Amelie M. drew our attention to a comment by actress Olivia Wilde.
In an interview, she explained:
When people saw “The Black Donnellys” (2007), they didn’t know it was the same girl from “The O.C.” (2003). I’m a natural blonde, but I feel like a brunette. I feel like people treat me now [as a brunette] how I should be treated. People used to be shocked, when I was blond, that I wasn’t stupid. I used to get these comments that I swear people thought were compliments. Like, ‘Oh! You’re smart!’ – like they couldn’t believe it.
Dmitriy T.M. sent a link to a Cracked list of misguided products. Among them, was a discussion of a doll I remember from when I was a kid: the Cabbage Patch Kid Preemie. Cabbage Patch Kids were all the rage. The preemie version, a supposedly prematurely born “kid,” was a sort of spin off.
Cracked points out one of the ironies here:
So What’s the Problem?
You know what’s not all that cuddly? A one and a half-pound infant fighting for its fragile life in a coffin-shaped incubator with more tubes and machines attached to it than Weapon X. Don’t forget the bandages that keep the light out of its underdeveloped eyes, or the little heating beds it has to lay in because it can’t maintain its body heat. Toss in some weeping parents and a couple of nurses probing and prodding its frail little body and you’ve got the must-have toy of the season.
Given this deserved critique of the product, what exactly is it about the idea of a premature baby that would make Coleco think it would appeal to children and their parents? I think this commercial gives us a clue:
The Cabbage Patch slogan, “You can give them all of your love,” is an excellent example of what this doll is really about: socializing young girls to be nurturers focused (apparently exclusively) on children.
In this case, what could possibly require more nurturing than an infant? A premature infant!
The Cabbage Patch Kids website, where you can still buy preemies in addition to kids and babies, says that this premature version of the doll “will require extra attention and lots of Tender Loving Care. Be sure to spend lots of time with these tiny ones once you adopt.” As Grandma reminds the girl, “Preemies need extra special care.” And the girl responds in a way that implies that a baby that needs “extra special care” is even more rewarding than a baby that simply needs special care. The more self-sacrifice is required, the happier a girl will be.
Some deep and disturbing socialization indeed.
Oh and also, I couldn’t help but also share this doozy with you, from the description of the Preemie doll:
These small babies have no hair, but come with a choice of eye colors in blue, green, brown, and Asian.
While the American ethos of success suggests that it is the result of talent and hard work, Gladwell examines factors that sociologists refer to as social structure—things beyond our individual control—to understand what else successful people have helping them on their journey. Let’s be clear: skills and hard work are important, but so is timing.
One of the examples Gladwell uses is the strange concentration of wildly improbable success in birth cohorts (people born around the same time). Sternheimer summarizes Gladwell’s argument as to how timing and geography shaped the ascendence of Gates and Jobs:
Gladwell describes how being born in the mid 1950s was particularly fortuitous for those interested [and talented] in computer programming development (think Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both born in 1955). It also helped to be geographically near what were then called supercomputers, the gigantic predecessors to the thing on which you’re reading this post.
Sternheimer goes on to argue that members of Generation X may have a special advantage over earlier and later cohorts. This figure shows that the number and rate of births peaked between the 1950s and then dropped precipitously during the period in which Generation X was born:
Those of us born in Generation X, then, would have had the advantage of schools designed and staffed for many more kids, leading to small class sizes and more resources for each kid. Sternheimer writes:
As Gladwell describes, children born after booms… have the benefit of smaller class sizes. An unprecedented number of schools were built for Baby Boomers in the years before I was born. When my cohort was ready to go to school, there were newly-built buildings waiting for us, especially for people like me who lived in well-funded suburbs…
When I was in elementary school in the mid 1970s, there were so few students that many classes were combined: first and second graders had the same teacher, as did third and fourth graders. Looking back, this provided me with some unusual opportunities.
Being able to think through this intersection of biography and history is how C. Wright Mills describes as “the sociological imagination.”
This nine-minute 1938 promotion video for White Sands National Monument is a stunning example of how incredibly short our attention spans have become. Or is it just me? Or maybe they found this mindnumblingly slow in 1938 also?
The introductory title pages finally fade away so that the substantive material can begin at about 40 seconds in. 40 seconds! I was dying from boredom at about second 15! See how long you can stand to watch it:
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
