Lisa and I have posted before about the way that food products are often marketed by conflating them with women’s bodies and reinforcing that the desirable female body is thin, but with the right type of curves. Non-food items are marketed this way too — for example, in one ad, Sunsilk Shampoo’s packaging underwent “a little nip, a little tuck” and came out a bit curvier.
In another perfect example of this, Mary R., Megan D., and Carey Faulkner, who is a Visiting Assistant Professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College, let us know about a new container from Pepsi. The new Diet Pepsi “skinny” can is, according to the company, “sassier” and a “celebration of beautiful, confident women.” The can will debut this month, in conjunction with New York’s fashion week. Reinforcing the conflation of thinness, beauty, and fashion, their chief marketing officer, Jill Beraud, said, “Our slim, attractive new can is the perfect complement to today’s most stylish looks”:
Just so we don’t miss the point, the Pepsico press release refers to the can as “attractive” three times, twice with the phrase “slim, attractive.” Because ladies, never, ever forget: thin = beautiful. Always.
Pepsi has also partnered with a number of designers for the advertising campaign, including everything from a window display by Simon Doonan to a t-shirt “inspired” by Diet Pepsi by Charlotte Ronson to giving away Diet Pepsi in the skinny can at a number of fashion boutiques in several major cities.
Josh Leo brought our attention to something he started thinking about recently: the use of the word “hobo” among kids. This started when he saw a video of kids reacting to the Ted Williams, the man who became famous after a video of him panhandling at an intersection and displaying his “golden voice” went viral. Josh was struck with the way the kids talk about individuals who become homeless and, in particular, the repeated use of “hobo” to describe him (they discuss Williams in the first 2 minutes):
Since one girl attributed her use of “hobo” to the TV show iCarly, Josh did a little searching and discovered that the show’s official website contains a set of photos of the cast dressed up for a Hobo Party, complete with captions that make fun of or trivialize poverty and homelessness, including this first one that refers to the store “C.J. Penniless”:
A quick google search turns up lots of images of and suggestions for throwing hobo parties (including a video of a “Hobo House Party,” in which four people in costume dance in a cardboard box). Now, my guess is a lot of people would argue that references to hobos today aren’t really about homelessness now, since it’s a term often associated with the Great Depression. Indeed, a lot of the hobo party sites I found referred to the Depression or suggested 1930s-type clothing. But the video of the kids’ reactions certainly shows that they don’t just see it as a term for people in the past; they clearly connect it to homeless people today.
This trivialization of homelessness and poverty isn’t just on kids’ shows, though. It reminded me of a segment The Daily Show did recently about a news affiliate in Indianapolis that decided to see if any local homeless individuals could be the city’s own “golden-voice” (the segment starts at about 1:30 in):
Such a news story could humanize homeless individuals, of course. Instead, the news segment treats the two women as sources of entertainment whose value comes only from the possibility that they might surprise us by having a “hidden talent.” The idea that it would be shocking to find a homeless person with an amazing gift presumes that people who have skills or talents don’t become homeless, while also presenting the solution as very individualistic: if you’re the next Ted Williams, you can have a house and a job too!
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
“You can’t be taught the skills to model, because first and foremost, skill doesn’t matter. It’s all in the jeans genes.”
So notes a shirtless man, a self-described “male mannequin” in commercials for Next Top Model in Vietnam:
My sociological knee-jerk reaction is to point to the ways in which models’ labor is deliberately rendered invisible, masking performance as mere appearance, in much the same way social categories are naturalized to appear like states of being instead of products of social organization — think gender, ethnicity, class, and yes, beauty.
As concerns the category of beauty, there is considerable work involved in pulling it off. Like retail service workers, models do “aesthetic labor,” as documented by sociologists Elizabeth Wissinger and Joanne Entwistle and more recently by Christine Williams and Catherine Connell. Aesthetic labor is the work of manipulating one’s physique and personality to embody a company brand. In the modeling market, some people easily have that physique, as the shirtless guy claims to have, but most models have to fight for it, and they’re fighting against the clock of aging. If they don’t have to work for cut abs and narrow hips, they most likely still feel compelled to work at it, given the rampant uncertainties facing them in their daily grinds of auditions and rejections. All of this work gets carefully tucked behind the scenes of fashion and beauty images — a clandestine world NTM purports to expose for voyeuristic consumers around the world.
But instead of exposing it, the NTM franchise caricatures it. In the American version, Tyra Banks insists that effort is everything, and she axes candidates left and right because they didn’t “want it badly enough.” She just didn’t work hard at it, goes the usual dismissal, or she lacked the determination to keep smiling when Jay Manuel told her that her face is weird. It’s not that you’ve got the wrong look, the show tells contestants, but that you didn’t put in the work to get the right one. NTM sticks close to an individualistic ethos: if you fail, it’s because you lacked the individual effort needed to succeed.
Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the “right” contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season. Saying that success is “all in the genes” renders the “look” into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production.
Saying it’s all in the jeans is also pretty funny. Let’s not overlook this guy’s self-deprecating humor: here’s a man surrendering himself (and his manhood) to the whims and preferences of fashion, an industry widely believed to be controlled by women and gay men. In other ads he mocks his talent and wryly notes the biggest hazard in his line of work: wearing leopard print g-strings (to say nothing of occupational challenges like the precarious nature of freelance labor, the lack of health and retirement benefits, or the unpaid labor of castings and magazine shoots). What’s most striking about this guy and his seductive black-and-white commercial is not the sociological back story, it’s his own silliness. He’s playing on the ironic gap between social expectations of masculinity and the realities of being featured as a passive visual object. We probably wouldn’t be so charmed if the commercial featured a young woman laughing about her job title: “I’m a professional model!” We’d probably roll our eyes. The source of that silliness—unequal cultural expectations about the display value of men and women—is as problematic as it is good fodder for comedy.
Ashley Mears is a former model and current Assistant Professor of sociology at Boston University who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry. In her book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Elisabeth R., Rebecca H., and Kalani R. all sent in a Volkswagen commercial produced for SuperBowl weekend that they found striking, both for the commercial itself and reactions to it. In the commercial, a child dressed up as Darth Vader tries using The Force on various items around the house. What struck all three of the submitters is the ambiguous gendering of the ad:
At no point is the child’s gender made clear. If we just went with the information in the ad, we might conclude the child is a girl, based on scene in the stereotypically super-pink bedroom. But given the usual clear gendering of toys, Elisabeth, Rebecca, and Kalani all enjoyed seeing an ad in which this didn’t occur.
But the possibility that a girl might dress up as Darth Vader seems difficult for a lot of people to grasp. In the pages and pages of comments on the commercial on YouTube, the child is repeatedly referred to as “he” or “the boy.” In one comment thread, when someone brings up the possibility the child is a girl due to the pink bedroom, someone else says no, it was a boy in his sister’s room.
There’s no particular reason to assume this child is a boy except that we associate Star Wars with boys (and generally see males as the default if gender isn’t otherwise specified). I think the reactions to the video are a good example of the power of gendering: because viewers have pre-existing ideas about gender, kids, and what they’d be interested in, they’re likely to apply those assumptions even in the face of potentially contradictory information and to come up with explanations that leave the pre-existing ideas intact.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention when I was writing the post that none of the commenters who saw the child as a boy seemed to think the pink room was his — I read several different comment threads and when it was brought up, people assume it’s a sister’s room. Also, reader Angie thinks the stuff in the pink room looks too old for the child, since the toys look like the type an older kid would collect. I am clueless about that, which is why I struggle to buy gifts for kids: I no longer have a clear sense of what types of things kids are playing with at what age.
UPDATE 2: This is separate from what the gender of the role of the child in the commercial, but VW has confirmed that the actor who played the child is a boy.
On another note, the fact that VW is using Star Wars nostalgia in its ads as a way to appeal to adult customers makes me feel very old for some reason.
The names are color coded by region of origin of the name:
A note on methodology: geographers looked at the most common by counting the most common last names in phone books and selecting the most common names in each state. This hides significant diversity in names in large cities that may have had a greater mix of immigrant groups that the state overall; for instance, a map of the most common names just in New York City might look quite a bit different than the most common names in New York state.
Nonetheless, the concentration of last names serves as an echo of immigration and settlement patterns. British-origin names tend to dominate across the U.S., unsurprisingly, particularly Smith, Johnson, and Williams. Because slaves were often given the last names of their owners, a significant proportion of individuals with British last names are African American — for instance, African Americans are about 20% of people named Smith.
Several Irish-origin names stand out in Massachusetts, as well as some French surnames in Maine:
The map of Hawaii reflects the significance of the Asian population there:
Spanish-origin names in the Southwest:
The names common in the Great Lakes/upper plains region reflects the fact that the area was a common destination for immigrations from Germany and Scandinavia:
I looked up the geographers who created the maps (James Cheshire, Paul Longley, and Pablo Mateos at University College London) and that led me to an interesting website sponsored by UCL, the World Names Project. If you type in a surname, it will show where on the globe it is most common. You can also zoom in on individual nations and see the distribution within them. Here’s the global distribution of my last name, Sharp:
You also get some data about the name: its origin, the top 10 regions and individual cities for that name, and the most common first names that go with it (which, in all the names I tried, were overwhelmingly male, so I don’t know what to make of that).
As Sara said of the National Geographic map, many of the results are predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to look at them.
UPDATE: Reader Kristina provides an explanation for why male names dominate the most common first names lists:
My explanation for Gwen’s finding that the most common first names are overly represented by male names is that names for boys are less variable than names for girls.
Interesting post on that here, which notes, “it [natural language geocoder] needs 4200 first names for girls to cover 90% of the population, but it only needs 1200 boy’s names to reach a 90% coverage. The reason for this huge difference is mainly found in the top positions. The ten most popular male names reach 23% whereas the ten most popular female names reach a comparatively meager 10%.”
Emily J. sent us a link to a segment of “That’s Gay” from the TV show Infomania. In this piece, Bryan Safi takes a look at a number of recent commercials that ridicule men for being insufficiently hetero-masculine:
We have posted previously about how desserts, particularly chocolate ones, are often advertised to women as indulgences they can use to overcome romantic disappointments, or even as substitute sources of love. L. Ellis sent in an example of this, an ad found in Bon Appetit for Sugar in the Raw that tells women to make brownies to deal with breakup:
Indeed, you can calculate how much dessert you’re going to need by how much time you invested in the guy (“Count the years you dated. If it exceeds 5, double the recipe.”). The ad is also a great example of the contradictory messages women get to be thin but also indulge — today you can “devour that pan of chocolaty goodness,” full of butter and sugar, while you cry over your lost love, but it’s a short-lived reprieve. Inevitably, you now being single and all, the “diet starts tomorrow.”
The New York Times has made available a digital copy of The Gentleman’s Directory, a guide to New York City published in 1870. The guidebook informs travelers of a particular type of local attraction: brothels. Of course, the information was for curiosity’s sake only:
Not that we imagine the reader will ever desire to visit these houses. Certainly not; he is, we do not doubt, a member of the Bible Society, a bright and shining light…But we point out the location of these places in order that the reader may know how to avoid them… (p. 6-7)
Certainly passages like this, from p. 13, make it clear that such establishments are to be avoided:
It also included pages that were simply ads for particular brothels:
Interestingly, the NYT checked the 1870 Census for the houses listed in the guide. In general, the women living there were described by Census workers as domestic servants or women who “kept house.” However, they found a few cases where the Census openly listed them as working at a “house of prostitution” or “house of assignation.”
A doctor advertised “imported male safes,” i.e., condoms:
His ad also describes an unspecified cure for women that may very well refer to abortions (at the time, products that caused abortion were often advertised as helping with menstrual regulation or any type of “menstrual stoppage”):
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
