Thomas Sander at the Social Capital Blog writes: “Obviously the $1,000,000 question is whether these behavioral changes are likely to continue beyond the Obama candidacy.” I think the answer to this, at least as far as racial composition goes, is yes. What we see here is a two decade long trend, not a blip inspired by Obama.

Data compiled by the the Pew Research Center, via Thick Culture.

Michael G., Sarahjane C., and Marlow sent us this commercial, designed for a small market, advertising a furniture store called The Red House. It was produced by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. It is a real commercial, though it was designed to self-consciously spoof the many poorly-produced and weirdly-sloganed commercials that we’ve all seen advertising local small businesses on late night television. Word on the street is that the commercial has been maligned as racist. What do you think?

McLaughlin and Neal felt obliged to respond to the accusations of racism in another video. In it, they make a distinction between “racist” and “racial” and suggest that the video only seems racist if any and all talk that acknowledges race is considered bad.

This is an example of how the internet operates as a public sphere and can facilitate discussion about difficult topics. Without youtube, attention to this commercial would have remained local and/or restricted to a two minute discussion on the nightly news. Instead, the commercial has been viewed over 1.2 millions times and the response has been viewed over 50,000 times (as of today). Blogs all over the internet have picked up on the controversy and people are chiming in. I wouldn’t say that the discussion is all that sophisticated, but it is really interesting to see so many Americans discussing racism at all.

Then again, maybe the commercial has gotten so much attention because most people conclude that it is not racist. That is, are race and racism more likely to be widely discussed when the collective conclusion is “not racism”? Do we see such wide discussion of clearly racist material?

What do you think? Is this an example of the revolutionary power of the internet? Or just business as usual?

American workers have lost power relative to their employers since the heyday of unionization during the industrial era. One way in which employees gained was through the extension of benefits to full-time workers: salary, relative job security, health insurance, sick pay, paid vacation, parental leave, etc.  Full-time jobs, however, are being replaced by part-time jobs, and with them have gone much of the power and most of the benefits that workers were able to gain through unionization.

You would think, though, that jobs that require a high level of education and training might be immune from these trends. Perhaps not.

The American Federation of Teachers released a report that included data on the percentage of employees at U.S. colleges and universities that are full-time tenure-track professors, full-time non-tenure track, adjunct (part-time) professors, and graduate students.  As you can see, the percentage of full-time tenure-track professors is decreasing and we are being replaced by other types of employees who cost the institution much less (graphs borrowed from MontClair SocioBlog).

This is a problem from a labor perspective in that it strips power away from employees, putting it squarely back into the hands of employers.  It may also be a problem in terms of the quality of education.  Adjunct professors are often terrific, but anyone who is overworked and underpaid is likely to invest less in their product.  I wonder, too, if this impacts the rate of scientific research (fewer full-time tenure- track professors= less research).  Any other thoughts on this trend?

I have been fascinated over the past week by news coverage of the newly discovered “Venus” figurine that is believed to be the oldest human carving ever found. In this post, I’m trying to work out my thoughts.

News coverage has described the figurine with terms like “sexy,” “erotic,” “sexually-suggestive,” “sexually-charged,” “busty,” “pornographic,” and “pin up.” I’m not sure what to make of this.  There is no possible way that we could understand the meaning–or, let’s face it, multitude of contested meanings–that such a figure could have carried for those who made it.  All interpretations are projections of our own contemporary sensibilities.

Perhaps especially because of this, I am dumbfounded as to the ease with which news coverage describes the figurine as sexy.

From a contemporary U.S. perspective, the figure would not be considered sexy. Bodies such as that portrayed in this “Venus” are considered grotesque today and people who are sexually attracted to such bodies are considered deviant. It’s amazing to me that this is so completely unnoticed in news coverage. Instead, the figure is seen as obviously sexual exactly because the body is fat.

I think this could be explained with our contemporary social construction of fatness. Fat symbolizes excess. Fat people are presumed to have appetites in excess, for sex as well as for food. Fat women in the media are often portrayed as highly, even aggressively, sexual (think Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, the way that Star Jones’ role developed on The View, even Karen Walker on Will & Grace who, by modern standards and compared to Grace, was “curvy”).  The figurine is described as somehow obviously in excess.  The coverage includes terms like “protruding,” “exaggerated,” “grossly exaggerated,” “enormous,” “aggressive,” “enlarged,” “bloated,” “huge,” “bulbous,” “oversized,”  “outsized,” “distorted,” “swollen,” and “with breasts that make Dolly Parton look flat-chested.”  Granted, the figure may be somewhat disproportionate (and I emphasize may be), but our interest in its disproportionality seems somewhat disproportionate as well.

Maybe this is intersecting with our own assumptions as to the primitiveness of the people who carved the figure. The primitive is also a socially constructed idea and we often think that primitive people have closer ties to their baser instincts.  From that perspective, maybe being sexually attracted to excessive sexuality makes sense.

So maybe the combination of our social construction of fat and our social construction of the primitive explains why the contradiction–the figurine is obviously sexy, but women who have that body today are considered the antithesis of sexy–is going unmarked. I’m not sure. I’d like to hear your thoughts.

An extended version of this post also appeared at Ms.

I’ve been taking photographs of breast-cancer-research-and-prevention-branded products for a few months now. I was first driven to do so when I saw this at the Million Aire (private plane terminal) at the Burbank airport:

That’s right. You are looking at pink chocolate chips cooked into cookies to signify a commitment to reducing breast cancer-related morbidity and mortality.

Anti-breast cancer messages are, I think inarguably, the most widely product-linked disease-related message ever.  I am constantly shocked by how many products have a breast cancer version. Here are some pictures I’ve taken over the last few months.

Cream cheese:

Padlock:

Cat food:

Gum:

Golf balls and tees:

Pots and pans:

Steve W. sent in this picture of a pink “ladies night out” breast cancer-themed limo (note the pink ribbon hanging from the rear view mirror):

NEW (May ’10)! Renée Y. sent along this photo of breast cancer-awareness-themed grape tomatoes.  I repeat: grape tomatoes.

We’ve discussed the commodification of activism extensively (see here, here, here, here, and here) and so I’m going to skip this point.  Instead, I’d like the ask the following:

What does it mean when awareness of and funding for disease is subject to marketing?  Is this really the most efficient or rational way to set health care priorities?  I did a bit of research.

According to the CDC (2005 seems to be the latest available data), cancer is not the leading cause of death.  Heart disease is the leading cause of death.  Granted, cancer is a close second.  In 2005, 652,091 people died of heart disease and 559,312 died of cancer.  But not breast cancer, all cancers.  In 2005, 49,491 people died of breast cancer.  More than 10 times as many people died of heart disease.

And, if you want to prioritize cancers, more people are diagnosed with prostate cancer than breast cancer (source) and more people die from lung cancer (159,292), colon, rectal, or anal cancer (53,252), and lymphoid/hematopoietic cancers (55,028) (source).

So why such an emphasis on breast cancer?   I’m not sure why.  Certainly there is a massive social movement organization behind this anti-breast cancer marketing and people in charge have made a decision to take this approach.   I think, also, the body parts and the presumed cause of disease matter.   Do we have less sympathy (and would, therefore, a similar marketing campaign be less effective) for lung cancer because we think that lung cancer patients are to blame for their own disease?  Would we find colo-rectal-anal cancer-themed cream cheese somehow less appetizing?  Or prostate cancer-themed gum?  Do lymphoid and hematopoietic cancers affect parts of the body that are simply less iconic?

“Save the lymph nodes” just doesn’t have quite the same ring?

I’m not trying to suggest that raising awareness of and funding research for breast cancer isn’t important, but I am interested in the strategies by which being “against” breast cancer is (literally) sold to us.  And I’m curious about how this affects treatment and research funding, if at all, and the rationality of our resource distribution given the application of a marketing approach to (some) diseases (and not others).  (Also in breast cancer marketing, see here, here, here, 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.

According to the Economist, beauty spending–on make-up, diet and exercise, fragrances, skin care, hair products, and cosmetic surgery–adds up to a $160 billion-a-year worldwide.  To illustrate this, Lauren Greenfield calculated the monthly spending of six women and photographed them undergoing their beauty treatments (slideshow here).  Thanks to Karl B. for sending along the link!

26 year-old, Ginger spends $650 a month on her physical appearance. At Manhattan’s store Sephora, Ginger shops alone for cosmetics because her friends know she will spend hours. She is so obsessed with makeup that she founded her own line of cosmetics, Ginger Luxe.

PR-Company owner, Claudine (29) compares prices at Duane Reade drug store in Upper East Side Manhattan. Claudine spends only $80 each month on her personal grooming. Her philosophy is ‘the less stuff I use, the better I look’.

New York City actress Cameron (25) spends $620 a month on her personal grooming. Cameron reveals that her hair is the key to her personality, ‘I spend so much time with my hair-stylists, they’re like my family’.

New York City hedge-fund exec Suzanne (36) spends $1720 a month on personal grooming.  At ‘Skin & Spa’ cosmetic surgery center, Suzanne receives Botox from Dr. Howard Sobel, a treatment that she receives 3 times a year.

Fashion company spokeswoman, Jennifer, 27 receives a spray tan at a top New York salon. Jennifer spends $865 on personal grooming, ‘My spa time’s not a splurge-it’s a necessity!’

For more on beauty and spending, see our posts on the scientizing of beauty products (here, here, and here), our post on how Dove and Axe are in bed together, and this post on the economics of beauty over a lifetime.

Also see Lauren Greenfield’s work on girl culture and photographs of children at a weight loss camp.

Both Aani B. and Sarah F. sent in a link to a commercial for the new diet Pepsi (Pepsi Max, of course) being aimed at men. 

Also don’t miss this commercial (embedding disabled) in which they describe the ingredients of Pepsi Max as the crushed bones of a Viking, the spit of a rapid Wolverine, pepper spray, and scorpion venom.  The can? Made from the hull of a nuclear submarine.  The crushing of cans on heads ensues.

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, a reader named Kate sent in a snapshot of some advertising for the product at the intersection of 6th and Anza in San Francisco:

Slogans:

“The first diet cola for men.”

“Save the calories for bacon.”

“0 calories. Great taste. Welded together.”

“No gut. All glory.”

This is, of course, all in jest. Yet is still re-affirms the idea that being this way is the epitome of manhood, if taken to a ridiculous extreme.  Eh, I’ll just let Twisty say it. As usual, she says it better than I:

What’s the big whoop? Well, you can’t have a “soda for men” unless “men” are considered a class unto themselves, defined in terms of the bacon-eating, welding, glorious nukular submarine-squashing aspirations that separate them from dainty vulnerable “women.” These ads are jokey, depicting average-looking dudes, but they tacitly allude to the noxious he-man/fragile damsel dichotomy that’s been chapping actual women’s hides lo these many millennia.

It also, of course, points to the fact that dieting really has been for women all along (see posts here and here for examples). In fact, it denies that diet-soda-for-men is about dieting at all: note the slogan “save the calories for bacon” and the name, Pepsi Max, which implies adding something to the beverage as opposed to taking something out.

See other examples of marketing for diet products aimed at men: Nutrisystem (“get ‘er done!”) and Weight Watchers.

Fair.org (via Alas a Blog) points out that the news media has consistently framed the recent U.S. killing of dozens of Afghan civilians as “bad PR.”  Consider these headlines:

Wall Street Journal

Washington Post

New York Times

Fair summarizes the coverage:

Early reports of a massive U.S. attack on civilians in western Afghanistan last week (5/5/09) hewed to a familiar corporate media formula, stressing official U.S. denials and framing the scores of dead civilians as a PR setback for the White House’s war effort.

…

The New York Times reported that civilian deaths “have been a decisive factor in souring many Afghans on the war.” As CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric put it (5/6/09), “Reports of these civilian casualties could not have come at a worse time, as the Obama administration launches its new strategy to eradicate the Taliban and convince the Afghan people to support those efforts.” Other outlets used very similar language to explain why the timing was “particularly sensitive” (Washington Post, 5/7/09) or “awkward” (Associated Press, 5/7/09) for the Obama administration.

The ease with which these deaths can be framed as a problem for the U.S. is a good example of how we can dehumanize the Other.  We clearly do not identify with the victims or their loved ones when the pain and suffering we leave in our wake is made invisible so easily.