This commercial is good evidence that we still think nothing of being cruel towards people deemed “overweight”:

Via Copyranter.

At Flowing Data, the Venn Diagram illustrated by a platypus playing a keytar. Go there.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Ms.

Maybelline’s brand of lip gloss, “baby lips,” is a straightforward example of the infantilization of adult women:

We should be worried about the infantilization of women for two reasons:

First, it’s directly related to the sexualization of young girls.  The two phenomena, when considered together, clearly point to the convergence of female children and adult sexuality.  As I wrote in a previous post:

…on the one hand, women are portrayed as little girls, as coyly innocent, as lacking in power and maturity. On the other hand, child-likeness is sexy, and girls are portrayed as Lolitas whose innocence is questionable.

Second, the need for women to look like babies to be beautiful (and the requirement for women to be beautiful), turns aging into a trauma for women.  Susan Sontag, in her (truly beautiful) essay The Double Standard of Aging, put it this way:

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man… A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another…

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.

A very lucrative defeat for Maybelline, if we buy into it.

More of the quote at a previous post.  And, for more on the infantilization of women, see our posts on baby teeth, lady spanking, Glee, this collection of examples, a vintage example, and the Halloween edition. Link via BagNewsNotes.

Cross-posted at The Hipster Effect.

I know, I know – you hate hipsters. Maybe somebody called you one once, but they were clearly mixing you up with the real hipsters. You know the ones.

Hipsters have beards. Or mustaches. Or neither. They wear skinny jeans. Or maybe they don’t. They’ve got thick-rimmed glasses. Or sometimes not. You may not be able to describe one offhand, but you know one when you see one. Right?

As elusive as a unicorn yet as common as an ant, the hipster seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. The only definite thing about a hipster is that nobody wants to be called one (yet pretty much all of us are guilty of having called other people hipsters). It’s become one of the worst insults you can bestow upon somebody (yet it’s also among the most common). If you want to completely discount a person and everything that they stand for, just break out the H-word and watch their credibility to go down the drain. Once you’ve been dubbed a hipster, you yourself become meaningless in that context.  You become one of those people and we all know what those people are like.

Or do we?

The definition of a “hipster” is at best a collection of vague cultural artifacts that we associate with a certain set of personality traits, very few of which actually exist in tandem. The prototypical hipster is a trust-fund baby who spends his days talking about art projects that he never gets around to starting. He drinks the cheapest beer available even though he can afford better. He does this ironically, and he wears his clothes in the same way. He judges you, the non-hipster, based solely on your appearance, quickly dismissing you as a non-member of the hip elite. He listens to bands you’ve never heard of and thinks it’s sad that you can’t keep up with his cooler-than-cool musical tastes. In short, the prototypical hipster is an asshole – but for the most part, he doesn’t even exist.

In a way, we’ve vilified the hipster archetype as a way of dealing with our own insecurities. Being cool was something most people never worried about once they graduated high school. Our internet-fueled society has since changed that, bringing the hunt for the newest and most interesting things into our day-to-day lives. There is a burden to be cool that now follows you into your 20s and 30s and beyond, whereas before these things were safely relegated to lunchtime cafeterias and high school auditoriums. And with the internet now spitting out a different concept of cool with each and every day that goes by, it’s almost impossible to keep up. Eventually we throw up our hands in exasperation and, whenever we see somebody who looks like they’re trying harder than us, we spit out the word: hipster.

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Sophy Bot is the author of the forthcoming book, The Hipster Effect: How the Rising Tide of Individuality is Changing Everything We Know about Life, Work and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Bot also runs The Hipster Effect blog, examining how identity, society and work have metamorphosed in the age of perpetual connectivity.

In an earlier post we reviewed research by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett showing that income inequality contributes to a whole host of negative outcomes, including higher rates of mental illness, drug use, obesity, infant death, imprisonment, and interpersonal trust.

In the four-minute video below, Kate Pickett argues that once societies develop the capacity to enable status-based consumption (as opposed to survival-oriented consumption),  status-consciousness among humans exacerbates inequality.  Meanwhile, being status-conscious in a highly unequal society creates stress, and all kinds of other negative outcomes, among those who are judged less-than.

See Dr. Pickett, also, on why raising the average national income in developed countries doesn’t make people happier or enable them to live longer. And see more about income inequality and national well-being at Equality Trust.

It’s been way too long since we’ve talked about one of my favorite foods-lost-to-history: vegetable flavored Jell-O.  I added some more examples to the end.  They’re truly awe-some.

Another great example of how tastes are shaped by history: JELL-O in the flavor of celery, seasoned tomato, mixed vegetable, and italian:

A box of various flavors:

What do you do with it? Well, fill it with things like chopped celery, olives with pimento, and squares of… something:

Or, um, tuna…

Don’t forget the hard-boiled eggs:

See also our post on aspic, meat-flavored gelatin foods.  And, for fun, here’s a history of JELL-O that includes a brief description of how you would have to make it if you had to make it from scratch, which will leave you wondering how we ever bothered to invent and make gelatin to begin with.

(Ads found at here, here, here, here, and here.)

We often think of athletic ability as innate, something people are born with.  In fact, athletic performance is a combination of (at the very least) ability and opportunity.

Case in point: the marathon.

The first Olympic marathon occurred in 1896. A Grecian named Spyridon Louis won that race with a speed of two hours, 58 minutes, and 50 seconds. Women were excluded from formal competition until 1972. Once they were allowed to compete, their time dropped to an equivalent two and a half hours in just five years (source).

Today the men’s record is faster than the women’s record, but by less than 10 minutes… a much smaller difference than the one hour difference that we saw when women were first allowed to compete.  The rate at which they’ve been catching up with men has slowed though. Still, who knows how fast they’d be running if they hadn’t been excluded from competing for the 64 years between 1908 and 1972.  In any case, the quickening of both men’s and women’s times over the years shows just how contingent athletic performance can be.

The clothier H&M is in the news this week and Craita, Ann C., and Marjukka O. all sent in links to the story.  It turns out that they are using a mannequin to display their clothes. Nothing new here.  Except that the mannequins are appearing on their website (instead of their brick-and-mortar stores) and they are photoshopping heads of real models onto the figure and changing the skin color, giving it the illusion of being a real person.

The practice is getting plenty of vaguely negative press (ABC, FOX, Guardian, Jezebel). The critique seems to be that the use of a “virtual mannequin” creates even more unrealistic bodily expectations for women than the use of “real” models (with “real” in quotes because of the degree of photoshopping that goes into creating any images of women that appear in fashion-related advertising).

To be honest, I’m having a hard  time feeling that this is either qualitatively or quantitatively different than the range of techniques used to produce impossibly idealized bodies (including photoshopping images, using mannequins in stores, using models with unusual body types, and requiring those women to exercise and diet their bodies to achieve an extreme look even given their biologies).  (In fact, Nadya Lev at Coilhouse has a positive spin on it.)

What is more interesting, in my opinion, is the way this illustrates the deskilling of labor. Models no longer have to have just the right body, nor do they have to be good at modeling (e.g., posing in ways that flatter clothes while simultaneously looking natural, not to mention the endurance and emotion work).  No, instead, modeling is reduced to a pretty face that can be nicely composed.  Everything else is done digitally.

Those in the modeling industry, then, don’t see this as an insult to women everywhere, they see it as an insult to models specifically.  FOX quotes Michael Flutie of E!’s model search show “Scouted” saying:

It is disrespectful and lazy. It is the job of the brand to properly scout for their models and find those that represent their brand in every aspect. They need to take the responsibility of looking deep into the model pool to find the right people instead of digitally creating what they need…

If this continues, models may face the same deteriorating working conditions that factory workers and many other segments of the U.S. workforce have faced: becoming increasingly obsolete.

For more on modeling, see our posts on the invisibility of labor in modeling, the dismal pay in the modeling industry, the fraudulent “model search,” and the contrasting aesthetics for “high” and “low end” modeling (all based on the work of ex-model, now-sociologist, Ashley Mears).