam (I Want, I Want).”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_uHa8gTyxU[/youtube]

See also the Google sari.

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.

Thanks to Daniel G. for sending this in!

In a recent post I discussed ways in which companies market beauty products to men, who traditionally aren’t supposed to worry about things like their pores. Here are a couple more examples.

Axe has a body scrubber for men (pointed out by akamarkman):

To differentiate it from girly body scrubbers, it’s called the Axe Detailer Shower ToolAxe Shower Scrub (or body wash, if you’re female) comes in varieties including Snake Peel, Skin Contact, and Glacier Water (scroll a little less than halfway down to see the varieties).

Here is an ad for the Detailer Shower Tool that shows a man being treated like a car in a car wash (cleaned by futuristically-attired women):

Gillette 2-in-1 Body Wash helps men prevent skin dehydration. And that helps them get hot girls at work:

This Gillette ad tells men to unleash “power” to “defeat dry skin:

Notice how buff he is. We also learn that this body wash is a “hydrator” (not a moisturizer) and that it’s “high-performance” to provde a “powerful defense” that leaves you with the sense you “can take on the world.” So macho!

Andrew F. sent in a link to a post at DirectDaily about the Axe Schedule ad. In it, we see that a set of dorm rooms is overlaid with a calendar, the idea being that you get a different girl each day:

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Look for how the striation on the wall bends in towards her belly where they thinned her midsection:

Like in the above photo, here the square tiles in the wall are warped, reflecting where they tapered her waist:

Check out the shadow to see her pre-photoshop profile:

These women are, of course, genuinely thin.  Much photoshopping isn’t about correcting “faults” (like a blemish), it’s about creating an unrealistic image.  These images remind me of Gwen’s post on the “fat” supermodel, Karolina Kurkova.  Kurkova is still incredibly thin!  The problem is that her body is betraying its humanness.  Like in the image above, where her body (god forbid) reacts to the string squeezing her midsection, Kurkova’s body reacts to the way she is moving it (with the squishing of her mid-back and buttocks).  There is no amount of thinness that will make you not human, but this is what we’re supposed to be aiming for.  And, if we get there, we’re not supposed to look skinny!  You might remember this photoshop example in which bones protruding from Cameron Diaz’s body are photoshopped out to make her thinness look more “healthy.”  So it’s not enough to rid yourself of the fat part of you, now they are ridding us of our very skeletons with photoshop. 

In Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo argues that compulsory thinness for women isn’t just a standard of beauty, it’s literally about making women less.  How much of us do they want to get rid of?

All three found at Photoshop Disasters.

CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: I am reposting this because I want to make clear that a couple of things that people picked up on in the comments are MY mistakes/confusing wording, not Jackson Katz’s. First, in regards to the Rambo movies, I was confusing Rambo:First Blood Par I, which came out in 1982, with Rambo:First Blood Part II, which came out in 1985, which is what Katz is quoting in the movie. I just googled the movie to find the year it came out and didn’t notice it was for Part I, not Part II. I have corrected that below.

As for the Terminator image, that is entirely my fault. I could not find the exact image Katz used in the documentary, though I searched for quite a while. I just put up an image I meant to be representative of both Terminator movies, and the one I used, as the commenters point ou, was not a good example of what I was saying. Since I can’t find the image Katz used, I have taken the Terminator image out of the post.

I just wanted to a) correct those two things and b) make it clear that they were my mistakes, not Katz’s.

*****

In the documentary Tough Guise: Violence, Media & the Crisis in Masculinity, Jackson Katz discusses how images of masculinity in pop culture have changed over time, and particularly how in the 1980s and 1990s images of male heroes got larger and more menacing, as well as hyper-violent. He uses Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as examples. I’m basing my discussion of the images from movies on Katz’s analysis.

In this image of Humphrey Bogart (found here) in The Maltese Falcon (1941), his gun is very small compared to his body. His body language is not particularly imposing or threatening. Keep in mind this was during World War II (though the U.S. had not joined yet) and that machine guns had been invented during the Civil War. So Humphrey Bogart conceivably could have been shown holding some sort of automatic weapon instead of a small handgun.

Then we have Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, from 1971 (found here). The gun has gotten much bigger and the body posture a bit more threatening.

And in 1985 we get Rambo:First Blood Part II (found here), a military revenge fantasy in which a Vietnam vet gets to finish the war the U.S. military wasn’t “allowed” to win, presumably because of weak, feminized elements that controlled the government. Stallone’s body is huge and muscular, and the gun has gotten larger and more deadly.

Katz attributes these changes in images of masculinity to a growing concern in U.S. culture that we are somehow being “feminized” and becoming weak. He argues that the loss in Vietnam (or lack of an outright win, if you prefer) as well as political and economic gains by women and non-whites caused a cultural panic about the status of white men. As these men were supposedly losing power and status in everyday life, cultural images of them emphasized strength, power, and aggression as a version of ideal masculinity.

Here is a clip from Tough Guise:

And here’s a clip that takes the Tough Guise intro but adds some other images:

I was thinking about this because when I was in Oklahoma, I was around a lot of trucks, and specifically, a lot of old farm trucks. And one day when I was standing next to an old Dodge Ram, it hit me how much less…I don’t know…imposing it was than newer trucks. It seemed like a cute little toy truck. Here’s a picture of a 1985 Dodge Ram (found here):

The 2005 version of the Dodge Ram (found here):

Looking at my family’s old farm trucks (and we’ve got a collection of rotting, rusting trucks dating from the 1950s on; I did not post pictures of our trucks because my grandma would kill me for exposing our farm junkiness to the world), I kept thinking, “We used to haul cattle with that?” or “That was considered sufficiently masculine at one point?” And the answer is, yes. Yes, they were.

Now, I’m certain that a lot of the redesigns had to do with advances in safety and efforts to improve fuel efficiency (by making the truck body more rounded, for instance). But there also seems to be a pattern in trucks today to design their headlights and grills to look sort of “mean,” if you will–like they’re snarling or growling.

I’m not necessarily saying there’s a connection between Katz’s work and the way trucks have been redesigned to look meaner and more aggressive…but it just got me thinking.

Of course, as a farm kid, what strikes me about trucks is the way the newer designs make them less functional for the types of things you see people doing in truck ads. While the cabs have gotten larger, making room for more passengers (that is, more like a car), the beds have gotten smaller, so you can’t carry as much (or as long of) stuff in them–and carrying stuff in the back is what you supposedly need a truck for. Yes, you can still stick more stuff in the back of, say, a new Dodge Ram than in a lot of cars, but I’m just sayin’. (Also, you’d be shocked at how much stuff I can get in the back of a Honda Civic if I lay the seat down and am really motivated. And my mom once brought a 130-pound calf home in the backseat of a car–I had the fun job of trying to keep him from attempting to crawl into the front. And we had a woman in my hometown who used to haul pigs around in the backseat of her Caddy.) A lot of things we used to haul around in the back of our trucks wouldn’t fit in the beds of new trucks, or you couldn’t fit nearly as much of them. And of course the majority of people who buy trucks for their big motors aren’t doing the types of things (driving through extremely rocky or muddy country, hauling trailers full of cattle, etc.) that require such a huge motor in the first place. So why not just buy a car?

Just some thoughts that struck me while hanging out on the farm.

Hello Readers!  Welcome to our third installment of Behind Your Back.  Below is a list of posts that we have enriched during the month of June without telling you.  Enjoy!

We added a commerical (found at Feministe) to our post featuring an ad using a male-to-female transgendered person to sell a epilator to women. The commercial is really interesting, as is Holly’s interpretation of why it’s problematic.

The evolving controversy over the Obama Sock Monkey toy led us to make a few updates on our post. If you didn’t notice, the company making the toy aggressively revoked its apology and we’re pretty sure they’re still selling it. Check it out here.

For contrast, we added the posters from the Terminator Trilogy to our post on how female heroines were represented in posters for The Sarah Connor Chronicles, as well as some more images portraying the heroines in The Sarah Connor Chronicles differently and some that feminize John Connor.

We added a Greenpeace video targeting Unilever to this post about Dove and Axe ads.  The video shows how the American beauty industry that is hurting American girls’ self-esteem is destroying the environment of other girls’ lives.  It’s pretty great. 

We found a particularly egregious Nebraska Wakeboard ad and added it to another objectifying ad for shoes.

We added an image showing the actual caption to this post about FOX News referring to Michelle Obama as a “baby mama.”

Matt S. sent us three more PETA posters and a video featuring Alicia Silverstone showing how how PETA sexualizes women in its anti-fur campaigns.  See it here (scroll down).

We found another ad using sex to sell homes and home-related products.  We added it to some others here.

Yikes.  P.J. sent us another doozy from Axe (also sold as Lynx in some countries).

We added a commercial illustrating the bizarreness of yogurt advertising articulated in this post.

Laura L. found another ad that trivalizes women’s rejection of men’s attention.  This Noxzema ad implies that women really like to be catcalled on the street, even if they appear not to.

And we added a fashion ad to this post about ads that use ambiguous images that could imply consensual sex or sexual assault.  Thanks again to Laura L.!

Finally, we added another sexualized image of Condoleezza Rice–as Lara Croft–to this post about differences in how Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton are portrayed.

Don’t forget to check out who links to us!  And if we’re on your blogroll and aren’t on the list, make sure to send us a note!

Happy July!

Since we’ve been on the topic of language (see yesterday’s George Carlin post), I thought I’d add something sent in by Z of It’s the Thought that Counts, who first read about it here. The conservative Christian organization American Family Association has a website called OneNewsNow where they post various news stories. Apparently the website has a filter to automatically replace the word “gay” in any news stories with the word “homosexual.” This became apparent when a news story about an athlete named Tyson Gay was posted with his last name changed to Homosexual in both the title and the text. Here is a screenshot (found here) of the original post from OneNewsNow:

The story has since been corrected. But as FriendlyAtheist points out, they have not corrected “Rudy Homosexual” in this sports story (thanks to Jon for the screenshot):

What is the symbolic power of saying “homosexual” instead of “gay”? What is the cultural difference between those two words? Is it an attempt to keep the focus on sexual activity? For some reason “homosexual” sounds more derogatory to me, but I’m not sure why–probably just because it’s used more by those opposed to gay rights, so I’ve come to associate it with an anti-gay ideology.

This might be interesting for a discussion of discourse and language in political movements generally, as well as conflicts around gay and lesbian issues specifically. Groups always try to frame issues to make their position sound more appealing, and a major way of doing this is through language. Think of debates about abortion–the differences between “pro-abortion” and “pro-choice” as well as “pro-life,” “anti-abortion,” and “anti-choice,” are symbolically meaningful, and different groups choose to use some of these terms rather than others in an effort to make themselves seem appealing and rational and the other side unappealing and radical. I suspect something similar is going on with “homosexual” vs. “gay.”

Thanks, Z!
UPDATE: In the comments to this section, Sanguinity made some great points about the differences between “gay” and “homosexual”:

“Homosexual” is the clinical term, and was used to pathologize gays and lesbians — it’s meant to invoke all that psychiatric-illness stuff. Also, the term focuses on sexual behavior, completely sidestepping romance, relationships, communities, cultures, and other sympathy-generating aspects of pershonhood. Additionally, by focusing on behavior above identity, it allows one to write entire articles with the implicit assumption that being gay is a choice: i.e., one isn’t gay, one chooses to engage in homosexual activities. That last item is especially important — while “gay” and “homosexual” may look like synonyms, they aren’t quite. “Gay” is a noun; “homosexual” is an adjective.

Thanks for the elaboration, Sanguinity!