These advertisements, the first two for a brand of jeans called Apple Bottoms, all fetishize black women’s behinds:

Underneath Beyonce’s name it says: “The body, the booty, the backstabbing.”

In this two-page spread, the body isn’t necessarily black… but it might be an interesting question as to whether the viewers assume, or might be expected to assume, it is.

Text:

MY BUTT is big
and round like the letter c
and ten thousand lunges
have made it rounder
but not smaller
and that’s just fine.
It’s a space heater
for myside of the bed
It’s my ambassador
to those who walk behind me
It’s a border collie
that herds skinny women
away from the best deals
at clothing sales.
My butt is big
and that’s just fine
and those who might scorn it
are invited to kiss it.

I think it’s interesting the way this poem pits “skinny women” against women with a big butt… so valorizing the big butt but only by taking down the skinny (white?) girl.

Divide and conquer.

You might pair these images with this post about a Pilates DVD.

This product nicely captures the fallacious ideas that (1) to be a “liberated” woman is to do what men do and (2) that “liberated” women necessarily emasculate men in a zero sum game.

Thanks to my awesome student, Molly M!

These three confessions, from Post Secret this week, illustrate that “ethnic” hair carries meaning (in the first authenticity, in the second ugliness, and in the third it’s left open) and how some women feel about that:

Shameless self-promotion… and some really interesting findings regarding knowledge and frequency of orgasm in a non-random population of undergraduates. This first graph shows the percent of male and female respondents who (1) correctly located the clitoris on a map of the vulva and (2) correctly answered a series of true/false questions about the clitoris.

You’ll see that there is surprising little difference between men and women (considering that women have had access to a clitoris all their lives and men have had access only recently, if at all), though you’ll see that men are more likely to think most women will have an orgasm from penile-vaginal sex (most women don’t) and women are more likely to think the g-spot is another name for the clitoris (it’s not). These two cancelled each other out such that the average knowledge score for men and women was statistically the same. The same!

It’s this next graph that’s the real kicker. This graph shows the relationship between how well a woman scored on the clitoral knowledge tests (on a 0-5 scale) and how frequently she has an orgasm during masturbation and with a partner. You’ll see a nice positive relationship between knowledge and orgasm in masturbation and no relationship at all between knowledge and orgasm with a partner. (For fun, notice that the average score on the clitoral knowledge measure for women who’d never had an orgasm with a partner and who always do is the same. Also notice that there are 124 women in that never category, it’s not just a handful of women who are somehow “dysfunctional.”)

So, for some reason (feel free to speculate), even when women know about their own bodies, they either keep it to themselves, or have partners that don’t want to hear it, or both.

You can download the paper here.

These images are of a beer marketed specifically to women in 1953, Storzette by Storz.

From the website:

“In 1953 Storz tried to market a new product for women, ‘Storzette.’ Designed to be a beer for the ladies it was supposedly not too bitter and was calorie controlled. it also came in a smaller can, 8 ounces, which Storz called “Queen sized” and it came in four can packs called “Princess Packs.” The brewery noted that market studies showed that many women felt that the standard 12 oz can provided too large a serving. The beer inside was also different, made to be less bitter than standard beers. The can even had a pink orchid pictured on it to help it appeal to women. It’s initial test market results in San Diego seemed positive, but in the end the effort was not successful and Storzette did not last long on the market. As a result, the little can with the orchid is very scarce. Storz also used a slogan on its regular cans for awhile in the 1950s, “the Orchid of Beer” which has to be one of the more unusual beer advertising slogans.”

Click here for a “world clock” (by http://www.poodwaddle.com/) that constantly updates the total number of, well, lots of stuff: births, abortions, deaths of different types, prisoners, marriages, divorces, extinct species, gallons of oil pumped, and computers, cars, and bicycles built. You can choose to display it by how much has happened in the last year, month, day, or even from a moment, like right… now.

Thanks, Mom!

These images, via NPR, are of 86-year-old Zhou Guizhen. We were hesitant about posting them when they were first forwarded to us (without information of where they came from) because of concerns about how the pictures were taken–were they taken by a tourist, who was viewing this woman as a freak to laugh at? We were also concerned that presenting these pictures would objectify her, turning her into evidence that non-Western societies are barbaric and backward (and, therefore, that those of us in the West should pat ourselves on the back for how enlightened we are). This would be similar to how Muslim women who wear veils are used in discourses about how oppressive and barbaric Muslim societies are, with no allowance for the many meanings a veil can have and the fact that women are actors in their societies and may not all view the veil as automatically or unequivocally oppressive.

Ultimately we decided to post them when we were able to ascertain that they are publicly available. Also, the very fact that we ourselves struggled with what to make of them and how to present them, seemed to indicate that they are very powerful images that bring up complicated ideas about women, bodies, objectification, and how these are connected to judgments of the modernity or backwardness of cultures.

We post these pictures with the intention that we view this woman as a human being who embodies a complicated tradition. This means that we refrain from calling her, her body, or her culture any names that we would not want to be called ourselves (names like “grotesque,” “ignorant,” or “barbaric”). We hope that, as we view these images, we are mindful of the ways that bodies are altered across the globe and throughout history… not only in places that we do not understand, but in places that we understand only too well.

Click here to read about Silo and Roy, gay penguins. They were together for six years before they broke up. One of them paired up with a female.

A children’s book, written about Silo and Roy, was apparently removed from the children’s fiction section at two bookstores because it promoted homosexuality.

A same-sex penguin couple, on the right in the picture below, were segregated from the rest of the penguins because they kept stealing eggs.  Sneakily, they would replace the egg with a rock and take the real egg for themselves.  The zoo keepers eventually decided to give them the eggs of another penguin pair who had a poor record of parenting and, the story says, they are among the best parents at the zoo (via Alas).

NEW!  Another pair of male penguins, this time at a zoo in Bremerhaven, Germany, have become adoptive parents (via). Z and Vielpunkt:

These two male storks, living in a Dutch zoo, are raising a chick together. The zookeepers don’t know how they came across their egg, but somehow they did, and now they’re parents! Click here for the story and a video.

About 20 percent of all black swan couples are male/male according to this study:

Carlos and Fernando just celebrated their fifth anniversary (see here):

A museum in Oslo has gained some attention for their exhibit, Against Nature?, featuring homosexual behavior among animals. Check it out.

And here is a link to a story about same-sex pairs (1/3rd of all pairs!) among wild Albatross.

NEW (Apr. ’10)!  Speaking of the Albatross: they mate for life (if they’re lucky, 60-70 years) and this is a female pair nesting in Kaena Point, Hawaii.

Biologist Lindsay Young, who studies this colony, concurs that about 1/3rd of the couples are same-sex.  They also rear chicks.

The New York Times article, from which I borrowed this images, explains that:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

…

Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as “mock” or “pseudo” courtship — or just “practice.” Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as “a nuisance” that “goes on and on.” One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report “the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses” which are “all too often packed” into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly.” To think, he wrote, “of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ — Oh, God!”

…

Different ideas are emerging about how these behaviors could fit within that traditional Darwinian framework, including seeing them as conferring reproductive advantages in roundabout ways. Male dung flies, for example, appear to mount other males to tire them out, knocking them out of competition for available females. Researchers speculate that young male bottlenose dolphins mount one another simply to establish trust and form bonds — but those bonds actually turn out to be critical to reproduction, since when males mature, they work in groups to cooperatively gain access to females.