I am trying to re-enter society after several days being sick, so I’m going with something short and simple today. Eden H. sent in this chart, found at Business Insider, that compares hourly minimum wages in a number of European countries to the U.S.:
The European data are available from Eurostat (though note they report minimum wages in terms of Euros per month, not hour, so the data was converted for the chart).
Ria sent along an example of something simultaneously routine and jarring. Disney princess grapes:
Thinking out loud here: By now, in the U.S., we’re used to thinking about food being branded with mascots, movie/tv show characters, and even corporate entities. When I posted about Cars– and Disney princess-themed diet snack packs, for example, it wasn’t the branding of food that interested me. But there is something unfamiliar to me about the associating of grapes with Disney. I think it has to do with the idea of processed versus “fresh” foods. In this case, Disney is marking a (genetically-modified) natural product in its natural state. This feels different than marking a brightly-colored, largely synthetic, already highly-branded foodstuff. Can Disney really claim grapes? Celery? Red peppers? To me, these are the last things in the grocery store that actually feel as if they come straight from the farmer. Now they’re taking a detour through the happiest place on earth?
Ria links the new development in branding to the obesity panic and the push for kids to eat healthier food. And she’s suspicious of the linking of corporate interests to health.
What do think? Are you as weirded out as I am? Is Ria onto something? What does it mean!? What’s next? Republican Party chicken breasts? South Park brand brown rice?
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Lauren S. sent in this ad for a used car dealership that ran in the London Free Press, a free newspaper in London, Ontario. The ad compares used cars to sexually experienced women with the lines, “You know you’re not the first. But do you really care?”:
As Lauren points out, it’s blatant objectification of women, but “in addition to objectifying women to sell vehicles, this campaign suggests that a woman’s sexual past is equivalent to depreciation.”
I suppose someone could argue that the message that you shouldn’t “care” whether your women/cars are “used” rejects the sexual double standard, but the objectification and the implication that non-virgin women are “used” undermine any apparent rejection of that double standard.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen this type of ad for used cars; we previously posted a BMW ad, but in that case, I suspect (though we’ve never been able to confirm) that it might have been a spec ad made by an ad agency but never actually used by BMW. In this case, Lauren actually saw it in print.
UPDATE 1: Well, I must give Dale Wurfel some credit. He is apparently an equal-opportunity objectifier. He ran a second ad that uses a man instead of a woman:
Via Wheels.
Of course, equal objectification doesn’t necessarily have equal effects. We live in a world with a sexual double standard. Calling a woman “used” resonates culturally in a way that it simply doesn’t for men, because we don’t punish men for sexual experience in the same way.
UPDATE 2: Lauren let us know that the car dealership issued an apology:
UPDATE: Comments closed.
In this TED video sent in by BlackCat and Chana Messinger, Tony Porter gives a nice introduction to what it means — for men, women, sons, and daughters — that men are confined by the dictates of masculinity. (Trigger warning: at about the 9 minute mark, there is a story about a sexual assault.)
Transcript after the jump (thanks to DECIUS for posting it in the comments).
Deeb K. sent in a story from the New York Times about who does unpaid work — that is, the housework, carework, and volunteering that people do without financial compensation. Based on time-use surveys by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this chart shows how many more minutes per day women in various nations spend doing such activities compared to men:
Childcare stuck out as an area with a particularly large gap:
On child care in particular, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do: 1 hour 40 minutes for mothers, on average, compared to 42 minutes for fathers…On average, working fathers spend only 10 minutes more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much time (144 minutes vs. 74) when not working.
The full OECD report breaks down types of unpaid work (this is overall, including data for both men and women):
The study also found that non-working fathers spend less time on childcare than working mothers in almost every country in the study (p. 19). And mothers and fathers do different types of childcare, with dads doing more of what we might think of as the “fun stuff” (p. 20):
Source: Miranda, V. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116. OECD Publishing.
Chris Rock makes a downright profound observation about race discourse in this 2 1/2-minute clip, sent along by Collin College sociologist John Glass:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Kristie C. sent in a Hardee’s commercial for their turkey burger that is an example of something we’ve talked about before: the conflation of women with food products to be consumed and the sexualization of both women and food in ads. But watch closely! It’s very subtle, so you might miss it the first time.
In the wake of two rounds of racially-charged anti-abortion campaigns: “Black Children are an Endangered Species” and “The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the Womb.” These campaigns are built around the fact that pregnant black women are more likely to have abortions than pregnant white women. The one getting attention at the moment, sent in by Laura E., is a set of billboards from That’s Abortion in the South Side of Chicago:
I’ve said this before, and it’s being said elsewhere, but I think it deserves to be said again, and strongly.
Many women have abortions because they cannot afford to raise a(nother) child. They would bring the fetus to term if only they weren’t all-but-crushed under the burdens of under-served neighborhoods, shitty public education, a dearth of jobs that pay a living wage, a criminal justice system that strips inner cities of husbands and fathers, a lack of health care, and stingy, penalizing, and humiliating social services (when they can get them). So telling black women that they are bad; telling them that they are killing their race alongside their babies, is twisting a knife that already penetrates deep in the black community.
Not to mention the fact that as soon as those poor women have children, they’re demonized for irresponsibly bringing babies into the world that they cannot support. It’s called a double bind; damned if you do, damned if you don’t. And no they cannot “wait until they’re in a better place financially” or “not have sex until they can afford to raise a child” because many, many women will never be in such a place in their entire lives. And they can’t just “practice responsible contraception” because half of all pregnancies are unintended, at least a third among even the most well-educated and resource-rich women. So pregnancies will and do happen, even to people who don’t want or can’t have a child.
If pro-life groups want to stop abortion, they need to stop accusing black women of moral bankruptcy and start putting those billboards up across from the Capital Building. What black women need isn’t an ethics lesson, they need resources. They need those very same people who tsk tsk them to stand up for them, to fight for a living wage, investments in their schools and communities, protection instead of criminalization, more available and better subsidized child care, and guaranteed parental leave benefits for all (it’s not a fantasy). If black women had those things, then they might feel like that had a choice to keep their baby, just as they have a choice to abort their fetus.
It’s not the parents who fail to care-about-the-children in America, it’s a government and it’s citizens that allow 1 in 5 to languish in poverty.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
