This is why Gwen was pessimistic about the New Yorker cover.  Another product sold at the Texas Republican Convention:

Also sold at the Texas Republican Convention: If Obama is President… Will We Still Call it the Whitehouse?

Found here via Copyranter.

Susanne T. sent us this image of an ad at a busy stop at the University of Bremen, Germany (comments after the image).  Susanne translates the ad to read:

Kids are only well when mothers are well.  Her project ‘wellcome’ helps families to order the everyday chaos.  Strong women, strong country.

Feminist theorists note that there are two ways to integrate women into a society as equals to men: as citizen-workers (who perform the same tasks as men, namely breadwinning) or as citizen-mothers (who perform different tasks than men, namely parenting). If, and this is a big if, we truly valued parenting as much as we valued breadwinning, then the latter is a perfectly viable strategy with which to bring about a gender egalitarian society.

In the U.S., we conflate the idea of equality with gender sameness, assuming that any difference between men and women is a sign of oppression.  So, to many Americans, the fact that this ad makes fathers invisible and holds women alone responsible for parenting is problematic (as Susanne noted).  But different isn’t necessarily unequal and Germany (as well as France) has a tradition of supporting women as mothers.  By “supporting” I mean generous social policy that rewards women in concrete ways for reproducing the nation.

I’m not sure to what extent Germany still supports mothers with pro-natal policies.  Susanne’s critique may very well be more accurate than my comments about different ways of integrating women into the state.  However, I think it’s useful to problematize our assumptions about what equality would look like.  If women were truly valued for their unique contributions, that would be okay.  The problem in the U.S. is that we hold women responsible for childcare and also devalue that work. 

Adding freedom to that equality, of course, means state support for both citizen-workers and citizen-parents (of both sexes) and equally valuing both contributions.

Also see this post on equating motherhood and military service in the Third Reich.

This is the fourth installment in a series on why and how people of color are included in advertising aimed primarily at white people.  In the first installment, I argued that people of color are included in such advertising in order to associate the product with a racial stereotype (i.e., hipness, intelligence).  In the second, I showed how people of color can be used to give a product “color” or “flavor.”  And, in the third, I argued that people of color are used to invoke ideas of “hipness,” “modernity,” “progressive” politics and other related ideas.  In this post, I suggest that people of color are used to trigger the idea of human variation itself.

In this first ad the idea that each body is different is illustrated by including women of different fitness levels, ages, and races.

In this ad, Levi’s uses a woman who appears Latina to sell their jeans, which come in various fits because there is “a style for every story.”  The idea is that people are different; not everyone wants the same cut of jeans.

In this Toyota ad, the copy says “For every expression, there’s a Toyota.”  People are unique and so, apparently, are Toyotas.  Race is used to communicate the notion of human diversity.

This is an ad for Playtex bras with half sizes.  The implication is that people’s bodies are more variable than the A, B, C etc sizes suggest, so half sizes accomodate that variety.  I think this ad is particularly interesting because the model is racially ambiguous.  Maybe she’s half Asian, Latina, or white, and she’s being used to sell a product that now comes in half sizes.

NEW:

Next up: Including people of color so as to suggest that the company is concerned with racial equality.

See the other posts in the series:
(1) Including people of color so as to associate the product with the racial stereotype. 
(2) Including people of color to invoke (literally) the idea of “color” or “flavor.”
(3) Triggering ideas like “hipness,” “modernity,” and “progress.”

Thanks to Thorsten S. for the link!

I have posted previously on the exoticization of the Other through tourism (see especially this post on hula girls in Hawaii).  This is part of an exoticization of the Other that occurs within state borders as well as across.   bell hooks talks about about how some white people see having sex with a person of color as an exciting adventure, like a trip to an exotic location, in her essay “Eating the Other.”   See also Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality by Joane Nagel and Black Sexual Politics by Patricia Hill Collins.  You can see visual representations of it here and here.

Jacob G. sent us this amazing ad suggesting that dating a person of another race is like going to an exotic location. 

Text:

he wanted to show me exotic places.

Um. Wow.

NEW!  From Postsecret:

According to Melissa, the dialogue/voice-over in this Czech commercial roughly goes like this:

…basically the woman complaining about stuff, followed by the deflation, then a voiceover with a play on words about blowing off your wife to have a beer with the lads.

Melissa at Shakesville has captured these examples of Reuter’s “Odd News” lists (see here).  She collects instances of:

…the wire services’ insistence on trivializing women’s lives, actions, experiences, and issues by categorizing as “Odd News” stories about the mistreatment of women, or stories about women that aren’t “odd” in any way aside from the fact that there’s a women at their centers.

A woman kidnapped for rejecting a man and sexualized prison politics.  How odd!

A woman was violent; another was sexually assaulted.  Women should have the right to nourish the next generation?  How odd!

Women are abused and a desperate girl is given away in a poker game.  Jealous husbands shouldn’t be allowed to do illegal things.  How odd! 

Rape, how odd!

Enjoy this clip from Fox’s Battle of the Bods where women try to guess in what order men will rank them according to their face, their body, and both.  As I suggest in my title, I think it’s a wonderful example of how being objectified places women in competition with each other and, thus, creates conflict and antagonism.  Thus, women are “catty” because of gender inequality, NOT because of those two pesky X chromosomes or something to do with hormones.

See this post for a breast implant ad suggesting that bigger boobs make you look smarter. And see this post for ads capitalizing on the stereotype that women are naturally bitchy to each other.

Via Feministe and The Feminist Underground.