Following up on our cartoon poking fun at the skimpiness of battle gear for women, Lindsey V. sent in a considerably-humorous skit in which two great sports are dressed in the sexy outfits of two genuine-video-game-characters and set to battle. Hijinks and wardrobe malfunctions insue:
Commodification is the process by which something that is not bought and sold becomes bought and sold. At one time, Americans grew, or raised and butchered, much of their own food. Later, meat, grains, and vegetables became commodified. Instead of working in the fields and with their animals, people would “go to work,” earn a new thing called a “wage,” and trade it for meat, grains, and vegetables. With those raw ingredients, they would prepare a meal.
More recently in American history, the very preparation of food has commodified as well. When I go to a restaurant, I am exchanging my wage for the planting, harvesting, processing, delivering, preparing, and disposal/clean up of my meal. In this way, then, more and more components of our daily nutritional intake have become commodified.
The graph below traces the increasing commodification of “dinner.” When it comes to family dinners, Americans are increasingly turning to restaurants, which commodify the preparation of food and the post-meal chores. Sometime around 1988, the family dinner as a commodity became more common than family dinners at home.
UPDATE: In the comments, Ludvig von Mises offers this alternative explanation:
Another way to look at this would be as a form of increasing wealth. The nobility of old, after all, also did not butcher, harvest, and prepare their own meals, and neither did the wealthiest members of the new rich. Over time, the ability to afford such a thing on a more regular basis has gradually expanded to more and more people.
Matter of fact, there is very little in the way of such luxury that has been enjoyed by the elites of the past that is not available to the majority of workers today. “Commodification” is not, as you suggest, the creation of any kind of new product, but merely of making extremely expensive products affordable to a much larger fraction of the population.
“The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses.”
Josh Leo brought our attention to something he started thinking about recently: the use of the word “hobo” among kids. This started when he saw a video of kids reacting to the Ted Williams, the man who became famous after a video of him panhandling at an intersection and displaying his “golden voice” went viral. Josh was struck with the way the kids talk about individuals who become homeless and, in particular, the repeated use of “hobo” to describe him (they discuss Williams in the first 2 minutes):
Since one girl attributed her use of “hobo” to the TV show iCarly, Josh did a little searching and discovered that the show’s official website contains a set of photos of the cast dressed up for a Hobo Party, complete with captions that make fun of or trivialize poverty and homelessness, including this first one that refers to the store “C.J. Penniless”:
A quick google search turns up lots of images of and suggestions for throwing hobo parties (including a video of a “Hobo House Party,” in which four people in costume dance in a cardboard box). Now, my guess is a lot of people would argue that references to hobos today aren’t really about homelessness now, since it’s a term often associated with the Great Depression. Indeed, a lot of the hobo party sites I found referred to the Depression or suggested 1930s-type clothing. But the video of the kids’ reactions certainly shows that they don’t just see it as a term for people in the past; they clearly connect it to homeless people today.
This trivialization of homelessness and poverty isn’t just on kids’ shows, though. It reminded me of a segment The Daily Show did recently about a news affiliate in Indianapolis that decided to see if any local homeless individuals could be the city’s own “golden-voice” (the segment starts at about 1:30 in):
Such a news story could humanize homeless individuals, of course. Instead, the news segment treats the two women as sources of entertainment whose value comes only from the possibility that they might surprise us by having a “hidden talent.” The idea that it would be shocking to find a homeless person with an amazing gift presumes that people who have skills or talents don’t become homeless, while also presenting the solution as very individualistic: if you’re the next Ted Williams, you can have a house and a job too!
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Coverage of the Egyptian protests this week disproportionately interviewed and photographed male protestors, occasionally using the terms “Egyptian men” and “protestors” interchangeably (excellent example here). What images we did receive of women depicted them as separate from the demonstrations if not dependent on male guardianship. The paucity of images or stories about women activists excludes them from the national uprising and silences their protests.
Outside of the mainstream media a widely circulated photo album, available to anyone with Facebook, collected over a hundred pictures of Egyptian women demonstrating. Curation of this album during the internet blackout, when nearly all images were filtered through the media, serves as a testament to the value of diaspora and transnational networks. Additionally, placing these images side by side becomes a powerful counter to women’s media invisibility and highlights diversity of backgrounds, opinions, and forms of protest undertaken by Egyptian women.
It might be worth nothing that we’re seeing more stories about women since a You Tube video (below) of a woman calling for people to join her in protest on January 25th caught the attention of the media. Namely this excellent NPR story and an AFP article. Lastly, anyone interested in social media should visit this Facebook group.
April Crewson is completing her masters in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
“You can’t be taught the skills to model, because first and foremost, skill doesn’t matter. It’s all in the jeans genes.”
So notes a shirtless man, a self-described “male mannequin” in commercials for Next Top Model in Vietnam:
My sociological knee-jerk reaction is to point to the ways in which models’ labor is deliberately rendered invisible, masking performance as mere appearance, in much the same way social categories are naturalized to appear like states of being instead of products of social organization — think gender, ethnicity, class, and yes, beauty.
As concerns the category of beauty, there is considerable work involved in pulling it off. Like retail service workers, models do “aesthetic labor,” as documented by sociologists Elizabeth Wissinger and Joanne Entwistle and more recently by Christine Williams and Catherine Connell. Aesthetic labor is the work of manipulating one’s physique and personality to embody a company brand. In the modeling market, some people easily have that physique, as the shirtless guy claims to have, but most models have to fight for it, and they’re fighting against the clock of aging. If they don’t have to work for cut abs and narrow hips, they most likely still feel compelled to work at it, given the rampant uncertainties facing them in their daily grinds of auditions and rejections. All of this work gets carefully tucked behind the scenes of fashion and beauty images — a clandestine world NTM purports to expose for voyeuristic consumers around the world.
But instead of exposing it, the NTM franchise caricatures it. In the American version, Tyra Banks insists that effort is everything, and she axes candidates left and right because they didn’t “want it badly enough.” She just didn’t work hard at it, goes the usual dismissal, or she lacked the determination to keep smiling when Jay Manuel told her that her face is weird. It’s not that you’ve got the wrong look, the show tells contestants, but that you didn’t put in the work to get the right one. NTM sticks close to an individualistic ethos: if you fail, it’s because you lacked the individual effort needed to succeed.
Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the “right” contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season. Saying that success is “all in the genes” renders the “look” into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production.
Saying it’s all in the jeans is also pretty funny. Let’s not overlook this guy’s self-deprecating humor: here’s a man surrendering himself (and his manhood) to the whims and preferences of fashion, an industry widely believed to be controlled by women and gay men. In other ads he mocks his talent and wryly notes the biggest hazard in his line of work: wearing leopard print g-strings (to say nothing of occupational challenges like the precarious nature of freelance labor, the lack of health and retirement benefits, or the unpaid labor of castings and magazine shoots). What’s most striking about this guy and his seductive black-and-white commercial is not the sociological back story, it’s his own silliness. He’s playing on the ironic gap between social expectations of masculinity and the realities of being featured as a passive visual object. We probably wouldn’t be so charmed if the commercial featured a young woman laughing about her job title: “I’m a professional model!” We’d probably roll our eyes. The source of that silliness—unequal cultural expectations about the display value of men and women—is as problematic as it is good fodder for comedy.
Ashley Mears is a former model and current Assistant Professor of sociology at Boston University who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry. In her book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
The figure below, featured in a paper by political scientist Larry Bartels, maps partisan identification — whether one identifies as a Democrat, an Independent, or a Republican, and how strongly — with opinions as to whether unemployment and inflation had gotten better or worse under Reagan’s presidency (1981-1988). It shows that partisan beliefs strongly predict people’s opinions about discernable facts.
Elisabeth R., Rebecca H., and Kalani R. all sent in a Volkswagen commercial produced for SuperBowl weekend that they found striking, both for the commercial itself and reactions to it. In the commercial, a child dressed up as Darth Vader tries using The Force on various items around the house. What struck all three of the submitters is the ambiguous gendering of the ad:
At no point is the child’s gender made clear. If we just went with the information in the ad, we might conclude the child is a girl, based on scene in the stereotypically super-pink bedroom. But given the usual clear gendering of toys, Elisabeth, Rebecca, and Kalani all enjoyed seeing an ad in which this didn’t occur.
But the possibility that a girl might dress up as Darth Vader seems difficult for a lot of people to grasp. In the pages and pages of comments on the commercial on YouTube, the child is repeatedly referred to as “he” or “the boy.” In one comment thread, when someone brings up the possibility the child is a girl due to the pink bedroom, someone else says no, it was a boy in his sister’s room.
There’s no particular reason to assume this child is a boy except that we associate Star Wars with boys (and generally see males as the default if gender isn’t otherwise specified). I think the reactions to the video are a good example of the power of gendering: because viewers have pre-existing ideas about gender, kids, and what they’d be interested in, they’re likely to apply those assumptions even in the face of potentially contradictory information and to come up with explanations that leave the pre-existing ideas intact.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention when I was writing the post that none of the commenters who saw the child as a boy seemed to think the pink room was his — I read several different comment threads and when it was brought up, people assume it’s a sister’s room. Also, reader Angie thinks the stuff in the pink room looks too old for the child, since the toys look like the type an older kid would collect. I am clueless about that, which is why I struggle to buy gifts for kids: I no longer have a clear sense of what types of things kids are playing with at what age.
UPDATE 2: This is separate from what the gender of the role of the child in the commercial, but VW has confirmed that the actor who played the child is a boy.
On another note, the fact that VW is using Star Wars nostalgia in its ads as a way to appeal to adult customers makes me feel very old for some reason.
In a previous post I discussed A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz’s suggestion that we play Farmville because we’re polite. Farmville, he argues, is a cooperative game; one needs help from others to get very far. So you are invited to play by friends, entreated to assist them, and given gifts to encourage your participation. The game “entangles users in a web of social obligations,” to the point where not playing would be rude or signal an effort to distance oneself from your friends who play.
Well Farmville is old news. Cityville was launched on November 18th, 2010. Within 24 hours it had 290,000 players. Within one month it had 84 million players, exceeding the total number playing Farmville, previously the most popular web-based game ever. Today, more than 100 million people play Cityville. And I’m one of them.
Well not really. Bored on a plane flight over the holidays and enjoying free wifi on the plane, I decided to check it out. And, despite expecting that there was a highly social dimension to the game, I was amazed — ah-mazed — at the pace at which Cityville asked me to publicize my participation and get others to join. Below are the kinds of entreaties I received every 20 seconds or so.
Each time I achieved a “goal” Cityville suggested that I tell everyone and share coins with friends. Sometimes Cityville would suggest that I get friends “started” by sending them gifts or help them with a city they’ve already got. It also suggested that I add neighbors and populate my own city with my friends in various roles. You can also visit your friends’ cities, help them out (e.g., harvest for them), or own businesses in their cities. All of this earns both of you points of various kinds. In fact, Cityville would only let me do certain things if my friends helped me do them. Cityville also told me which of my friends were playing.
Then, despite having at no time clicking on “share” anything, Facebook put the news that I was playing Cityville on my wall (it was probably in the “I agree” contract at the very beginning). Gwen was predictably surprised:
Finally, after about a week, Cityville got directly into my email inbox to tempt me to play again with FREE CASH!.
So there you have it. Cityville implores, pleads, begs, insists, threatens, and cajoles the user into getting their friends involved. It’s an insidious social network parasite… and it’s contagious…
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
