Rihanna’s first new single since getting beaten by boyfriend Chris Brown is titled “Russian Roulette.”  On the cover, she is wrapped in barbed wire with an eye patch that looks like a black eye:

The lyrics include:

And you can see my heart beating
You can see it through my chest
And I’m terrified but I’m not leaving
Know that I must pass this test
So just pull the trigger

And:

So many won’t get the chance to say goodbye
But it’s too late too pick up the value of my life

Given the many, many young girls that blamed Rihanna for her beating, releasing a song that posits that love is simply dangerous is really… disappointing.”

You can read a more thoughtful discussion about this by Anna North at Jezebel.

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

Stephen W. sent in an amazing 9-minute cartoon touting the superiority of capitalism:

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

Serena Williams is on the cover of ESPN this month, as Becky T. pointed out. And Becky is torn. I’d like to put it up for discussion.

The cover:

So, on the one hand:   Dude. Why is it that a woman rarely makes it onto the cover of ESPN and, when she does, she’s freakin’ naked? And, of course (*sarcasm*), it’s for “The Body Issue” (because women’s bodies are where it’s at, right fellas?). I did a google image search for “espn cover” and the first page of results includes only two women. One is naked (Williams) and the other is pregnant.

On the other hand:  The cover doesn’t appear to be trying to hide or diminish Williams’ strength.  The girl is STRONG.  Check out that bicep!  Part of me wants to say that she looks good.  DAMN good.

What do you think?

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

Emily L. sent in a link to the t-shirt below.  It was made by students at Houston’s Memorial High (go, Mustangs!) for the yearly football game against their rival, Stratford.  It nicely reveals how sex and domination are conflated in American society.  On the shirt, “beating” Stratford at football is conflated with “fucking” them.  As the text says: “F’n Spartans Up Since 1962”:

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, it should be really troubling to us all that “fuck” has the double meaning that it does.

More conflations of sex and power here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Borrowed from Jezebel.

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

One of my former students, Janel B., sent me to this post called “Don’t Sleep on Africa” on the fashionable Livejournal community called black cigarette, and thereby introducing me to the South African photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko and her amazing portraits of Johannesburg stylish street denizens.

The entire post at black cigarette begins with this brief intervention into the problematically differential distribution of “style:”

Stockholm. Paris. London. New York. Helsinki. Milan. Tokyo.

These seem to be to go-to places when it comes to “street-style” and what’s hot in general on most fashion blogs, but I just wanted to share some of the street-style you’ll find on the African continent…. South African street style is rarely sleek and chic – it’s irreverent, vibrant and daring. It mixes patterns and textures, with echoes of mid 70s style (and just a splash of “geek chic”).

(Consider too the fact that Feedshion, which collects “the best street fashion photos from all the greatest street style blogs for your viewing pleasure,” happens to feature only street style blogs from the usual suspects and none from South America or Africa.)

The photo-heavy post is a wonderful contrast to those editorials in American and European fashion magazines whose visual vocabularies for “Africa” are unbelievably narrow and alienating (Galliano, I’m looking at you and your “tribal” fetish figure shoes). The continued refusal to see the African other as coeval (that is, contemporaneous) with the so-called modern observer, most obviously manifested in the classification of “tribal chic,” betrays the still-haunting presence of colonial aesthetics in Western art and design.

I wish I could repost all the photographs, but I will settle for a handful from Veleko.

Edited to add additional links supplied by Sociological Images and Racialicious, by way of the LJ community Debunking White.

Gorgeous photos from South African photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko.

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Based outside of Chicago, Mimi Thi Nguyen scours thrift and vintage stores with reckless abandon. She writes about neoliberalism and humanitarianism from a transnational feminist analytic, which includes the “management” of refugee crises but also beauty as a civilizing project.  She blogs at Threadbared.

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

At FST, via Chartporn.

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

Larry Harnisch, of The Daily Mirror, scanned these two ads for Grand Marnier from the latest New Yorker.  Normally we don’t get too worked up over phallic imagery, but I thought these two might be good for discussion.  Besides, it’s been a while since we linked to our awesome collections of ads featuring ejaculation imagery, subliminal sex, and not-so-subliminal sex (NSFW).

In the first, the woman greets a man at his door.  She is wearing a dress with a very low cut back.  She is holding the bottle behind her, angled provocatively.  Don’t miss the shape of the bottle itself (and what exactly is that circle at the base of its neck?).

In the second ad, the woman sits deep in an armchair, her legs in the air.  The bottle, being poured by a man, is tilted towards her, and spilling liquid into her glass.

So, Readers, what do you think?  Is the bottle meant to be read as a penis subconsciously?  Do you think it works that way, intended or not?

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

Jessica G. drew our attention to the promotional material of Panty Raid.  Panty Raid is two guys, Josh Mayer and Marty Folb, who produce dance music.  As you might guess from their name, their materials include a dismissal of women as fans and an endorsement of men’s entitlement to sexual access to women.  Their slogan for their album, Marine Parade, is: “Audio fondling your girlfriend.”

So, “you” are a straight guy.  And, like it or not, these guys are such hegemons that they are makin’ it with your girl, whether she likes it or not.

There is more of this typical misogyny at their website (you can google it), but it was the promo shot below that Jessica felt compelled to send in.

This is a great illustration of what it looks like to embrace both white and male privilege.  We see the bottom half of a black woman sitting with her legs apart and her underwear at her ankles.  Were it not dark between her legs,  you could see her vulva.  Mayer and Folb, both white men, sit in front of her and look at the camera.  Their expression and posture suggest utter disinterest.

This is where I think the privilege is revealed, and embraced, loud and clear.  She is not a human being, she is a vagina and, even as a vagina, she is uninteresting.  She is nothing, really.  Like their sneakers, their trucker hats, and their hoodies, she is only a prop.  What does a sexually available black woman signify?  Urban cred?  Masculine domination of women?  High status in a hierarchy of men?  All of the above?  Congratulations dudes: racist and sexist message sent and received.

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