Florence Colgate recently won the title of Britain’s Most Beautiful Face.  The competition, which attracted more than 8,000 contestants, was sponsored by Lorraine Cosmetics.  The company compared each face to a mathematical algorithm representing beauty.  Florence, who is blonde and blue-eyes, came out on top:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQjFFTezh5I[/youtube]

An example of the formula from the Daily Mail:

A woman’s face is said to be most attractive when the space between her pupils is just under half the width of her face from ear to ear. Florence scores a 44 per cent ratio. Experts also believe the relative distance between eyes and mouth should be just over a third of the measurement from hairline to chin. Florence’s ratio is 32.8 per cent.

So, it’s science, right?  Well, that plus (at least) a little bit of racism.  Carmen Lefèvre, a psychologist, was quoted explaining why Florence was so “classically” beautiful:

Florence has all the classic signs of beauty. She has large eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and a fair complexion. Symmetry appears to be a very important cue to attractiveness.

How did “fair complexion” get mixed up in there?

Not an isolated incident either.  Tom Megginson, of Work That Matters, reported on Britain’s Most Beautiful Face and added in another example of “objective” measures of beauty conflating light with pretty and dark with ugly.  This time it’s an app called Ugly Meter. You take a picture of your face and it tells you if you’re hot or not.  What Megginson noted was the overt colorism.  One attractiveness finding read:

For what it’s worth, he also scanned in some famous faces and found it to be, let’s just say, inexplicable and inconsistent:
Okay, well it might be right about Barbie. (Ha! I beat you to it, commentors!)

Ugly Meter, by the way, is offering a cash prize for the ugliest face.  So… the world is keepin’ it balanced, I guess.

Sociologists have observed that employment in the U.S. is largely structured around an assumption that the worker has no family responsibilities.  The ideas that an employee should be able to work during non-school hours, stay late when needed, take off time for their own illness but never anyone else’s, for example, all presume that the workers have either no children or someone else taking care of children for them.

Most jobs, then, are not designed to be compatible with family responsibilities.  Since most people doing primary child care are women, this hurts mothers disproportionately.  Mothers have a more difficult time being the “perfect employee” and also face discrimination from employers.  This translates into some telling numbers.  Women make about 69% of what men make (not controlling for type of occupation), but most of this disadvantage is related to parental status, not sex. Women without children make 90% of what men make, while mothers make 66%.  Ann Crittenden’s book, The Price of Motherhood, lays out these numbers starkly.

These issues are at the heart of this well-crafted Ampersand cartoon by B. Deutsch, which prompted this post in anticipation of Mother’s Day in the U.S.

In this three-minute clip, sociologist Shelley Correll discusses her research on the “motherhood penalty.”  The phrase refers to the finding that being a mom specifically, not just being female or being a parent, leads to lower income. Scholars have begun to realize just how significant this is. As Correll explains, the pay gap between women with and without children is larger than that between women and men:

For more, see the full text of Correll’s paper titled “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty.”

Hennessy Youngman kicks around the question, should art be beautiful?

If you liked, more from Youngman:

• How to Make an Art
• How to Be a Successful Artist and How to Be a Successful Black Artist
• Performance Art in the Age of the Internet

A while back, in a post of test prep for kindergarten entrance exams, I criticized the idea that we should be giving our children every advantage.  Have every advantage over who?  Somehow, I wrote, “the fact that advantaging your child disadvantages other people’s children gets lost.  If it advantages your child, it must be advantaging him over someone else; otherwise it’s not an advantage, you see?”

This notion applies, also, to our adult lives, as manifest in a post about the “luxury” of drinking tea that was especially time-consuming to prepare.  We’re supposed to find appealing the idea that someone else has had to work really hard for our pleasure and comfort.  Really?

I thought of both of these examples when I saw this Citigold ad, submitted by vmlojw.  The copy reads, “You may not consider yourself privileged.  Then again, you haven’t experienced our premium service yet.”

What is interesting to me about this is the assumption that we should all seek to have MORE than other people.  The ad doesn’t suggest that we should seek to be comfortable or have enough to get by, but instead appeals to the idea that we must all want a “premium” life, one that is characterized by having more than other people.

And this isn’t interpreted to mean that you’re greedy or arrogant.  It doesn’t reflect on your character negatively.  Instead, being on the top of a hierarchy is something to aspire to.   The fact that that your being on top requires other people to be on the bottom is of no concern.  The pleasures and comforts of being on the top are things that we should enjoy without qualms.

Meanwhile, the existence of hierarchy itself — the idea that we must live in a world where some people have so much and others have so little — is never questioned.  I think there’s a nearly-invisible American value here that I would like us to talk more about.

The splashy introduction of the new LEGO friends line earlier this year stirred up a lot of controversy. My goal with this set of posts is to provide some historical perspective for the valid concerns raised in this heated debate. 

1932-1977: The Brick Era

The LEGO Group started as a family business with the motto “only the best is good enough.” The company produced primarily wooden toys for the first two decades of its existence. It wasn’t until 1958 that the iconic LEGO brick was patented as we know it today. LEGO bricks were originally marketed as toys for both boys and girls. The 60s saw the introduction of new elements to the LEGO system like wheels, windows and hinges. Marketing images from this era tend to feature boys and girls equally.

In the 70s we encounter the first LEGO theme marketed specifically at girls: Homemaker. The sets aren’t very different from the rest of the products offered at that time (there’s some bricks and you build stuff), but the pictures of smiling girls playing with the sets clearly mark them as “girls only.” Homemaker sets are clearly meant to be furniture for dolls.

Dolls are popular toys, so finding ways to integrate the LEGO experience into this existing model of play was a shrewd business strategy for TLG, but one that nevertheless perpetuated stereotypes.

The 70s also saw TLG experimenting with different types of human-like figures. The first figures (sometimes called maxifigs to contrast with their later mini brethren) were built from regular LEGO bricks and new head pieces. These appeared in a line of sets with the uninspired name “LEGO Building Sets with People.” These line as a whole was marketed at both boys and girls, but some sets were more targeted. Co-existing for a brief period with the maxifig was a proto-minifigure. The minifig we all know and love today was next.

1978-1988: The Golden Era

In 1978 the minifigure first appeared as we know it today and, after an awkward period of co-existence with the maxifigs, the “minifig” became the standard for tiny plastic people. The minifig is now as iconic as the LEGO brick and equally important in defining the LEGO brand, over the years has tried to introduce other types of figures, but none of them have the staying power of the minifig.For the next decade LEGO minifigs existed in a gender neutral utopia. One can argue that the hairstyles are slightly gendered, but keep in mind that unisex hairstyles were all the rage at the time. When people talk about wanting to get back to the “good old days” of LEGO, this is generally the decade they are referring to.

In response to the LEGO Friends launch a lot of people have been passing around these images from an early 80s ad campaign:Even at this time, however, LEGO was promoting gendered play.  The short-lived Scala Jewelry theme, for example was a major deviation from the core LEGO product line. There is virtually no building in these sets, they are completely superficial — a triumph of style over substance.

Contrast this with Technic, which is all substance and no style. These complicated sets (originally called Expert builder sets) are clearly for boys. Boys also seem to have taken over LEGO trains. It’s great that TLG provides a range of products for builders of all skill levels, but why is it that the products for girls are always on the low-skill side of the spectrum and the high-skill side always reserved for boys?

The segregation of LEGO into feminine and masculine sets would escalate in the next 15 yrs, however, and I’ll cover that development in the next installment.

Read Part II of A Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap.

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David Pickett is a social media marketer by day and a LEGO animator by night.  He is fanatical about LEGO and proud to be a nerd. Read more from David at Thinking Brickly.

Alexandra O’Dell, a student at North Idaho College, does a great job of integrating data, interviews, and images in this 11-minute video about the sexualization of young girls in the media:

Dolores R. sent in a flubbed opportunity to represent Mexicans positively and reach out to the expanding Mexican market in the U.S.  In “honor” of Cinco de Mayo, Mike’s Hard Lemonade hired five men —  in fake mustaches and sombreros — to pretend to be a Mariachi band.  They then improvised songs in response to submissions from viewers.  The stunt is self-conscious, along the lines of the “ironic” “hipster racism” we now see so much of.

The fake band may have been making fun of themselves, but they did so by engaging in something that they had already decided was ridiculous, Mariachi music.  Happy Cinco de Mayo, everyone.

A better approach, Latino Rebels suggests, would have been to spotlight some of the actual awesome Mariachi music out there.  They wouldn’t have even had to be traditional.  They could have hired a real band to improvise, or they could have drawn on the existing Mariachi cover bands, bands that do really neat stuff!  Here’s, for example, is a band covering Hotel California: