As Melissa at Shakesville writes:

…Subway reminds women that the only reason they have to feel good about themselves is being thin, that their self-worth is predicated on their looks, that psychological health is evidently dependent on being pretty, that fat axiomatically equals ugly, and that no man would ever love a fat girl.

First, the commercial (found here):

I love and hate this commercial because of androcentrism.  Androcentrism is the idea that we value masculinity over femininity such that we admire both men and women for performing masculinity.  Androcentrism explains why we tend to like it when women drink beer, play sports, and become lawyers, but do not typically think it’s equally awesome when men cry, wear skirts, learn to knit, or become interior designers.   Here is my crash course on androcentrism.

In any case, I kinda love the fact that the hot chick in this commercial represents strength and we’re obviously supposed to think she’s awesome.  But the guy in the commercial, who is supposed to represent sissy hippy environmentalism, doesn’t exactly come off as awesome.  He is funny, stupid, ridiculous.  And I kind of hate that.  In a perfect world, men would be allowed to do things associated with femininity without being considered uncool.

Click here to watch a segment on Good Morning America about the upcoming movie, Tinkerbell.

The rather barf-tastic segment comes to you thanks to media consolidation.  Good Morning America is on ABC which is owned by Disney which, of course, produced TinkerBell.  So there you have it.

In this excellently-made 55-minute video, Michael Wesch talks about the way in which YouTube, especially, functions to create community in the post-community era (via Wicked Anomie).  It’s a bit too heavy on the feel-good for me, but quite informative and, well hell, it did make me feel good!

I’ve posted about the phenomenon of what I’ve called leftist balkanization or the way in which leftist causes tend to be narrowly focused such that they undermine other leftist causes (see here for my original post and here and here for two follow-ups).  Perhaps the opposite of such balkanization is social movements that try to bring together issues that find themselves on opposite sides of the political spectrum.  Below are two advertisements for the pro-environment anti-immigration movement.  The argument is that restricting immigration is good for the environment.

This first commercial from the Californians for Population Stabilization makes exactly this point:

You might be asking yourself whether this pro-environment anti-immigration message is really just an anti-immigration message shrouded in leftist rhetoric.   In this case, at least based on the commercial below from the same organization, the answer appears to be “yes.”

Of course, it’s not necessarily true that all anti-immigrant pro-environment messages are secretly simply xenophobic. For a great discussion of this troubled movement, see Leslie King’s great article that shows how challenging it is to mobilize a grass roots movement when one half of your message offends one half of the population and the other half of your message offends the other.

Via copyranter.

Cross-posted at Love Isn’t Enough.

Ann DuCille, in her book Skin Trade, takes two issues with “ethnic” Barbies. 

First, she takes issue with the fact that “ethnic” Barbies are made from the same mold as “real” Barbies (though sometimes with different paint on their faces).  This reifies a white standard of beauty as THE standard of beauty.  Black women are beautiful only insofar as they look like white women (see also this post).  DuCille writes:

…today Barbie dolls come in a rainbow coalition of colors, races, ethnicities, and nationalities, [but] all of those dolls look remarkably like the stereotypical white Barbie, modified only by a dash of color and a change of clothes.

Consider:

But, second, DuCille also takes takes issue with the idea that Mattell would try to make ethnic Barbies more “authentic.”  Trying to agree on one ideal form for a racial or ethnic group is no more freeing than trying to get everyone to accord to one ideal based in whiteness.  DuCille writes:

…it reifies race.  You can’t make an ‘authentic’ Black, Hispanic, Asian, or white doll.  You just can’t.  It will always be artificially constraining…

And also:

Just what are we saying when we claim that a doll does or does not look… black?  How does black look? …What would make a doll look authentically African American or realistically Nigerian or Jamaican?  What prescriptive ideals of blackness are inscribed in such claims of authenticity?  …The fact that skin color and other ‘ethnic features’ …are used by toymakers to denote blackness raises critical questions about how we manufacture difference.

Indeed, difference is, literally, manufactured through the production of “ethnic” Barbies and this is done, largely, for a white audience. 

To be profitable, racial and cultural diversity… must be reducible to such common, reproducible denominators as color and costume.

The majority of American Barbie buyers are only interested in “ethnicity” so long as it is made into cute and harmless variety.  This reminds us that, when toy makers (and others) manufacture difference, they are doing so for money.  DuCille writes:

…capitalism has appropriated what it sees as certain signifiers of blackness and made them marketable… Mattel… mass market[s] the discursively familiar–by reproducing stereotyped forms and visible signs of racial and ethnic difference.

Consider:

Black Barbie and Hispanic Barbie, 1980

Oriental Barbie, date unknown

A later “Asian” Barbie (Kira)

Diwali Barbie (India)

Hula Honey Barbie

Kwanzaa Barbie

Radiant Rose Ethnic Barbie, 1996

There are many reasons to find this problematic.  DuCille turns to the Jamaican Barbie as an example. 

The back of Jamaican Barbie’s box tells us:

How-you-du (Hello) from the land of Jamaica, a tropical paradise known for its exotic fruit, sugar cane, breath-taking beaches, and reggae beat!  …most Jamaicans have ancestors from Africa, so even though our official language is English, we speak patois, a kind of ‘Jamaica Talk,’ filled with English and African words.  For example, when I’m filled with boonoonoonoos, I’m filled with much happiness!

Notice how Jamaica is reduced to cutesy things like exotic fruit and sugar cane and Jamaican people are characterized as happy-go-lucky and barely literate while the history of colonialism is completely erased.

So DuCille doesn’t like it when Black Barbies, for example, look like White Barbies and she doesn’t like it when Black Barbies look like Black Barbies either.  What’s the solution?  The solution simply may not lie in representation, so much as in actually correcting the injustice in which representation occurs.

(Images found here, here, here, here, here, and here.) 

For a related post on race and friendship, see here.

These images capture the Columbia University class of 1909 posing as “Zulu Savages” (found here thanks to Penny R.)  We may not be so surprised to see such mimickry of blacks in 1909, but I think that when compared to these pictures of college students at race-themed parties in 2007, it might make for some interesting discussion of humor, mimickry, racism, and the notion of progress… especially as Halloween approaches.

Beth T. sent us this picture of some books for sale at the NASA John Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.  I found some more at the website. They nicely illustrate the gendering of jobs.  Only because we implicitly think that zoologists, oceanographers, paleontologists, and architects are men, is it necessary to modify the term with “woman.”