Even in an era when children’s obesity is a significant problem (though a commenter points out that this is contested), the ever-upping of serving sizes at McDonald’s doesn’t appear to be skipping kids. Stephen W. took this picture at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania this week.
Now McDonald’s doesn’t just offer Happy Meals, but Mighty Meals. Mighty Meals include a double cheeseburger instead of a hamburger or cheeseburger or a 6-piece McNugget instead of a 4-piece.
By the way, a Mighty Meal with a double cheeseburger has 780 calories.
And, really, what kid doesn’t want to be mighty? McDonald’s will sink pretty low for a few extra pennies.
I think this is a great example of discursive, and other, manipulation. I’ll focus on the discursive. This advertisement is for Dupont and it’s suggesting that Dupont is awesome because it engages in “open science.” See if you can discern, from the ad, what exactly “open science” is:
I certainly couldn’t. It has something to do with scientists working together and Dupont tells us it’s responsible for some pretty great things. But what is it? And why do I feel so goddamn good about it?
Well part of the reason is certainly the pretty colors, lovely voice-over, and cartoon-y images… but it’s also the word “open.” The word “open” is pretty much universally positive. It’s like the word “choice” or “life.” These are good words. So if you label something with a word like that, it must be good, right?
Well, no. Of course not. It’s just labelling. Most of you are probably vehemently pro-life or pro-choice and against the other, despite the fact that both labels have comforting words.
Anyway, if anyone knows what “open science” is, I’d be glad to know!
Ii think this ad for Kotex is using the X-TREME meme to sell pads (found here):
The copy reads:
It’s got a million micro cells that say your heavy days are goin’ down.
Three words… bring it on. Always Infinity can take it. It’s the world’s first pad of its kind. Packed with an uber-absorbent material called Infinicel that has the power to hold 10x its weight. Which means you just kicked the heavy out of heavy days.
Um, “goin’ down,” “bring it on,” “uber-absorbent,” “kicked the heavy”? They even have an “x” in there. Not to mention the whole floating in a circle of light thing.
The copy in the refrigerator ad reads: “And So Electricity Is Made The Willing Servant.” The accompanying image includes three white women looking leisurely and a Black servant.
Similarly, these two Gold Dust ads personify the product as Black twin babies. The motto is: “Let the GOLD DUST TWINS do your work.”
I think these are fascinating in that they draw our attention to whose work technology is designed to replace. Earlier on this blog we’ve talked about how ads have offered to replace women’s work with the market and with technology. In these cases, the market and technology were needed to ease women’s workload (they certainly couldn’t expect their husbands to do it). In this case, Black servants serve to take women one step further from “women’s work.” Instead of replacing women themselves, the product replace the servants who replaced women, making the comparison of the product to Black servants completely sensical at the time.
Breck C. sent us this link to a collection of photographs of Harajuku Girls. Harajuku is a style for teenagers in a region of Japan (here is the wikipedia entry). I can’t think of a way to describe them that does them justice, so here are some pictures (found here, here, here and here):
In 2004, Gwen Stefani began touring with four women posing as Japanese Harajuku girls. Stefani’s Harajuku Girls serve as her entourage and back-up dancers. Here she is with four (Japanese?) women that she hires to be her Harajuku Girls (found here and here):
In the comments, Inky points out that Stefani says this about them in her song, Rich Girl:
I’d get me four Harajuku girls to
Inspire me and they’d come to my rescue
I’d dress them wicked, I’d give them names
Love, Angel, Music, Baby
Hurry up and come and save me
Stefani also has a Harajuku Lovers clothing line and a series of perfumes, one for her, and one for each Harajuku Girl:
I think that Stefani’s use of Asian women as props (they may or may not be Japanese) fetishizes Asian women and reinforces white privilege. The Harajuku Girls serve as contrast to Stefani’s performance of ideal white femininity. It makes me think of both this poster on colonial-era travel and this fashion spread.
Yet, Stefani’s been at this for four years and I can’t remember hearing any objections to her Harajuku Girls, even in feminist and anti-racist alternative media. Further, if her fashion line, perfume, and continued employment of the Harajuku Girls are any indication, people seem to think the whole thing is awesome. In the meantime, I bet she’s making bank on her clothing line and perfume. Where’s that money going?
Do you think my reading is fair?
And, if so, why do you think there’s been so little outcry?
For good measure, here she is performing with her “Girls”:
In our comments, SG asks that we include the following clarification:
This article is really misrepresenting a whole fashion scene and I would like to ask that you correct it- It is just perpetuating the idiocy and ignorance surrounding these styles. “Harajuku is a style for teenagers in a region of Japan”. “Harajuku style” Is a term coined by western media because they are too ignorant to actually research the names of these actual styles. Harajuku is not a style. It is a location. The females you have pictured are in Decora (and two in Visual Kei). The only “harajuku style” that exists is the fictional one made up by Gwen Stefani and the western media.
Elizabeth recently posted about an ad for Motrin that suggested that you should take pain medicine so as to keep walking in pain-inducing high heels. The message was, essentially, “Suffer for fashion, ladies! Motrin will help!” I wanted to discuss, also, this second ad in their series (found here) and an anonymous commenter egged me on:
They start off saying that how mothers make decisions about how to carry their infants according to what is in style (“Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”). They then point out that what is currently in fashion is painful for mothers. But, of course, moms are going to do it anyway, because the sacrifice is for the child (“It’s a good kind of pain, it’s for my kid”). But also about fashion! And about how in-fashion it is to be a mom! (“Plus it totally makes me look like an official mom”).
The ad trivializes motherhood (threatening to reduce it to fashion), equating it, in a sense, to the high heels in the other ad. At the same time, it legitimizes suffering in the service of your child, which reinforces the ideology of intensive mothering that has ramped up the must-haves and must-dos of mothering like never before in human history.
The good news is that Motrin pulled this ad campaign and has apologized after bloggers took them to task.
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…
