I was at the Pittsburgh airport last week and I saw this concourse map and I thought to myself, “Wow, they used pink and they’re not trying to signify WOMAN!  That’s something else!”

Then I looked closer and noticed that this concourse map was specifically for the shopping in the concourse.  Notice it’s a map of the “AirMall”:

Sigh.

Rebecca H. sent us a link to the Clorox website and I thought “Holy Moly! There is actually a MAN on a cleaning product website!” (in the lower right):

Then I looked closer and realized that the man in question is a gay man famous for being on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Sigh.

Two opportunities for suffocating stereotypes to be undermined; two opportunities lost.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Tenured Radical, tired of Facebook ads targeting her with weight loss programs and anti-wrinkle cream, decided to remove her sex from her profile.  Lo and behold, Facebook saw her bet and raised her.  Now, she reports, each time she clicks on her profile page, Facebook asks her to identify herself as male or female.

I tried it.  Here is the pop up:

Tenured Radical’s report is confirmed!  Facebook is programmed to nag you.  It is so “confusing” when you refuse to be stereotyped according to your sex.  Facebook needs to know because how else would it know if you wanted to buy wrinkle cream!!!  Aaaaahhhhhh!!!

Tenured Radical writes:

What a hoot. And I have to hand it to them, the tone is perfect: friendly, non-antagonistic, encouraging. I imagine it’s how people might talk to me if I were on a four-day crying jag, or had had a terrible nervous breakdown, or were crashing after a methamphetamine binge. I imagine myself wrapped in lovely warm towels, on soothing drugs and in a pink room with soft music playing in the background. Nurse Ratched is smiling encouragingly with a big, whacking hypodermic in one hand, trying to encourage me in the least threatening possible way to remember what my gender is or to commit to a gender at least, even if it’s not one we can agree on. “Because you see, dear,” Nursie is saying in my imagination; “People may be confused…other people are, well, upset about this, and if you could just answer the question it would be so much better for them.”

Visit our other post on Facebook’s use of a (white) masculine avatar for all subscribers without photos and our post on avatars, gender, and neutrality more generally.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In the vintage ad below, Sanka sells coffee by joking about how Mexicans (I think) lack good ol’ American capitalist values (text below):

Text:

“How a kind word ruin by beezness”

1. Everyone takes the siesta in the heat of the day, except I, poor Juan.  While all are asleep, the shops are closed.  Except my shop, where I sell pottery to the American tourists for ten times what it costs in America.

2. An American senorita comes one afternoon to buy the pottery.  “How is it that you do not take the siesta?” she asked, speaking that strange language which I have heard called Highschool Spanish.  “Ah, senorita,” I sighed, “I cannot sleep!”

3.  “Is it the coffee!” I explained.  “I love the coffee. I cannot resist it.  But when I drink it with the lunch, then all afternoon I am wide awake!”  She nodded.  “It is good business to be open when other shops are closed!”

4. “I would give all the beezness for a good siesta!” I cried.  “Then you should drink Sanka Coffee,” she said.  “It’s 97% caffein-free [sic], and can’t keep you awake!”  “It is an American trick!”  I scoffed.  “How can it be good coffee?”

5. “It’s wonderful!  A blend of fine Central and South American coffees!” she replied.  “And the Council on Foods of the American Medical Association says: ‘Sanka Coffee is free from caffein [sic] effect, and can be used when other coffee has been forbidden!’ ”

6.  So in gratitude I charge her only five times what the pottery is worth.  Later, I try Sanka Coffee.  Delicious.  And I sleep each day during the afternoon.  My pottery beezness, he is ruin but ah, amigo… how I enjoy the siesta!

See also our post on the Frito Bandito and a vintage Tequila ad.

Found at Vintage Ads.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

On Mary K.’s birthday she received the following birthday-related promotion from Best Buy.  Notice that the promotion is personalized: it says “Happy Birthday, Mary” in the upper right corner.  Nonetheless, the promotion features a tie as an example of a bad gift and a camera as an example of something that Mary might really want.

Given how carefully ads are now targeted to internet users (based both on the demographics it can gather about you [e.g., when you’re on Facebook] and the content of the text you’re reading [e.g., alongside email exchanges]), it’s kind of fascinating that Best Buy is apparently NOT paying attention to Mary’s sex.  This, of course, might be heartily welcomed by many of you.

But, if Best Buy is going to put together a non-sex-specific promotion, it sure seems like it would be a good idea to make it non-sex-specific (featuring, as a bad gift, something non-gendered like an electric toothbrush or something).  For whatever reason, Best Buy went with “we’re going to assume that all our customers are dudes.”

For more instances of male as the default human, see these posts: one, two, three, and four.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Peter Hessler, at the New Yorker, discusses the practice of outsourcing art to China. According to Hessler, Chinese people, mostly from the countryside, are trained to paint copies of photographs or paintings en masse and those paintings are sold to tourists elsewhere in the world.

Painters pose in their workspace:

Paintings to be sold as souvenirs somewhere in the American West:

Venice?

See more at the slide show.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The Oral Cancer Foundation released this video last month, just a couple of weeks before the FDA was scheduled to vote on approval of the ‘male’ Gardasil vaccine.

Whether you’re pro- or anti-vaccine, you might wonder why has FDA testing of and approval for Gardasil’s use on males lagged three years behind the female-only “cervical cancer” vaccine? Most of us who have followed Gardasil’s development were not surprised when the FDA recently voted to approve its use on boys and young men for the prevention of genital warts. However, this limited focus on male genital warts ignores the growing number of medical studies which have shown causal connections between two cervical-cancer causing types of HPV (covered by Gardasil) and a variety of cancers that can have devastating health consequences in female and male bodies.

In light of this body of research, many were dismayed by the fact that the CDC decided against recommending routine use of the Gardasil vaccine for boys.  A NYT article reported that this committee will likely consider data on Gardasil’s ability to protect against male cancers when it meets again in February.

As more Americans learn about the causal links between HPV strains covered by Gardasil and serious (sometimes fatal) oral and anogenital cancers, it will be interesting to see if U.S. boys/young men get vaccinated at as high a rate as girls/young women.

To educate people about the risk of oral cancer from sexually-transmitted HPV, the Oral Cancer Foundation released this video:

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Adina Nack is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University specializing in medical sociology, gender inequality and sexual health.  Nack’s book, Damaged Goods?  Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases came out in 2008.  You can see an earlier post of hers, about sexually transmitted disease and stigma, here.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Kay, a student at a University in Munich, sent along an invitation for a Corps Isaria fraternity, or or “Burschenschafts,” party. The cover for the invitation reads “Isarias Gute Kinderstube” which, she explains, “translates literally to good nursery and means something like being well raised, knowing how to behave.”

When you open the invitation you see a naked woman, covered only by a teddy bear, alongside baby-related items (a Snuffalufagus, a rocking Zebra, and a crib) and party-related items (a disco ball, a stag’s head, and high heeled shoes):

Kay explains that the copy, “Das Corps Isaria gibt sich die Ehre und laedt zur eskaloesesten Pyjamaparty der Stadt” translates into something like “The Corps Isaria is honored to host the most risque sleepover in town.”

The invitation is another example of the infantilization of women. Or, as Kay put it, a “mixture of the male gaze and child porn fetishism.”

For more infantilization of women, see here, here, here, here, and here, and here.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Ilari Sani sent in this vintage ad encouraging Americans to eat vegetables and “Toughen Up.”  Today salad is definitely considered “girl food,” and there are plenty of vintage examples in which meat was connected with strength and toughness (and, more generally, masculinity; see below).  This ad tries to contest that idea.  I wonder if the effort was successful in its day, or if it fell flat alongside the meat = real food narrative.

For vintage examples of meat being connected to masculinity, see here and here.  For contemporary examples, see here and here.

Found at Vintage Ads.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.