This Sunday is the 2012 Oscars ceremony. The Oscars are awarded based on the votes of nearly 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; however, the Academy keeps the identities of the voting members secret, so there’s little knowledge of who, exactly, determines the recipients of Oscars, prestigious awards within the industry that can increase interest in a film, increase job opportunities, and generally raise the profile of winners.

Sangyoub Park sent in a link to an article at the L.A. Times story about Academy voters. Times reporters were able to verify the identity of 89% of current voters, and the paper provided this breakdown of their demographics; as it turns out, those deciding who wins an Oscar are overwhelmingly White non-Hispanic and male:

Within some categories of voting members, Whites are even more dominant; they make up 98% of writers and executives. Voters are also disproportionately older; the median age is 62, and the Times reports that only 14% were under age 50.

As the Times story illustrates, many inside and outside of the film industry believe the make-up of Oscar voters influences which movies, actors, and directors have a serious chance of winning, with those that appeal to middle-aged White men inherently advantaged because of the lack of diversity among voters.

PBS has a gallery of images of oral contraceptives that provides a nice illustration of the way product design can be used as a form of behavior modification, while also needing to adapt to the way people actual use products — or forget to do so, the ever-present problem with the pill.

Initially , the pill came in bottles, like other prescriptions:

Notice the bottle contains 100 pills; there was no effort to package it into quantities for a single month. Women were supposed to take 20 pills in a row, then none during their period. It was up to them to keep track of everything and remember when it was time to start taking the pills again.

In 1962, an engineer created a prototype of a dispenser pack, designed to hold exactly a month’s worth of pills and help women remember to take them correctly:

The first contraceptive in a pack of this type, Dialpak, appeared the next year; oral contraceptives packaging has been designed to help women remember to take them accurately ever since. This became a major selling point, with Dialpak 21 even offering a small calendar you could attach to a special watch band so you could more easily keep track of whether you’d taken the pill:

In 1965, Eli Lilly introduced a new packaging design, with differently-colored pills arranged in a sequence; however, it didn’t label the days of the week, so it didn’t help women figure out if they’d remembered to take their pill on any given day:

Norinyl came in a package that took the sequential design but added several features that enhanced compliance. An extra pill was added, so that pills with active ingredients were taken for 21 days, not 20. Then a row of placebo pills were added so that women took a pill every day of the month, so they were less likely to forget to start a new pack:

When we think about the emergence and success of the pill, we tend to focus on the product itself. But the packaging tells an interesting story on its own. The pharmacological effectiveness of oral contraceptives meant little if women forgot to take them reliably. The design of the packaging helped play a crucial role, increasing users’ ability to follow the prescribed schedule.

Today, there’s an entire trade organization, the Healthcare Compliance Packaging Council, dedicated to promoting attention to the design of packaging as an important element in all areas of healthcare. The pill was the first prescription drug sold in a so-called “compliance pack,” serving as an example of the potential effectiveness of packaging design as a way to encourage patients’ conformity to prescribed medication regimens.

In 1964, in Jacobellis v. Ohio, a case regarding an allegedly obscene film, Supreme Court Justice Stewart Potter Stewart famously wrote in his opinion,

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of hard-core pornography]…But I know it when I see it…

Of course, the problem is that not everyone has the same reaction to what they see. While the 1964 case specifically dealt with a film, and a judgment on whether it crossed the line from pornographic (legal) to obscene (not), similar arguments are common regarding what is appropriate on TV. The Federal Communications Commission may impose penalties, including large fines or revoking a broadcaster’s license, on networks that air “indecent or profane programming during certain hours.” Last month the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case regarding the FCC’s regulations and whether they violate free speech guarantees.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a segment from The Daily Show that highlights some of the inconsistencies and contradictions in the FCC’s standards for prime time, and the seeming arbitrariness of decisions about what is “indecent”:

By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen multiple examples of before-and-after photos that illustrated how re-touching is used to help celebrities and models meet those unrealistic beauty standards we see in the media (see our posts on Katy Perry, a parody Photoshop ad, pre-retouched Playboy pics (NSFW!), Jessica Alba, and Demi Moore and Kim Kardashian). Dolores R. sent in a video of a man emphasizing the other side of the equation — that is, how the “before” body in supplement ads can be manipulated to make the apparent transformation especially dramatic:

For the full collection, see our Re-Touching/Photoshop Pinterest board (NSFW).

This week in my gender class, we talked about gender and embodiment — that is, the way that men and women may experience our bodies differently, and how we train our bodies to signal gender differences just as much as the clothing and accessories we wear do. Men and women learn to use their bodies differently as part of their performance of masculinity or femininity; think of the difference in how men and women tend to hold cigarettes, how women are more likely to sit with their legs crossed (even if they’re not wearing skirts), and other ways in which we learn to use or position our bodies differently.

Lindsey sent in a link to an art project, Switcheroo, posted at Sincerely Hana that illustrates a number of topics related to gender. The project, by Hana Pesut, consists of (mostly) men and women exchanging outfits. In our gender binary, women have more flexibility to engage in some types of gender non-conformity; due to androcentrism, women may gain status by associating themselves with masculinity, while men generally only lose if they are perceived as feminine, a devalued status.

Not surprisingly, then, the images that stand out most in the collection are those with a man wearing clothing that is strongly coded as feminine. We’re not surprised that a woman would wear pants, but a man in a skirt or dress — that is, a man openly performing femininity — is still unusual in our culture and violates the cultural norm that masculinity might be good for everybody, but femininity is just for women.

In addition, a number of the photos illustrate gendered embodiment. When the men and women in the photos take on not just the other’s clothing, but also their postures, we can see how certain ways of holding or displaying our bodies are gendered — that we perceive them as feminine or masculine, and see them more often from one or the other gender.

It’s worth browsing the entire collection.

One of our readers sent in a Valentine’s Day card that came in a box of cards her 10-year-old received. The card reinforces the idea that pretty girls are high-maintenance; they’re materialistic and, implicitly, demanding or difficult — which they presumably get away with in exchange for being attractive:

For another example of cultural assumptions about pretty girls, and the idea that they play by a different set of rules, see our post on the “I’m too pretty to do math” magnet or t-shirt.

Zeynep P. sent in a commercial for Teleflora, a company that delivers flowers, that, as Zeynep points out, combines objectification with the explicit message that women exchange sexual favors for gifts from men:

The ad normalizes the idea that women would manipulate men with sex, and that men would expect that doing things for women (especially spending money on them) should result in sex. It’s a winner all around.

Sangyoub Park sent us a link to a post by the Brookings Institution about the changing racial/ethnic demographics of the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S. While White non-Hispanics still make up the majority in those areas (at 57% of the population), the minority population has grown rapidly in a number of cities; 22 of the top 100 metro areas are now majority-minority:

A detailed map of the majority-minority metro areas, with the largest racial/ethnic minority group in each (and the White non-Hispanic population in parentheses):

This demographic shift in metro areas should accelerate, given the racial/ethnic makeup of the population of children under age 1:

The Washington Post has an interactive map that lets you select an area and get detailed demographic information at the Census tract level (racial/ethnic makeup, household type, etc.) from 1990 to 2010.

Of course, as Sangyoub points out, being in the numerical majority doesn’t imply that a group no longer meets the definition of a minority group in a social sense. In many areas, racial/ethnic minorities continue to have less access to or control over economic resources, social prestige, and political power than do non-Hispanic Whites. Accumulated advantages do not get automatically redistributed when demographics change.