Z at It’s The Thought That Counts asked us to submit for commentary a product called the BeBand on sale at Target.  The Band is designed for pregnant women and women who’ve recently given birth:

(Note the carefully placed rings!  This model is no unwed mother!)

The box says that it will “cover unbuttoned pre-pregnancy jeans,” “hold up too-big maternity pants,” and allow you to “fit into pre-pregnancy pants sooner after giving birth”:

But it’s interesting that that’s the fine print.  The large print emphasizes beauty (“Be Belly Beautiful”) and the product is also sold under the name BellaBand.

Questions:

I’ve never been pregnant, is this a new product?  If so, is it a useful product or an invented need?

Even if this is a useful product, what do you think of the emphasis on beauty on the part of the marketers?

Is this not just another part of a demand for women to be freakin’ gorgeous at every part of their lifecycle?

NEW! (Mar. ’10): Along the same lines, R. Walker told us about a product called Shrinkx Hips:

For the low price of $54.99, “Shrinkx Hips provides constant, even pressure to gently guide hips back to their pre-pregnancy position” (if you wear it for 8 weeks). R.W. said it seems like a torture device, and I rather agree. But hey, apparently it makes you look like that model afterward, so what’s a little pain?

Christina S. sent along a link to the British commercial below for Twingo. There’s a twist ending, so I’ll let you watch it:

Notice that, at the very end, the narrator refers to how “we live in modern times,” meaning that we drive socially responsible cars and tolerate cross-dressing.

The idea embedded in that commercial is: now that we’re “modern,” there is no more prejudice and intolerance. Or, “modern” people are tolerant of social differences. Things like bias, hate, and discrimination are “in the past,” confined to those who are “traditional” or otherwise somehow regressive.

This makes sense to us (and the commercial, therefore, works) because many of us have a model of history that assumes that everything will, inevitably, always get better… or at least not get worse. This is a linear model where the line for “progress” keeps going higher and higher over time.  However things are today, we assume, things must have been worse before.  Thinking like this makes invisible the possibility that people were more tolerant in the past as well as the possibility that we could become increasingly intolerant in the future.  As I wrote in a previous post about cavemen:

There are serious problems with this idea:  (a)  We may stop working to make society better because we assume it will get better anyway (and certainly never get worse) with or without us.  (b) Instead of thinking about what things like gender equality and subordination might look like, we just assume that equality is, well, what we have now and subordination is what they had then.  This makes it less possible to fight against the subordination that exists now by making it difficult to recognize.

History doesn’t move along in a linear or predictable way.  And it certainly doesn’t produce equality just by plodding along.  We need to do the hard work of figuring out what an egalitarian society looks like and how to get there.  Conflating “modernity” with social tolerance makes it seem as though the work is already finished.

UPDATE! Ashleigh V. sent in another Twingo commercial.  This one conflates modernity with sexual permissiveness:

Gwen M. sent in a story about a performance by Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin at the Russian National Figure Skating Championships:

The pair won first place and plan to use the routine at the Vancouver Olympics next month. They explained that the routine (video below) was inspired by clips of Australian Aboriginal dance on the internet. About the idea, Domnina wrote: “I thought it was just crazy, but once we have tried it, we immediately fell in love with it.”

Bev Manton, the chair of the New South Wales Land Council thinks it’s less “crazy” and more offensive. She says:

I am offended by the performance and so our other councillors… Aboriginal people for very good reason are sensitive about their cultural objects and icons being co-opted by non-Aboriginal people – whether they are from Australia or Russia.

It’s important for people to tread carefully and respectfully when they are depicting somebody else’s culture and I don’t think this performance does.

The routine:

Sources (text; image).  Via Racilicious.

This week the Supreme Court overturned a ban that “prevented corporations [and unions] from using their profits to buy political campaign ads” (source).  The ruling enhances the ability of these organizations to throw money behind candidates, potentially increasing their ability to influence political decision-making by shaping who ends up in, and out of, office.  The majority argued that the decision honored the First Amendment right to free speech.  And, since corporations, according to U.S. law, are persons, they have the same right to free speech as any of us.

They also, of course, happen to have a lot more money.

So much money, Senator Charles Schumer (D – New York) said, that “…the winners of next November’s election. It won’t be the Republican or the Democrats and it won’t be the American people; it will be corporate America” (source).

Matthew Yglesias puts this in perspective (source):

Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million). And if you can have it be the case that just one Senator goes down to defeat for having pissed off BofA then everyone else will learn the lesson and avoid pissing them off in the future. You don’t need to actually sustain that volume of campaign spending.

Others argue that the ruling doesn’t so much change the political landscape as make it more honest, since corporations have always found ways around the rules anyway (source):

“Whether there’s a vast increase in the amount of resources spent, it’s hard to say,” said Joseph Sandler, a former lawyer for the Democratic National Committee. “There’s already so much they can do.”

…

Republican consultants, in particular, argued that the decision would simply shift spending by political action committees and issue-based “front groups” to the corporations themselves.

“I don’t believe that the ruling will fundamentally change the outcome of the elections given the obscene amounts of money that was spent independently in the last two years by everyone,” said Jim Innocenzi, a GOP strategist in Alexandria, Va. “You could argue that since everyone has figured out a way to get around the rules, we’d be better off with full disclosures of who is really paying for this stuff and let everyone just promote whatever cause they want.”

The decision left unaddressed the question of whether this meant that multinational corporations, with non-U.S. roots and branches, were allowed to throw money to candidates (source).  Right now, the answer appears to be “yes.”  This, then, allows for an unprecedented “foreign” influence on U.S. elections.

So, with all  that said:  How do unions and corporations spend their money in elections?  What can we expect?

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to the Center for Responsive Politics listing the 100 corporations with the largest contributions to political campaigns between 1989 and 2009, as well as the direction of their donations (to the left or right).  Donations include:

Direct “soft money” contributions from the organization’s treasury. Under federal law, contributions from the treasuries of corporations, unions or other organizations may only be given to the parties’ “non-federal” (soft money) committees.

Contributions from the organization’s political action committee, or PAC. The money for these comes from individuals who work for or are connected with the organization, and it’s given on behalf of the organization.

Contributions by individuals connected with the organization. This includes employees, officers, and members of their immediate families.

Here are the results:

At last as far as these top 100 are concerned, it doesn’t appear that there is an overwhelming preference for Republicans, as one might expect.  Then again, a lot of these are unions.

But what does it mean when corporations and unions are sitting “on the fence”?  Basically it means that they’re covering their bases.  They win influence whether Republicans or Democrats end up in office.  Interestingly, 46 of the 100 are on the fence.  This doesn’t mean that things are somehow more fair or balanced, it means that, no matter who wins, corporations and unions win.

For another look at this type of information, see our post on partisan political contributions by U.S. companies.

We at Sociological Images are having fun with forms lately (see here and here). This time the fun is thanks to Bri A. who sent us some screen shots from the website Trillian.

Against heteronormativity, you can choose your sexual orientation.  If you choose female and gay, you are represented by two side-by-side female symbols (on the right):

However, if you choose straight, you aren’t represented by a male and female symbol, you’re just represented by a female symbol:

This reveals that straight is the default (without  a male by her side, everyone assumes she’s straight), and gay is the different, odd, marked category.

Bri then added “in a relationship” and noticed that, despite choosing gay and female, the “in a relationship” icon featured a man and a woman:

Oops.  Heteronormatity is back!

And, if she clicked “single,” the icon simply represented her as a man:

Presumably all people are represented by a male figure.  And we can’t even pretend that it’s neutral and supposed to represent “person,” because the “in a relationship icon” clearly includes a male and a female figure.

What’s funny is that these seem like really easy problems to fix, but either no has noticed or no one cares.

For  more posts on default and marked figures, see our posts on traffic lights with female figures, stick figures and stick figures who parent, and default avatars.

Dan S. forwarded a post by Matthew Yglesias in which he presents recent data from the OECD Factbook (larger version at the link).  It is another interesting way to think about income inequality.

First, we can look at a comparison of how much median income earners in the U.S. make compared to other countries (in U.S. dollars).  Luxembourg is the standout at the far right, with the U.S. not far behind, showing the fourth highest median income alongside some Scandinavian countries.  Mexico, Turkey and some Eastern European countries have the lowest median incomes.

A story starts to emerge, however, if we look at the median income of the bottom 10% of earners.  Suddenly the relative position of the U.S. shifts way to the left; the bottom 10% of earners in the U.S. make less than the OECD average.  Notice that the relative placements of the other high income and low income states don’t shift very much.  This means that while people in the U.S. are doing relatively well overall, the poorest people in the U.S. are doing worse than the poorest in about 2/3rds of the other countries:

Then, if you look at the median income of the top 10%, the relative position of the U.S. moves all the way to the right; that is, the top 10% of U.S. earners make more than the top 10% of earners in any other OECD country.  We even beat out Luxembourg:

Most other countries retain their relative position, more or less, with the exception of Sweden, which drops way down.  So the richest Swedes are, relatively speaking, not that rich.

The lesson is that income inequality–the difference between the incomes of the high earners and low earners–is significantly more severe in the U.S. than it is in other OECD countries (and that may be an understatement).

See this post for another graphic showing that income inequality is larger in the U.S. than in most other industrialized countries.  Also, the top 1/100th of a percent in the U.S. brings home a larger proportion of the total earned income in 2007 than they have since 1913.  And here is the percent of total U.S. income that went to the top 1% of earners (23% as of 2006).  Also see our posts breaking down CEO compensation, on the disproportionate tax burden by social class, and on class inequality across U.S. states.

The stereotype that professors are more likely to be liberal than people in other occupations was confirmed by a recent study by sociologists Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse:

The study measured a number of reasons why college professors may be more liberal.  Among others, they argued that already liberal people may be drawn to academia because they perceive that academics are liberal.  That is, just as women are drawn to teaching and men to construction work because these jobs are gendered, academia is a politically-typed job that draws people who identify as liberal already.

They also speculate that the relative low pay, given the high educational attainment that the profession requires and high status that it brings, may lead professors to lean towards democratic principles of economic redistribution.  They write:

Deprived of economic success relative to those in the world of commerce, intellectuals are less likely to be invested in preserving the socioeconomic order, may turn toward redistributionist policies in hopes of reducing perceived status inconsistency, and may embrace unconventional social or political views in order to distinguish themselves culturally from the business classes (quoted here).

I think this is a fascinating and provocative question, even given Gross and Fosse’s excellent work, and one that I’ve wondered about many times.  Thoughts?

We often talk about gender objectification on this blog, but we also try to talk about other types of objectification.  In this case, Literanista sent us a great example of racial/nationalist objectification.  The example comes from a tourism website for travelers to the Dominican Republic.  It offers, in one of its excursions, the chance to swim in a jungle river, enjoy a secluded beach, visit a “Rum Shack,” taste fresh sugarcane, see native animals and meet an honest-to-goodness-real-Dominican family.

Elsewhere, just to add some negative stereotyping, the website suggests that Dominican’s are drunk all the time:
In a similar vein, Karole F. sent in a photograph of some “African” carvings for sale a Stones ‘n Stuff in Exeter, New Hampshire.  Human beings are included as objectified tokens alongside animals:

For more tourism-related objectification, see our posts on tourism in Hawaii, Brazil, and Thailand, and, related, these images of international adoption and onesies for internationally adopted babies.