These ads, for a “fashion brand for teenagers” (according to Adverbox), use the trope of colonial taxidermic collection, to promise death to the tween love of Hello Kitty, Snoopie, Minnie and Mickey Mouse, teddy bears, unicorns, Bugs Bunny, Pinnochio, and more.
As a kid who hated Hello Kitty more than life itself and as an adult who just doesn’t get a life-long love of Disney, these ads appeal to me. As a sociologist, their colonial trappings disturb me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Cross posted at Racialicious.
In many places in the midwest the American Indian is very present, but in other places in the U.S., like in California, Disney’s Pocahontas is as close as we get to “Indians.” The idea that American Indians are gone comes, in part, from the ubiquitous representation of them with feathers, buckskins, and moccasins. These anachronisms are everywhere (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here).
American Indians are as modern as the rest of us, why are representations of American Indians, as they live today, so unusual? And what effect might that have on the psyche of American Indian people?
Via PostSecret.
NEW! One of the commenters at Racialicious pointed us to a cartoon that illustrates how anachronistic images of American Indians may shape our ideas of what they are like:
One of the magazines for the obscenely rich that I’ve been perusing lately was Yachts International magazine.
In it was a glaring Sociological Images story. Paging through the magazine it became exceedingly clear that yachts were one prize for extreme economic success… and women were another. Below I have uploaded every ad in the magazine that included people. Across all of the ads, there are 22 women and four men. The women are, overwhemingly, posed as beautiful objects that adorn beautiful yachts.
Each of the ads is embedded after the jump (there’s a lot and they take some time to load):
The following ad was an exception to the rule, it shows a selection of people, not clearly gendered, having a (presumably) nice time on a yacht:
Markus G. alerted us to some of the coverage of Samantha Davies, one of the few women to ever compete in the Vendée Globe, an around the world non-stop sailing competition.
The coverage, in the Daily Mail, highlights her sexuality instead of her competence as a sailor. Sexualizing women is problematic because it undermines any notion of her competence by reducing her to one purpose–fulfilling men’s lust–and erases, in doing so, her skills, work ethic, experience, and knowledge.
The headline reads: “Lone Yachtswoman Samantha Davies: ‘Sometimes I sail naked.'”
Text includes such doozies as:
When you see Samantha Davies pottering about in a teeny pink bikini on her pink sailing boat, Roxy, and spritzing her cabin with perfume, it’s difficult to imagine her facing waves the size of houses, 80-mile-an-hour winds and nights without a second’s sleep.
But that’s how life is for Sam, a 33-year-old Cambridge engineering graduate who once wanted to be a ballerina, still loves to dress in girlie clothes onshore and wears three tiny diamond ear studs and a belly ring.
Let’s get her sailing credentials out of the way – then we can move on to the important questions, such as: ‘How do you have skin that looks like a Clarins advert when you don’t sleep and your face gets ravaged by sun, salt and sea?’
‘In rough seas, sometimes it’s too dangerous to boil water, so you just eat freeze-dried food,’ she smiles. ‘But as I’m a girl, my nutritionist acknowledges that I have to eat chocolate each day!’
‘Don’t give me big muscles,’ Sam wails. ‘But you’ve got to pull up your mainsail, and you can’t do that without strong muscles,’ replies her trainer. ‘But my objective after the race,’ insists Sam, ‘is to have smaller, ladylike arms and shoulders!’
…she uses her sex to her advantage: ‘Whenever I don’t want to climb the mast to do a job at the top, I wear a short skirt so that I simply can’t get up there.’
Other pictures included in the news story:
Politics has long been considered a masculine domain. After all, there are issues, and there are “women’s issues.” However, in this election season, The View has delved deeply into politics. Reactions to this reveal the assumption that politics are for men.
First, Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on The View can be described as nothing if not sexist. Essentially, his message was “Don’t worry your pretty, little emotional heads about politics, ladies!” The View is just “entertainment,” according to O’Reilly, because it’s for women.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6rR2OwaY1c[/youtube]
Second, soon after Joy Behar appeared on Larry King, King asked her “When did ‘The View’ become this? When did it go off-track?” King’s question reveals his assumption that women’s media is for women’s issues, and those are, simply, not real politics (read the transcript here).
Ironically (awesomely), after 12 years on the air, this election season marks the first time that The View has been the #1 watched daytime show, “…garnering its biggest aud[ience] ever (6.2 million) on Nov. 5, the Wednesday after the election” (source).
So, it turns out, women are interested in politics after all.
(Thanks to Gwen for help on this post.)
I found this two page article in a travel magazine aimed at extremely, excessively, egregiously rich people. There is a long history of exploration tourism in which locals are positioned as subservient–see, for example, this colonial era travel poster–and this history immediately came to mind when I saw these two pages.
There is nothing overt here, but I did notice that the author tells us the name of the elephant, but not the guide. It may not seem like a big thing, but this erasure of the African guides as subjects is troubling to me given the history. Text below the images.
Text:
We were about 100 feet from a herd of Cape buffalo. They stood perfectly still, their curly horns giving them a comical George Washington-wig look. Even though they are one of the deadliest of the big six animals, from where we stood they looked almost cuddly. My elephant handler stayed just long enough for me to get several great photos before urging Lundi, the elephant we were riding, to move forward. My guide saw several giraffes up ahead and wanted to get there before they galloped away.
A main source of the wage gap between men and women is job segregation. Men and women are sorted into different jobs and jobs associated with women are paid less.
Below is a list of occupations and their average wages for 2007 from The Bureau of Labor Statistics. I picked out occupations that were rather straightforward (not a random sample, just an illustrative one), put them in order from lowest to highest, and colored them according to whether they are feminine (pink) or masculine (blue) occupations. Comments below.
Parking Lot Attendants: $8.82
Child care workers: $8.82
Coatroom attendants: $9.18
Bellhops: $9.25
Sewing machine operators: $9.31
Manicurists and pedicurists: $9.60
Home health care aid: $9.62
Stock clerks: $9.85
Janitors: $10.00
Hairdressers: $10.68
Security Guards: $10.85
File clerks: $11.06
Pre-school teachers: $11.12
Barbers: $11.31
Receptionist: $11.40
Bus Driver (school): $12.43
Construction workers: $13.13
Butchers: $13.87
Dental Assistants: $15.17
Bus Driver (city): $15.94
Roofers: $15.98
Car mechanics: $16.43
Truck drivers: $17.41
Electricians: $21.53
1. Notice that feminized occupations, occupations that are disproportionately female, cluster towards the lower wage end of this hierarchy.
2. Notice also that, were we to rank these occupations in order of importance or difficulty, we might come out with a very different ranking. Importance and difficulty does not necessarily translate into wages.
For example, child care workers and home health care workers are paid only a bit more or no more than parking lot attendants. And coatroom attendants are paid more. So coats and cars are, I guess, pretty important.
Car mechanics are paid more than dental assistants. They require a similar amount of training, yet we still pay those taking care of our cars more than those taking care of our teeth.
And pre-school teachers are paid less than butchers and bus drivers. Is preparing our children for school less important than getting them there? Do we value the man preparing our meat more than we value the woman tending to our child?
3. Finally, notice that some jobs come in gender specific forms and the feminized form is paid less. For example, maids are paid less than janitors and hairdressers are paid less than barbers.
This Halloween, in Maryland, sex offenders who had been released from prison were required to put this sticker in a front window (news story here).
I can’t say it better than Gwen, so I quote her from this post:
I find the intense stigmatization of child sexual abuse, compared to other crimes, fascinating. With other crimes, once you finish the terms of probation, you’re pretty much done with the criminal justice system. Only with sex crimes (and generally only if they were against children) is there a requirement that the ex-felon register with law enforcement every time s/he moves even once probation is over, sometimes for a certain number of years, sometimes forever, depending on the state. I mean, you don’t have to do this if you murder someone, or even lots of people (or even if the victims were kids). Our culture currently defines child sexual abusers as unique, particularly horrific criminal who can never really be rehabilitated or reintegrated into society.
I wonder, though, to what degree this law makes children safer. It seems like a false sense of security–if you just know who the convicted sex abusers in your neighborhood are, you can protect your kids. Yet most child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child and his/her family, not a stranger who just moved in to the neighborhood, and very often they have no criminal record, so these types of programs would be useless.
