Oh my. Inés V. just let us know about a contest on WTVN, a conservative talk radio station in Ohio (reader Scapino clarifies that the conservative tone is mostly due to syndication of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, not really the local DJs). Just…see for yourself:

Inés says,

This campaign is a response to Columbus mayor Michael Coleman who boycotted AZ by banning all city-funded travel after SB1070, and the mayor is depicted as a holder of a green card [that’s him shown on the ID card].

It’s an astounding example of dehumanizing undocumented immigrants — being a proud American is linked to “illegals” (a term that somehow seems more stigmatizing than terms like “illegal immigrants” or “illegal aliens,” even — a linguistic erasure of personhood altogether) being scared, presumably of all the proud Americans they encounter, and the lucky winner gets to go “spend a weekend chasing aliens”. It’s like you’re getting to go on a safari.

Groups in Columbus have organized a response and will be delivering letters to the station this afternoon, before the contest ends, in protest.

I’d add more commentary, but what can you really say?

This being the opening weekend for Sex and the City 2, it seems like a perfect time for this video of sociologist Tracy Scott, from Emory University, discussing the cultural impact and contradictions of the SATC franchise. Enjoy!

Thanks to Nicole J. for sending it in!

Lukas B.sent in an advertisement from the February 2010 Hemisphere magazine (the in-flight United Airlines mag). The ad is for ANA airlines’ flights to Japan. The target of the ad appears to be business travelers, represented by a White man. And how to show what a great job the airline will do of taking care of you? Surround said male business traveler with ten Japanese women, there to serve and pamper him:

The ad seems to rely to some degree on the stereotype of the submissive Asian woman, or more specifically, the geisha — a Japanese woman trained in the art of serving and pleasing men. There are many ways ANA could advertise, and even lots of ways they could represent good service.The fact that this ad deals with flights to Japan makes a particular racialized idea of service and comfort useful to the company.

At the same time, I’m fascinated by the fact that there are presumably potential customers to whom the idea of being waited on hand and foot while flying would be a major selling point (as opposed to, say, more comfortable seats or tastier food or something).

And, as Lukas points out, they also make sure to throw in the obligatory blossoms that are required in advertising/images related to China or Japan.

Dan S. alerted us to an image, purportedly of an article from the May 13, 1955, episode of Housekeeping Monthly. In it there is a photo of a woman bending over an oven with a list of tips for being a good wife, such as “a good wife always knows her place.” We’ve gotten this image before and never posted on it, much like the list on “How to Be a Good Wife,” attributed around the web to a “1950s home economics textbook.”

So why haven’t we posted the image before? Because it’s a fake. According to Snopes, the list was circulating widely on its own long before it suddenly appeared with the damning image…which is a completely unrelated image from a cover of John Bull magazine (not Housekeeping Monthly) that appeared in 1957, not 1955. Notice the text along the upper right corner of the image–it says “Advertising Archives.” According to Snopes, no one has ever turned up the economics textbook the “How to Be a Good Wife” list supposedly comes from, either.

So what gives? Why do these hoax 1950s-era images/lists keep appearing? I think Snopes makes an interesting case:

It has become fashionable to portray outdated societal behaviors and attitudes — ones we now consider desperately wrongheaded — to be worse than they really were as a way of making a point about how much we’ve improved. When we despair over the human condition and feel the need for a little pat on the back, a few startling comparisons between us modern enlightened folks and those terrible neanderthals of yesteryear give us that. We go away from such readings a bit proud of how we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and with our halos a bit more brightly burnished.

The juxtaposition of wonderful modernity with a tawdry past also serves to reinforce the ‘rightness’ of current societal stances by  making any other positions appear ludicrous. It reminds folks of the importance of holding on to these newer ways of thinking and to caution them against falling back into older patterns which may be more comfortable but less socially desirable. Such reinforcement works on the principle that if you won’t do a good thing just for its own sake, you’ll surely do it to avoid being laughed at and looked down upon by your peers.

A typical vessel for this sort of comparison is the fabricated or misrepresented bit of text from the “olden days,” some document that purportedly demonstrates how our ancestors endured difficult lives amidst people who once held truly despicable beliefs.

Of course, as the Snopes article goes on to discuss, all kinds of very sexist stuff existed in the ’50s, and there were home-ec textbooks, magazines, etc., that included suggestions along the lines of those listed above.

Given that, it’s not shocking that when we see images of this sort, they immediately seem authentic, and get re-posted around the web despite the sketchy aspects of their origin stories. It’s not like we’ve never posted anything on Soc Images that we later figured out was a hoax (we also get things that we hope, desperately, are hoaxes but turn out to be real).

So there’s a truth behind the general gist of these types of lists, but many of the images themselves are fakes, created to make fun of our hopelessly, and hilariously, sexist past. And given how many real examples of sexist propaganda you could find from the 1950s, it’s worth pondering we find so many fake ones, and how, for some people, they may function to delegitimate concerns about gender inequality or sexism today, because come on, ladies — look how much better we have it than our grandmas did!

Amanda B. sent in this screencap of the teaser for a story on the Shape magazine website:

That is the image we’re presented as a woman who isn’t “skinny.” This photoshopped picture is, apparently, what counts as being curvy in Shape: a perfectly hour-glass figure with large breasts (that have been contour shaded/highlighted to emphasize their size and roundness).

Just to be sure you don’t think Shape is arguing that you, yourself, should accept your body the way it is, the article includes a link to Kim’s workout routine so you can “get her body.”

It’s another example of articles that pretend to be presenting an alternative to beauty standards/Hollywood ideals (be confident! Even stars have cellulite! So what?!?) but ultimately reinforce them, both by presenting images in which the featured women’s bodies differ little from those seen in the rest of the magazine and by making sure you know how to diet and exercise in order to get  your body to conform.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Andrea sent us a link to a post at Carpe Diem about the growing sex gap in college degrees. Current Department of Education estimates have women earning over 60% of all college degrees within 8 years:

A breakdown by type of college degree:

Nothing new there, in that scholars have been aware of this pattern for a while now. The author of the post on Carpe Diem uses this data to thus argue that women’s centers are no longer needed on campuses. He also asks,

Didn’t the “journey toward equity” that is mentioned in the book [he discussed] end back in 1981 when women started earning a greater share of college degrees than men?

This comes down to a question of what equality would mean. Does equality mean simply that men and women make up about half of those in any given institution? What about the continuing differences in the types of majors men and women choose, with women particularly underrepresented in engineering and the natural sciences? Or that female college graduates still make less than male college graduates? Even among men, attendance rates vary greatly by race and class.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned that the gap is increasing, or that it doesn’t matter if men aren’t going to college at the same rates women are. But a bean-counting attitude toward issues of equity — that if there are equal or greater numbers of one group in an institution, they have automatically overcome any and all inequality — obscures a lot of information. For instance, a workplace could have very similar percentages of male and female employees…one group working as the lower-paid secretaries and assistants to the other.

My courses are overwhelmingly female. From that perspective, any inequity is in the direction of hurting men. On the other hand, my male students very rarely miss class because they had a sick child they had to stay home to care for or their childcare plans fell through. Issues such as sexual violence on campus, which affect female students more than male ones, might also indicate that paying attention to women’s issues on campus might not be obsolete quite yet.

Anyway, I think it’s an interesting case for starting us thinking about what sex and gender equality on campus would look like. Among other things…would men’s and women’s centers have to be mutually exclusive? Couldn’t we address the needs of male students without seeing it as a zero-sum game in which to do so we have to take away services provided to female students?

This was originally posted at Jezebel by Lindsay Robertson. Thanks to Chloe A. at Feministing for drawing our attention to it as a possible cross-post!

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Last night, ABC used hidden cameras and actors to see what regular people would do if they saw an obviously abused woman being harassed by her boyfriend. A lot of regular people failed the test.

The highly-successful 20/20 spinoff What Would You Do? brings social experiments to television, using variables to test how ordinary people react to situations such as seeing someone steal a bike in a park, or witnessing a deli clerk give a blind man incorrect change. Lately, the show has been raising the stakes, and last night reporter John Quiñones showed us what restaurant diners do when they see a very obviously bruised woman getting picked on by her boyfriend at a nearby table.

As they often do, the producers used different variables to see if they changed the outcome, staging the scene with both white and African American actor “couples” to see if race affected bystanders’ willingness to step in. In both cases, the actresses were helped by fellow diners (though fewer men got involved with the African American couple):

But then they tried a different variable: the women’s clothing. When the same actresses dressed “provocatively,” and we’re talking clothing that’s pretty average for a Saturday night, not Julia Roberts’ blue-and-white monokini-thing in Pretty Woman, nobody came to their rescue. Diners complained to the staff that the couple were “upsetting customers” and one man told the abusive boyfriend actor that the two were “embarrassing themselves as a couple,” but nothing like what happened when the women were dressed conservatively occurred in this case, and in fact, two middle-aged female witnesses joked with each other about the beaten-up woman being a prostitute.

While obviously the show is highly unscientific (notice that in the second video, the white actor is inexplicably dressed up in a suit) and meant for entertainment, it can’t be a bad thing to force viewers to think about issues such as racism or domestic violence. Maybe the next time they see someone being abused, they’ll be more likely to step up. (After all, they might be on TV!)

What Would You Do? [ABC]

Send an email to Lindsay Robertson, the author of this post, at lindsay@lindsayism.com.

Eden H. sent in this image, found at FlowingData, that shows the categories federal ag subsidies fall into, compared to federal recommendations for how often we should eat those types of food (originally found at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine):

Just to clarify, the 73.8% figure for meat and dairy on the left doesn’t refer just to direct subsidies; it also includes subsidies for crops that are grown primarily to feed livestock. The “grains” category (13.23%) refers to grains grown for human consumption. If you included all grains in one category it would be much larger, but somewhat misleading in that the vast majority of grains grown in the U.S. aren’t intended for people to eat.

Without subsidized grain, keeping livestock in confined feeding facilities to fatten them up would be much more expensive, if not entirely cost-prohibitive. Thus, farm subsidies are an essential component of U.S. agribusiness.