This archive of cigarette commericals, sent in by Kay W., makes some interesting comparisons of vintage and contemporary cigarette ads.

First, they compare vintage ads that try to sell cigarettes by pointing to the fact that they suppress your appetite with contemporary-ish Virginia Slims ads which seem to suggest so indirectly.

Second, they compare vintage advertisements that argue that some brands are smooth and good for your voice with the contemporary “Find Your Voice” campaign:

Third, this set of ads nicely shows how the association of glamour with cigarette smoking has transcended history:

Rachel M. sends us this story:  The cover for the 1976 Scorpions album “Virgin Killer” apparently not considered problematic enough for censorship at the time, was pulled from a Wikipedia webpage for being “a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18.”  The image, included after the jump, features a naked prepubescent girl in a provocative pose:

According to Wikipedia, the album cover immediately spurred protests and it was replaced by the album cover below in some places (thanks to Dubi and Lizzie in the comments for pointing out my error):

This image, as well as the controversy, discussed on Wikipedia here, brings up questions regarding censorship, historical change, child pornography (see also the controversial Calvin Klein ad campaign) and, more generally, the sexualization of young girls.  See contemporary and historical examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Oh dear.

And don’t miss this fascinating, and perhaps misguided, attempt to fight the sexualization of girls.

Have you ever wondered why many stores now no longer require a signature when you make a purchase of $25 or less with a credit card?  Today, I found out why.

It has to do with the pressure to increase employee efficiency.  So how do you make employees more efficient?  According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, you change practices.  Consider:

Then, you start clocking employees.  For example:

Daniel A. Gunther has good reason to keep his checkout line moving at the Meijer Inc. store north of Detroit. A clock starts ticking the instant he scans a customer’s first item, and it doesn’t shut off until his register spits out a receipt.

To assess his efficiency, the store’s computer takes into account everything from the kinds of merchandise he’s bagging to how his customers are paying. Each week, he gets scored. If he falls below 95% of the baseline score too many times, the 185-store megastore chain, based in Walker, Mich., is likely to bounce him to a lower-paying job, or fire him.

According to the article, the cost is, in large part, paid by the employee in the form of comfort on the job, the ability to make human contact with regular customers, and having to be mean to old ladies to get them to hurry up. 

Jay Livingston has a nice analysis.

Bern K. and Megan P. sent us another example of androcentrism (see here, here, here, and here), one that is nicely combined with the representation of women as annoying naggers, and the social construction of diamonds as men’s best friend.  Bern writes:

It starts off with promise, showing that it’s ridiculous for a man to buy his wife a vacuum cleaner for their anniversary. It finishes, unfortunately, by suggesting that the only way to get out of the doghouse is to buy his wife diamonds.

In the 5-minute commercial, men are punished by their wives for being insensitive or insulting by being sent to the “doghouse.”  In this five minute advertisement for JC Penney, men who have been sent to the doghouse are punished by being forced to do feminine tasks: fold laundry, eat quiche, and drink chai lattes.  There is some irony in that the main dude was sent to the doghouse for buying his wife a vacuum for their anniversary.  Apparently he wouldn’t want to be caught dead vacuuming… which is exactly why the gift might be considered insulting.  After all, when you give a woman a cleaning product for a gift, it means you think it’s HER JOB.

The video:

The website include the sound of a woman nagging and giving inconsistent orders (“speak less,” “talk more”).

How to get out of the doghouse? Buy your wife diamonds (at JC Penney):

I like how it says that she’ll be “screaming and jumping for joy.”  Gah, women are so shallow and annoying.

There’s more!  The website is interactive.  You can actually put people in the doghouse.  If you are on Facebook, you can upload someone’s profile picture and have it show up on the website.  A fascinating new way to merge advertising and social networking sites.

NEW (Jan. ’10)!  JC Penney apparently thought this campaign was so delightful that they updated it. Joel P. sent us the link. It’s really quite obnoxious (for all the reasons discussed above):

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U45oxUyiMc[/youtube]

Jezebel also has a nice analysis.

The United States is highy individualistic.  Most advertisers appeal to our indivdual self-interest, as do politicians when trying to “sell” public policy.  The idea that we should do something for the greater good is not, somehow, as appealing an appeal.

In light of this, it is interesting to see a counter-example.  Chris Uggen posted this image of a sticker he received after he got his flu shot from the University of Minnesota health clinic.

Most of the time we are encouraged to get a flu shot so that we, personally, do not get sick.  In this case, we are encouraged to get a flu shot for the good of the greater community.  This is a nice example of the way that a collectivist ideology can be used in place of an individualist ideology.

Miguel E. sent us a link to a story about Natural High, a Japanese company that reportedly makes “extreme” pornography.   The producer, Sakkun, felt bad that many children in Africa live in poverty and so he sent a porn star to Kenya to have sex with African men (on film, of course).  The company gave a Kenyan aid organization one million yen (around $10, 800 U.S.) and 1,000 more (currently about $10.77 U.S.) is donated for every DVD sold (story here).  Images and discussion after the jump:

These first two photos are part of a promotional photo shoot in which the porn star poses with recipients of aid:

Natural High has, in fact, produced a series of “charity porn” videos.   In these videos, female porn stars have sex with men and a portion of the profit goes directly to their communities (as I understand it).   The first image below is a promotional photo and the others are DVD jackets:

Some scattered thoughts:

1.  If this was a U.S. production company, I would say that this represented a fetishization of the modernity/tradition binary (like the fashion shoots we’ve highlighted–see here and here–but explicitly and literally sexualized) and that the videos might function as a sort of sex tourism. 

2.  Gail Dines writes about interracial porn produced in the West.  She argues that the genre of porn in which white women have sex with black men functions to denigrate both white women and black men.  If the content of the videos is any indication, the viewers of the pornography, who she argues are primarily white men, get off on watching white women being degraded by having sex with a black man.  Thus the genre is both racist and sexist. 

3.  The project also reminds me, more directly, of this Icelandic cartoon that caricatures Barack Obama as a primitive cannibal cooking up a sexualized Hillary Clinton.

But I don’t know if any of this applies in the Japanese context. Any thoughts?

The project also raises ethical questions.

First, the news story doesn’t discuss payment.  I assume the men are paid.  This raises serious questions.  How much choice can these individuals really exercise if, in fact, they are as impoverished as the producer claims?  This reminds me of those campaigns to sterilize women on welfare or drug-using women by offering them a sum of money and paying for their operation.  Is this consent or coercion? 

Second, to what extent do you think these individuals would understand what they were getting into when a Japanese porn company came along offering money in exchange for engaging in sex on film?  I should be careful not to assume that such populations are ignorant about the “modern” world, but it’s possible that they are rather unfamiliar with the pornography industry.  That said, another question is to what extent this is all staged. 

Finally, I wonder how the women in these communities feel about this project. Certainly some women wives and girlfriends of the men in the video are perfectly fine with it, and happy to get some money. But I would assume that at least some are not thrilled that their husbands or boyfriends are having sex with this other woman who is in town to make a video. To what degree do the producers worry about how the women who are connected in some way to these men feel about their participation? Related to that, to whom are the payments to the community made? Do women have a role in deciding how it is spent, or is the money distributed to the men who were in the video, in which case it might or might not be spent in ways that improve women’s lives (as many aid agencies have discovered over the years)?

I hesitate to make conclusive comments about what this video series illustrates because I am unfamiliar with Japanese culture.   If you have some familiarity with Japan, I’d be really interested in your thoughts.

UPDATE:  In our comments thread, Andrew writes that he rented one of this films and that the sex occurs between Japanese porn stars, not the local men.  I will admit, I did not verify this story personally, so I’m blogging blind.  Has anyone else actually seen these videos?

Welcome to Christmas 2008!

Rose McM. sent us this great example of rigidly gender-coded toys from the Sears Wish Catalog (click to enlarge):

NEW! (Jan. ’10): Sarah O. snapped this photo of toys that teach girls they should cook and care for babies, while boys can build things and be doctors:

See also these posts on the Rose Petal Cottage and Tonka Trucks (“built for boyhood!”).

The 1966 and 1976 editions of this old board game illustrate both historical ideas about gender and the way they can change in just ten years.

The 1966 version for girls (found here):

Options for girls include going to charm school to become a model, nursing school to become a nurse, drama school to become an actress, college to become a teacher, ballet school to become a ballet dancer, or airline training school to become an airline hostess.

The 1966 version for boys (found here):

Options for boys include going to law school to become a statesman, graduate school to become a scientist, medical school to become a doctor, college to become an athlete (!?), technical school to become an engineer, or flight school to become an astronaut.

They revised the girl’s game (I’m not sure about the boy’s game) in 1976 (found here).  Girls could now choose between going to medical school to become a surgeon, the riding academy to be a jockey, flight training school to be an astronaut, college to be a commentator, drama school to be a director, and law school to be a lawyer.

I wonder if the revised boy’s version included going to college to become an elementary school teacher, to medical school to be a pediatrician, or to a dance academy to become a dancer.  I predict not.