NEWS:

Happy fall semester everyone!

For me, classes begin today and just yesterday the doc gave me the a-okay to walk without the “boot.”  So “hello” to students and “goodbye” to the summer-of-a-broken-leg!

You may have noticed that our parent site has changed to The Society Pages.  This is a name change only and we’re still thrilled to be under the stewardship of Doug, Chris, Jon, Letta and the wonderful folks at the University of Minnesota.  Word on the street is that SocImages crashed their servers so many times that they had to reconfigure them!  We’re so grateful to have their support and patience!

Gwen and I are proud to announce a new SocImages essay, What is Indian Art?, published in Contexts magazine (based on our original post).  If you’d like a pdf of the essay, send a note to socimages@thesocietypages.org and we’ll send it along.  You can see a list of our teaching essays here.  They’re all super short and great for in class exercises.

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook (where we update with featured posts everyday).

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Aug ’10):

Women clean because they love it, don’tcha know!

Facebook has added a generic female avatar.

Another example of boys are kids and girls are girls.

More pinkification of manly items for the ladies.

We added a 38th example of food items conflated with sexy women.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Sarah P. sent in this stunning video, from the the Wall Street Journal, about how to advise women about investing. The video has a simple message:

Women are women. They’re weird and need their weirdness to be attended to. But they don’t want to think that you’re treating them like women. They want to think that you’re treating them like human beings (whatevs!). So, whatever you do, never let them know that you’re treating them like women. If you do this, you will make gazillions off of them. Go forth!

The video after a short commercial (selected transcription below):

Selected transcription:

We all know women can be a little difficult… no one wants to feel that they are… being treated differently from the men, so what can advisers do to try to connect with women and keep from following that stigma?

In other words, women are different and also more annoying than real people (e.g., men), so you need to treat them accordingly. But they don’t know that they’re different from real people (they’re “difficult,” after all), so you have to work around that.

First… you can’t approach women as women… don’t treat her like a lady, treat her like a person… women need more time, they ask more questions… get to know what motivates her… if you connect with her on that level, not on the basis of her gender, that’s the first mistake most advisers make…

In other words, pretend like you’re treating her like an individual, but know that what you’re really dealing with is a creature named W.O.M.A.N.

Second… she’s gonna triangulate, women seek many sources of opinions… just know she’s gonna do that, why don’t you play along… give her other sources of information that augment the advice that you’re giving her… that’s a good way to play to women’s natural ability and need to triangulate on advice that they’re getting. She’s gonna do it anyway, put that to your advantage.

In other words, the goal here is to manipulate her essential woman-ness to your advantage. Don’t actually help her learn more about investing, just feed her information that confirms what you’re telling her. She’ll never know the difference!

Third… be aware and be prepared to invest. It’s gonna take more to serve her… It takes time, she needs education… she’s gonna ask a lot of tough questions… but if you invest that time up front… she’s a better client… what advisers tell me time and time again: women are more fun.

In other words, women are “better clients,” even though they’re a drag because they’re “more fun”!  Woo hoo!  If women aren’t good for fun, what are they good for!

The conversation just goes on from there… the expert here tries so hard to balance the essentialization of women’s nature and the social construction of gender, but she just really fails because she goes back and forth between both and her interviewer keeps cornering her with questions about how frustrating it is to work with women.

The Daily Kos highlighted an ad for Summer’s Eve in this month’s Woman’s Day magazine.  Women’s magazines are peppered with douching advertisements, so why did this one prompt nine people — Tony S., Pharmacopaeia, Frank B., Jason W., Tom M., Jesse W., Sarah P., Ilysse W., and Philippa von Z. — to send it to us?  Take a look:

What makes this a remarkable instead of a regular douche ad is the suggestion that Summer’s Eve is interested in women’s empowerment.

This is odd because douching is well understood to be bad for healthy women’s bodies.  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for example, explains:

Most doctors and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommend that women don’t douche. Douching can change the delicate balance of vaginal flora (organisms that live in the vagina) and acidity in a healthy vagina. One way to look at it is in a healthy vagina there are both good and bad bacteria. The balance of the good and bad bacteria help maintain an acidic environment. Any changes can cause an over growth of bad bacteria which can lead to a yeast infection or bacterial vaginosis. Plus, if you have a vaginal infection, douching can push the bacteria causing the infection up into the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries.

Douching is bad for you, ladies.  So the fact that the C.B. Fleet Co., the company that owns Summer’s Eve, tries to convince all women that they need to regularly douche is not only manipulative, it’s harmful.  If it wants to maximize its profit, however, the company needs healthy women to feel that their vaginas are disgusting.  And so they tell us that it is over and over again.

You see, C.B. Fleet ‘n friends doesn’t give a shit about you.  They don’t care if you get that raise; and they certainly don’t care if their product is unnecessary and potentially harmful in most cases.  They just want to make money.  And if using a feminist-sounding you-go-girl ad will do that, then they’ll slap on a smile and laugh all the way to the bank.

In our more fledgling days we highlighted quite a few examples of marketing that co-opted feminist messages.  See our other examples of ads for bras, cleaning products and contraceptives (see here and here), botox (here and here), diamond rings, moisturizer, makeup, cars, cigarettes, and credit cards, Whirlpool, Philip Morris, Virginia Slims (here and here), and the new Disney princesses.  And none of this is new, see this example of a woman’s magazine marketing to suffragettes in 1910.

See also our collection of vintage douche ads.

James O’Byrne and Doug MacCash retrace their steps through the post-katrina devastating, comparing the photos of flooded neighborhoods with photos of those neighborhoods today.

Via www.nola.com.

David Mayeda at The Grumpy Sociologist discussed a commercial, for Best Buy, encouraging us (men?) to feel embarrassed if we don’t have the most recent technology:

Mayeda sees this as an example of the making of deviance. He writes:

So, as a male, if you don’t have the financial capital to possess a kick ass phone, you are a deviant male, with a low-end job (sharing a cubicle), without technical prowess (can’t stay on top of your e-mail or access the net), and bottom line, you aren’t an attractive mate.

How far “behind” does a person need to “fall” before they are so “out of the loop” that they are not really part of respectable society anymore?

I have only had a cell phone myself for four short years. Yet, when I learn that someone doesn’t have one, the neurons in my brain short out a bit.  How do two people even know each other if one doesn’t have a cell phone?  How do you let someone know you’ve hit traffic?  Find them in a crowded place?  Cell phones have become so ubiquitous that not having one seems deliberately counter-cultural.  Like face tattoos or men in skirts, eschewing a cell phone seems deviant indeed.  So maybe Best Buy isn’t that far off the mark.

UPDATE DEC. 20, 2010: I failed to mention that, at the time of this post, I did not own a smart phone at all. Now I have joined the hip cats of the 21st century: I have a smart phone. Though, I would like to specify, that I was able to attract a mate without one. Then again, I am a chick, so how much money I can spend on a phone is slightly less important, or so I hear.

Miriam H. noticed that the “Plus Size” section of the Frederick’s of Hollywood website uses very thin women to model the clothes, a phenomenon we’ve documented at Woman Within, even as it boasts “SEXY AT EVERY SIZE” and “Styles in sizes up to 3X and 42F”:

I browsed through all of the front pages for the categories at the left and noticed only one photograph of a woman that could pass as a “plus size” model:

This got me to wondering where these photos come from… and I have absolutely no answer to this question.  I don’t know if Frederick’s arranges for these photos to be taken, if they hire a company to take these photos, if the manufacturers have the photos taken and give or sell them to Frederick’s.  That might explain the single image with a plus-sized woman.  It also seems to me that the photos vary quite a bit stylistically, suggesting that they were coming from different places.  For example:

I suspect, as well, that the reason all of the products are modeled by thin models is because only one photo of each product is produced (one with a thin model on the assumption that plus-sized models could not be used to sell to non-plus-sized people).  That is, it would be twice as expensive to show two differently sized women in the garment, so women searching for plus-sized clothes don’t get to see the garment in their size.

Then again, as I continue to think out loud, almost no women buying any of these clothes has a body that approximates that of the models in these photos.  So this is not a non-representation issue for larger women, it’s a non-representation issue for almost all women.

So this seems to me to be an issue of representation, but also an issue of the institutional and financial constraints of the fashion industry.  Thoughts?  Insights?  Answers?

This 8-minute video from Powering A Nation documents the fight of Kindra Arnesen to save her family and her Gulf Shores community. It’s a stirring portrait of how one family has been affected by the oil spill and is trying to fight back:

Via NPR.

These Bed Stü shoes, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., are meant to appear as if they are covered in oil accumulated while cleaning up the BP oil spill in the gulf.

According to Selectism, 100% of the proceeds are going to help wildlife affected by the spill.

So Bed Stü makes no money on this collection, but gains a great deal of publicity and, potentially, good will from consumers.  And then some dude is going to be wearing shoes that look like they’re covered in oil at a garden party.

This looks to me like an example of “conspicuous conservation.”  The term was originally derived from the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” defined by Wikipedia as “lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth.”  Conspicuous conservation, then, is the (often lavish) spending on “green” products designed mainly to advertise one’s environmentally-moral righteousness.

If you wear regular shoes and donate to the gulf spill clean up, your altruism is entirely invisible.  But if you buy these hideous things, everyone gets to know what a nice guy you are.