Via Vintage Ads.

An anonymous confession sent to PostSecret, a site for secrets:

See also our post on the plagiarized dissertation of then-Jacksonville State University president, William Meehan.

Ricardo G. sent in a link to a British campaign encouraging citizens to ride the train.  The campaign features a Mexican wrestler named Loco Toledo.

The commercials basically feature him acting weird (“loco” means crazy), speaking broken English, and comparing the awesomeness of England’s train system with Mexico’s. An example:

How exactly is this different than the Frito Bandito and the Sleepy Sanka Mexican?

Other examples of contemporary advertising campaigns featuring demeaning racial and ethnic stereotypes: the U-Washee, KFC thinks Asians are ridiculous, Native American sports mascots, racism in identity theft ads, Indian, Chinese, and Italian stereotypes in superbowl ads, Asian kitch, selling noodles with Asian enlightenment, and Mr. Wasabi.

The Adipositivity Project is a website featuring photographs by Substantia Jones.  The site features 324 beautiful pictures of fat women’s bodies.  Below are a few safe-for-work selections (click here to see them all [NSFW]).

UPDATE: I just want to note that the commenters on this post are bringing up great questions!

NEWS:

1.  If you’re following us on Facebook, you might have noticed that we’ve begun updating our status with a “featured post” each day.   We’re on Twitter too, if that’s more your style.

2.  Remember that Method commercial where the soap suds sexually harass a woman in her own shower?  Ann Marie N. sent us note to let us know that it’s been discontinued due to complaints.

3. This was a good media month for us.  I was quoted in a CNN article about The Princess and the Frog; several of our posts on gendered marketing to children were discussed in a Salon article by Kate Harding; a recent post about pink telescopes and microscopes was featured on Pharygula; we were linked from the American Spectator; and Guardian named our Avatar post among The Best of the Web.  Fun!

NOTE FROM A READER:

Sarah is a reader and frequent commenter on the blog who sent us a note complimenting all of you.  We thought we’d let everyone read it.  Sarah wrote:

I just wanted to commend you for the environment of open discourse on your website. I have some opinions that differ from those of many others on this site, and when I’ve brought them up, I’ve been able to openly discourse with other members without any fear of being chased off with fire and pitchforks.

So, thank you for setting up such an open and welcoming environment.

Thanks Sarah!  Our readers are, indeed, awesome.

And we try!  We don’t follow the comments threads as closely as we’d like (we’re both tenure-track profs), but we do the best we can to make sure that people adhere to our discussion policy.  Thanks to all of you who have been patient with our less-than-perfect moderation and sometimes-ineffectual efforts to weed out the trolls.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

In Dec. ’08 we commenting on McDonald’s efforts to market itself as high class, linking the fast food chain to Bourdieu and Sex in the City, of course.

And in Dec. ’07 we posted a hilarious story about a statue in Lexington, KY, of a war hero on a female horse with, um, testicles.  A hero riding a girl horse into battle is simply inconsistent with our cultural preconceptions… so bring on the intersex equine!

Finally, if you haven’t seen enough Christmas material, visit the posts of Christmas past: marketing cigarettes for Christmas (with new material), non-U.S. Christmas cultures, a scary, fiery Christmas cross, Christmas vs. Holiday (politics edition), the Chrismakkuh Yarmaclaus, a clothesline for X-mas (why not?), and a special gift for Santa and for you.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Dec ’09):

Marketing

We found another example of vintage ads extolling the dietary benefits of sugar.

Larry H. sent us two photos of Amelia Earhart from 1937 in which she is posed in cutesy, flirty ways; we added it to our post of a Lucky Strike ad featuring Earhart.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in another example of a vintage Chrysler ad in which they market the car as youthful (can you imagine!).

Race and Ethnicity

To our vintage Jello ad featuring Asian stereotypes, we added a contemporaneous ad for Rice Krinkles, sent in by Ted K.

It’d be nice to not link back to our post on instances in which college and post-college students dress up like racial minorities, but this isn’t one of those updates.  We added an image of students at the London School of Economics  in brown-face dressed up like Guantanamo Bay prisoners to our post featuring similar acts of individual racist impersonations (scroll way down).

Pete W. sent in a third vintage Bull Durham tobacco ad depicting Black Americans as foolish and bumbling.

Pornification

Yikes!  We added a new ad to our post where sexual body parts are not-so-subliminally included in ads (NSFW).  This one is for “fresh” “shaved” turkey breast slices and they look like, um…

Our evolution of Evony ads post has been among the most popular posts on our site.  Timm F. sent in an ad for another online game, Alteil, making fun of the Evony ads.  We added it to the original post and, while we were at it, we also added another in the series of increasingly sexualized ads, this one sent in by Tim R.

Gender

Harvey tC. sent in a photo that we added to our post featuring pink guns and rifles being marketed to girls/women.  For the hell of it: here is a crazy great set of pro-gun posters.

Both Emily W. and Sabine M. sent us another example of t-shirts being divvied up into “t-shirts” and “women’s t-shirts.”

Elizabeth T. sent in a video of men vamping it up and trying to “do” sexy. We added it to another post asking whether, given the gender binary and our gendered image of “sexy,” such a thing can be anything other than ridiculous.

Monica C. sent in another great example of gendered toy advertising.  In this one a girl plays with a kitchen set alongside a boy playing with a tool set.  Sigh.

In contrast, Lynne S. and Fia K. sent in some more photos of house play toys featuring both girls and boys.

In earlier posts, we’ve highlighted instances in which contradictions in U.S. culture become glaringly clear.  In one, suggestive advertising accompanies an article critiquing a video game in which the player rapes a woman.  In another, CNN asks whether Jon and Kate Gosselin are getting too much media coverage, and then tempts you to read more media coverage about Jon and Kate Gosselin.  In a third, neighbor billboards carry hilariously contradictory messages.

I found another example that left me shaking my head.  Via Racialicious, I found myself reading a Time magazine article reporting on recent research that shows that, even when black and whites are portrayed as equal on television, viewers come away with subconscious anti-black bias that actually translates into bias in real life.  The findings are pretty dismal.

Two paragraphs into the article, there was a promotional link… for television (see the bolded, red parenthetical sentence):

So, yeah, television is likely inculcating you with racist views; “the transmission of race bias appears to occur subconsciously, unbeknownst to the viewer”… but don’t let that stop you from enjoying awesome TV!

The second promotional link, halfway through the article, was just salt in the wound:

And, of course, they couldn’t let your thoughts linger on social justice issues when there are great TV series out there to see!

The final paragraphs:

Maybe they are hoping that we’ll watch the top 10 TV ads and episodes more critically?

These promotional inserts may very well be automatically generated, but the article is dated Dec. 17th, so clearly no one at Time has been alerted to, or cares about, the possibility that they may trivialize the message of the article, or even draw people away from it as early as two paragraphs in.  What Timewants is for you to waste as much time on their website as possible.  Apparently any ideological commitment to fighting racism is secondary at best.

Some have observed that advertisements featuring kids often present active boys and passive girls. This vintage ad is a great example of what that looks like:

Missives from Marx sent in a link to this animated time line documenting the diffusion of various political-economic systems (e.g., fascism, democracy, and feudalism) over world history.  It can be read as a story about the triumph of democracy, but it’s also illustrates how political-economic systems are not natural, but invented during particular historical eras, and diffuse or disappear as a consequence of war, geography, and other geopolitical factors.