The uproar in the blogosphere pales only in comparison to the uproar in our email inbox about My New Pink Button.

Penny R., Eden H., Alicia T., Shannon H., Nils G., Shiquanda S., Mickey C., and Bob C. have all sent in links to a new product designed to bring back the “fresh” to your lady parts. For 30 bucks you can get 3 days of pretty-in-pink. That’s right, genital dye to pinkify your private parts. In case you weren’t worried about this particular repulsivity, now you know. (It apparently works on men as well as women, and nipples too).

As they say at Jezebel: “Anti-aging mania and marketing: Not just for your face anymore!”

Shiquanda and Mickey brought our attention to this particular Q&A in the FAQ section:

Q. “Help! I’ve noticed I am turning a more brown color down there on my inside lips, is this normal”?

A. Yes, it’s perfectly normal and there are many factors that can contribute to this.  Ethnicity is a big factor, also age, hormone change, surgeries, childbirth, sickness, health, diet and medications can all contribute to a change from “Pink” to “Brown” in a woman’s genital area.

So this is kind of fascinating: browner coloring is “normal,” but you should change it anyway.  The message is that normal is not ideal.  We are normal (or at least white people are), and we still need fixing.

The FAQ makes plain the two ways in which marketing tries to convince us to change our bodies: both by telling us that our bodies are abnormal and by telling us that they are normal.  Normal bodies are icky, we’re told, your body should appear, as much as possible, as if it is not a body at all.  I mean, isn’t that part of what shaving our legs, chests, and genitals (both male and female) are about?

I think the ubiquitousness of breast implants in the media also sends the message that beautiful breasts have the look of breast implants (in terms of shape, size, and the position of the nipple).  I recently saw mannequins in a store window who were built to look as if they had breast implants.  Do you get how crazy that is?  If a mannequin is supposed to represent the ideal body, then the ideal body isn’t one with naturally large breasts, it’s one with fake breasts!  Nuts.  This world is nuts. (Kristi reminds me that this is insensitive to those with mental illness… and she’s right.)   Weird!  This world is weird!

(I looked this up on Snopes, but no word yet as to whether it’s a hoax. I have no idea whether this product is for real or whether it’s a big-enough-seller to get my panties in a bunch over.  Though it appears that you can order it, but it is of questionable efficacy.  Scam-status and efficacy aside, I think it still reveals something interesting about how we are told that our bodies aren’t good enough.)

Readers responded so positively to our post featuring the lego ad from the 1980s that was just so… human.  The girl in the ad reminded us how hypergendered advertising has become.  I offer the ad below in the same spirit (from Vintage Ads).  Three people, who look like people, saying stuff about tires:

This Clymer for Pennsylvania governor poster attacks his opponent, Geary, and the Republican exponents of black suffrage, with a familiar caricature of blackness  (Jim Crow History):

Text:

Every RADICAL in Congress VOTED for NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  Every RADICAL in the Pennsylvania Senate VOTED for NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  STEVENS, FURNEY, & CAMERON are for NEGRO SUFFRAGE; they are all Candidate for the UNITED STATES SENATE.  NO RADICAL NEWSPAPER OPPOSES NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  GEARY said in a Speech at Harrisburg, 11th of August, 1866 — “THERE CAN BE NO POSSIBLE OBJECTION TO NEGRO SUFFRAGE.”

For more caricatures of black people in U.S. history, see these posts: one, twp, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen.

And for examples of modern reproductions of these stereotypes (literally), see these: one, two, three, four, and five.

Paul S. sent in a link to a cell phone for five-year-olds (plus or minus).  The fact that it has a button for dialing a female and a male person (presumably mom and dad) is a nice illustration of how having two parents of opposite sexes is normative.  Many children have two caregivers of the same sex (e.g., a mom and a grandmother or gay parents) or only one caregiver (or, for that matter, more than two).  But it is expected that a child will have a mother and a father involved in their life.  That this is “normal” will be reflected back at that child again and again, whether or not it reflects their reality.

For more examples of heteronormativity see this post (featuring sea monkeys!) and also see our post full of cute photos of same-sex animal couples.

In several posts, we have problematized past and present school mascots.  In this post, I discuss the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Ragin’ Cajuns.

Originally, UL Lafayette’s mascot was a Bulldog.  Then, according to the mascot history page,

…in the early 1960’s as an effort to “fire up” the football team, Coach Russ Faulkinberry called his team the Raging Cajuns since 95 percent of the football team was from the Acadiana area [i.e., ethnically Cajun].  It was then decided by the Sports Information Director, Bob Henderson, to honor the team and the Cajun heritage by calling them the Raging Cajuns.

The first Ragin’ Cajun mascot was Cajun Man:

This was protested by African American activists who resented the association of the multi-racial and -ethnic University with a white ethnicity.  From another perspective, the mascot was questioned on the grounds that “Cajun” had once been a nasty racial slur.

Apparently the University lost Cajun Man when he graduated, so he was replaced by Cajun Chicken:

Cajun Chicken as Elvis (what, your mascot didn’t dress up like Elvis?):

Cajun Chicken was later replaced by Cayenne, a chili pepper, the University’s current mascot:

Still, the disappearance of the Cajun Man has not led to the disappearance of the controversy over the mascot, kept alive with the term “Ragin’ Cajuns.”  In Blue Collar Bayou, Jaques Henry and Carl Bankston III report that in 1997 Louis Farrakhan protested that the state funding of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette amounted to the state using “African American and Creole tax dollars… to promote a white culture.”

Consider the Ragin’ Cajun controversy in light of the other mascots we’ve covered: the Orientals, the Gauchos, the Jews, the Fighting Irish, and the Indians.

Dan Ariely, in this great talk, describes some of his surprising research on cheating.

He finds that almost everyone will cheat, but only a little bit.  People are less likely to steal money, than other things (e.g., office supplies).  “Priming” works, too: If people are reminded to be moral, they are less likely to cheat.

If we see people we think are like us cheat, we are more likely to cheat than we would have otherwise (but we have the opposite reaction to cheaters that we see as not like us).  Ariely then applies his findings to the Enron scandal.

A fun and fascinating 16 and a half minutes:

I was stuck by this image, which is being used by Environmental Defense as part of a “how you can stop global warming”-type promotion:

We see a cartoon anthropomorphized earth flexing its muscles happily while a tape measure is cinched around its quite unnaturally narrow waist. It’s an interesting collision between the longstanding metaphor of environmentalism as seeking the “health” of the environment, with the modern idea of obesity as iconic of poor health.

Unpacking the idea of ecological “health” as the goal of environmentalism is something I’ll mostly set aside here, except to note that it is a non-inevitable conceptualization (contrast the alternate framing of conservation/sustainability). The important thing to keep in mind is that the idea of ecological health involves conceptualizing the ecosystem, or even the entire planet, as a mega-organism — and in particular, a mega-human-body — for which health consists of an approximation to a particular ideal state. For a human body, health by this conception involves having all the normal parts (2 legs, both eyes, smooth skin, etc) functioning in the normal way.

What caught my eye about the ED ad was the change in the representation of what constitutes “health.” A quick Google image search on “sick earth” brings up lots of examples of the old way of representing health. We get lots of earths suffering from common cold and flu type symptoms — flushed, sweating, excreting mucus, and making use of thermometers and hot water pads.

The archetype of ill health here is infectious disease, an invasion by microbes that upsets the system’s functioning. The metaphorical parallels between viruses and pollution (including, in some cases, human beings) have been powerful for environmentalism.

But over the past few decades, we’ve acquired a new archetype for poor health: obesity. Being fat has become synonymous with being sick, and vice-versa. What I’m interested in here is not the scientific/medical question of how bad for you being fat really is (though I’ll admit to skepticism of the obesity panic on these grounds), but rather the sociological question of how obesity became the key trope in our discourse about health. Thus, a healthy earth can be easily represented as one that has slimmed down, because we all know that getting skinnier equals getting healthier. The metaphor is extended in the “Low Carbon Diet Guide” that the ad encourages you to download, which talks about how “counting carbs” should apply to carbon dioxide as well as carbohydrates. Interestingly, the guide sticks to energy conservation tips, thus both continuing environmentalists’ reluctance to address food habits as a contributor to climate change while mercifully avoiding blaming fat people for causing global warming by stuffing their faces.

An important element to the conceptualization of obestity as the archetype of ill health is the way it’s tied to ideas of personal responsibility. While genetics and social conditions play a huge role in determining who gets fat, our discourse about obesity promotes the idea that on the one hand you can control your own weight, and on the other fat people can be blamed for their condition. This is reflected in the content of ED’s Low Carbon Diet brochure, which is is a fairly standard compendium of personal behavioral changes that will make you a better, less-carbon-emitting, metaphorically slimmer person. Obviously this sort of thinking long predates the ecological-health-as-thinness metaphor, but there’s a synergy between them in terms of the emphasis on the small scope of personal control within a larger issue.

This is not the first, or most extreme, time environmentalists have tried to link up with the concern over obesity. But it was striking to me that the thin = healthy idea is so engrained that it can be used as a metaphor by causes outside of the public health field.

Stentor Danielson is a professor of Geography at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the relationship between humans and their environment. Specifically, he’s interested in how people understand the risk of wildfires. You can read more from Stentor at his blog, Debitage.

Is “princess” being redefined?

One of the compliments aimed at the new Disney movie, The Princess and the Frog, is that the heroine isn’t just a pretty face, but in fact an entrepreneur who wants to open her own restaurant and is uninterested in catching a man.  This observation was made to me, for example, when I was interviewed for a story by CNN reporter Breenana Hare, who suggested that this new princess was making a break with the old princesses in more than one way.

I replied that this “new” kind of princess had been on the scene for a while.  Belle, from Beauty and the Beast, according to imdb, was “a bookworm who dream[t] of life outside her provincial village,” not of a prince charming.  That was 20 years ago.  Both Pocohantas and Mulan were adventurous and brave.  Most princesses, these days, are not perfect embodiments of femininity, they balance their femininity with a bit of masculinity.  It’s ‘cess + sass as a rule.

But, to be fair, these princesses aren’t radical.  They aren’t pushing the envelope of femininity.  They are only reflecting the fact that ideal femininity in the West has changed such that the perfect woman now incorporates some masculine character traits.  “Some” is the operative word here.  Today’s ideal woman is still feminine, but she works, wears pants, and plays sports.  She may even be a sports fan and drink beer.  But she also preserves her femininity, especially those aspects of femininity that mark her as “for” a (just barely and totally benevolently of course) dominant male.  She still doesn’t disagree too vigorously or laugh too loud.  She marries a man who is slightly older, more educated, larger, taller, and makes a bit more money at his job that is just slightly higher prestige.  And, no matter what, she looks, dresses, and moves in pretty, feminine ways.  Barbie and the Three Musketeers is another, non-Disney example of this phenomenon:

Not a man in sight!  But damn do they look good in those boots!

Simon O. also sent in a Barbie website that fits this theme nicely.  It asks “What Should Barbie Be Next?” and let’s us vote on her next profession: pet vet, race car driver, ballerina, baby sitter, “kid doctor,” rock star, pediatric dentist, or wedding stylist. Barbie can be anything she wants, as long as she looks great doing it.  Or maybe it’s that Barbie can be anything she wants because she looks good doing it.

The new rule is: a girl can be anything, as long as she’s hot (and deferent when push comes to shove).  Whether she likes it or not, she always gets the guy in the end because, well, she’s so damn sweet and adorable (and, yes, those words are totally coded with gendered meaning).  This fact, the fact that she always still ends up with the guy in the end, is a really important part of this story… it reminds us that getting the guy is still the happy ending… even the little girls in the bike commercial came away with a “prince.”

So, yeah, we can debate about whether these princesses are a qualitative and substantial break from previous princesses.  I’m not sure they are.  Or, if they are, I’m not sure the difference is all that fantastic, given that the ideal is still incredibly rigid and damn difficult to live up to.  And I’m not even sure I like this new (impossible) ideal any better than the old (impossible) ideal.  What we see today is a couple generations of women who are expected to be both masculine and feminine.  As if staying fit, looking lovely, smelling great, volunteering, and having a clean house, a sexually satiated husband, and behaved, brilliant, well-adjusted children wasn’t enough of a job… women now have to be go-getters at the law firm and ass-kickers on the court.   It’s called The Second Shift and women work more and relax less than men.

For more examples of the ideal balance of femininity and masculinity, see these posts on pinkifying masculine jobs, prints, and hobbies (sports and guns), the “girl” ranchhand, this ad suggesting that a girl’s razor should be “no girly man,” the social construction of female athletes (here and here), and the color blue.