Re-posted in honor of Love Your Body Day.

In “Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners,” Evelyn Nakano Glenn* argues that in many areas of the world, light skin tone is a form of symbolic capital; research indicates that individuals with lighter skin are interpreted as being smarter and more attractive than those with darker skin. Glenn suggests that this symbolic capital is especially important for women:

The relation between skin color and judgments about attractiveness affect women most acutely, since women’s worth is judged heavily on the basis of appearance…men and women may attempt to acquire light-skinned privilege. Sometimes this search takes the form of seeking light-skinned marital partners to raise one’s status and to achieve intergenerational mobility by increasing the likelihood of having light-skinned children. (p. 282)

I thought of Glenn’s article when we received an email from Fatima B. about personals ads in Islamic Horizons, a magazine distributed by the Islamic Society of North America. Fatima says the ads for women often contain references to skin tone, where the women are described as “fair.”

The January/February 2011 personal ads section contains this example:

Looking through the past year’s matrimonial ads, I found several others, such as these:

Sunni Muslim parents seeking correspondence from professionals for their Canadian born/raised daughter, BA honors, fair, attractive, 289, 5’4”, with good Islamic values.

Sunni Muslim parents of Indian origin seeking professional match for their daughter 30, 5’1”, attractive, slim, fair, good family values, engineering graduate, working in Management Consulting. Inviting correspondence from residents of Toronto only

Sunni parents Urdu speaking of India origin seek correspondence for their daughter US citizen, 25, 5’4”, pretty fair, religious (non-Hijab) MD from prestigious institution second year resident.

As you’d expect, the ads placed by (or on behalf of) men didn’t stress their looks as much as the ads placed by women did. I only found one example in which they made clear the man was light-skinned:

Muslim parents of US born son, 3rd year medical student, 24, 6’2”, slim, fair seek Pakistani/Indian girl, 18-22, very beautiful, fair, tall, slim, religious and from a good educated family

Of course, to the degree the ads emphasized looks, they aren’t particularly different than personals ads anywhere else except that they emphasize skin tone openly. I am sort of fascinated by how often the word “lively” is used in the ads describing women, though. It appeared in a number of different ads in the “seeking husband” section, but I’m not sure exactly what “lively” might be code for (in the language of personals ads, that is, where you try to convey lots of info with very few words).

Anyway, back to our original topic, these ads clearly illustrate the use of skin tone as a form of symbolic capital, which those who have it (particularly women) may highlight to make themselves more attractive on the romantic marketplace, and which others appear to actively value. Further, by allowing ads to include “fair” as both a characteristic the ad placer has, and as a sought-after quality, the editors of the magazine legitimate the open valuing of light-colored skin over other skin tones.

Fatima was pleased to see this practice called out in an ad placed in the most recent issue:

* Article is from Gender & Society 2008, vol. 22, issue 3, p. 281-302.

Back in February I posted about this commercial for Dr. Pepper 10, which was then being introduced to the market:

Dr. Pepper is market-testing a new product, Dr. Pepper 10, which is a 10-calorie (per 12 ounces) soda aimed at men aged 25-34. The problem the company faces is how to market a diet product to men, given the association of dieting with femininity. Dr. Pepper has apparently decided to face this challenge head on and make it very, very clear who this product is and isn’t meant for. This commercial, sent to us by Sully R., uses over-the-top tropes from action movies to prove the soda’s macho cred, and practically yells that it isn’t for women:

Wait, did I say “practically”? I meant literally yells that it’s not for women. Just in case you didn’t get it.

—–

Now, Dr. Pepper is rolling out the product for real. Dave E., Dave W., David B., Rob W., Christopher D., Kathy W., Andrew D., and Emma H. all let us know that the full-scale ad campaign is out, and they are going all-out with the “no women” theme. Here’s the image from the Dr. Pepper 10 Facebook page:

There’s an app on the Facebook page which takes you to lists of requirements for being sufficiently manly; I didn’t go to it, as it required you to allow Dr. Pepper to access all your Facebook info and send you emails, but according to abc News, it includes tidbits like “Thou Shalt Not Pucker Up. Kissy faces are never manly” and “Thou Shalt Not Make a ‘Man-Gagement’ Album. That is all.”

It’s another example of over-the-top ridiculous masculinity presented with a wink and a nod that is supposed to reassure us all that we’re in on the joke, which somehow makes it less absurd that if you want one group of human adults to drink your product, you feel the need to scream from the rooftops that you’re doing your best to prevent another group of human adults from drinking it, so they won’t get symbolic cooties.

UPDATE: Dr. Pepper’s brand index fell among both men and women (but especially women) in the weeks after this campaign was lost.

Shamus Khan posted a link to a great slideshow put together by the Business Insider that summarizes the current state of our economy. It’s a one-stop illustration of, in their words, “What the Wall Street protestors are so angry about,” and definitely worthy of clicking over to see the whole thing. I’m posting just a few of the images here.

The median length of unemployment for those who lose their jobs is now over 20 weeks:

About 45% of the currently unemployed have been without a job for at least 27 weeks — six to seven months without a job:

CEO pay is now roughly 350 times higher than the average worker’s:

And CEO pay has grown dramatically since the early ’90s, though production workers’ pay has barely budged and the minimum wage has actually dropped if you adjust for inflation:

We often hear that the extremely wealthy pay a very disproportionate amount of U.S. taxes. It is true that they pay a large share. But it’s not so imbalanced compared to how much of all income they earn. For instance, the richest 20% of earners receive 59.1% of all U.S. income but pay 64.3% of taxes:

There’s much, much more in the full slideshow; go check it out.

Andrew Francis D. sent in this 1970s commercial for Faygo soda that appropriates elements of Native American culture, presenting them as part of a ridiculous caricature (“Running Pudgy”?):

For other examples, see our posts on the stoic Indian in marketing, advertising with Eskimos, a parody of Native Americans in ads, confusing the Sioux with Robin Hood, Sambazon’s Warrior Up campaign, Levi’s brochure of “American Indian lore,” and appropriating Native cultures in fashion.

Myrianne J. forwarded us an email she received from Dell advertising a laptop that perfectly illustrates the conflation of thinness with beauty. The email, which came with the subject line “Hello beautiful — introducing the new ultra-thin Vostro V131,” included this image, with the line “Thin and powerful never looked so good” centered over a woman’s hand:

Including the subject line, in fact, the words “beautiful” or “beautifully” appear three times in the ad, lest you fail to make the connection.

A recent Tide commercial featuring gender non-conformity by a girl has really struck a chord, judging by the ten submissions we got of it. In the ad, a mother wearing a pink sweater, sitting in a room accented in pink, nervously bemoans the fact that her daughter, who is wearing a camouflage hoodie and playing with wooden blocks, doesn’t like the trappings of femininity — specifically, she doesn’t like pink and she does like cargo shorts:

The commercial clearly illustrates the emphasis on gender conformity and the way parents may feel discomfort if their child won’t conform. The mother is clearly distressed that the “pink thing” didn’t work with her daughter, and we’re to assume that she worked hard to try to convince her to act more traditionally feminine but has slowly given up in the face of her daughter’s disinterest. The little girl eschews femininity at the cost of disappointing her mom. As someone who absolutely hated dresses as a kid myself, I remember that feeling that hopeful look on my mom’s face when she’d hold up a dress, hoping that somehow this one would win me over, and the knowledge I was somehow hurting her by rejecting it.

Yet as several of the submitters point out, the commercial also undermines this emphasis on gender conformity, even while presenting having an unfeminine girl as an exasperating situation for a mom. Unlike some ads we’ve seen that present the product as helping you raise a child who meets gender norms, here, the product does just the opposite: it saves the little girl’s clothes, which the mother kind of wishes had been ruined. In the end, the mother, though clearly less than thrilled, praises her daughter’s parking garage. As Melissa M. says,

On one hand, we see a child neither conforming nor being forced to conform to styles attributed to their gender role, though on the other hand we see a mother obsessively sticking to her role and being painted in the light of a harrowed mother, desperately trying to help her child fit in.

Thanks to Miss B., George McHenry Jr. (a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah), Tiffany D., Ulysses H., Leiana S., Sarah R., Melissa M., Felice S., Allison C., and Mary Ann C. for the tip!

Transcript after the jump, thanks to Ulysses.

Transcript:

Well, we tried the whole ‘pink thing’. Nope. All she wants to wear is hoodies, hoodies and cargo shorts, gettin’ dirty. Then she left some crayons in her pockets and they went through the wash: I thought all her clothes were ruined. Enter Tide, Tide Booster. The stains are gone, so… it’s kinda too bad. Another car garage, honey? It’s beautiful.

What happens after we throw something in a garbage can? From the user’s perspective, it disappears once the trash collectors pick it up (if you live in an area with municipal trash collection, of course; I grew up in a rural area where everyone had to deal with their own trash). Where does it go? Sometimes items are taken to a dump not far from where it was thrown away and either buried, bulldozed into large heaps, or incinerated.

But Carlo Ratti, an architect who works with the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, directed a project to find out just how far garbage can travel, with the goal of helping us understand the “removal chain” that conveniently disappears our trash for us as well as we’ve come to understand the global supply chains that bring us items in the first place. His team asked 500 people in Seattle to tag items they would be throwing out anyway with small tracking chips. They tagged a total of 3,000 objects, everything from tin cans to cell phones to sneakers. And the results showed that some of the items we get rid of can go on a rather dramatic journey, traveling thousands of miles:

The Trash Track website contains information about the methodology and ideas behind the project.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the tip!

Last month I posted a video from the PBS series on U.S. inequality, showing the misperceptions many Americans have about the level of economic stratification in the U.S. In a new segment in the series, PBS looks at the often hidden health impacts of this economic inequality:

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Full transcript available here.