Dmitriy T.M. sent in a Chilean ad for menstrual relief pills, posted at Copyranter. The ad plays on the old trope that during their periods, women turn into savage beasts, unrecognizable compared to their normal selves. In this case, menstruating women turn into burly, hairy, enormous Vikings:

Going with the same theme, another ads for the same company depicted a woman as a large Black boxer:

And another includes a Mexican wrestler:

What I find fascinating here is the presentation of menstruation as something that masculinizes women. We’re talking about a biological process unique to women, the foundation of women’s ability to reproduce; if you were a biological essentialist, you could argue that it is, in fact, the essence of womanhood. Yet here, the message is that menstruation steals femininity, temporarily turning women into large, intimidating, unattractive, violent non-women who must be managed and tamed by the men in their lives, with the help of the right medication.

Jordan B. sent in an interesting observation about the current advertising at Diesel.  Many of the ads feature varying skin tones, but the darker-skinned models appear to always be male, while the women appear to always be lighter-skinned.  Two ads:

Jordan thinks that Diesel is following American cultural rules that gender race and racialize gender.  For example, if I may quote myself:

According to American cultural stereotypes, black people, both men and women, are more masculine than white people. Black men are seen as, somehow, more masculine than white men: they are, stereotypically, more aggressive, more violent, larger, more sexual, and more athletic. Black women, too, as seen as more masculine than white women: they are louder, bossier, more opinionated and, like men, more sexual and more athletic.

I’ll let Jordan finish the thought:

This is why Diesel’s selection of a black man and light skinned women makes sense for their ads.  By choosing a black man, men everywhere will want to identify with the hyper-masculinity our society has attributed to them. Similarly, by choosing a light-skinned woman, Diesel is selecting the type of women our society has put on a pedestal.

For more, see our posts on asymmetry in interracial marriage, how Asian women are marketed to white men, and data on race and response rates on a dating website.

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.

Back in October, NPR presented the results of their investigation into the writing of Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law, SB 1070. I was listening to NPR when the story first aired, and I was stunned. The discussion of the law, which allows Arizona law enforcement officers to ask people they stop for proof of citizenship/legal immigration (and to arrest them if they don’t have it), has generally left out one important part of the story: the role of the private prison industry (the above link has an audio file of the story; you can get a complete transcript here):

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it…

Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit prison company, used its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that brings government officials and corporate representatives together, to lobby for and shape the wording of the bill, which they see as being in their direct interest:

According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. Last year, they wrote that they expect to bring in “a significant portion of our revenues” from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that detains illegal immigrants.

Once the bill was introduced, CCA began lobbying the broader Arizona legislature. This graphic illustrates the interconnections between ALEC, private prison companies, and final sponsorship of the bill. Of the co-sponsors of the bill, only 6 didn’t receive campaign contributions from the private prison industry (represented by the dollar signs), and the vast majority had either been at the ALEC meeting or were at least members:

In a foll0w-up story (transcript here), NPR explains how ALEC’s “conferences” allow legislators to meet with corporations but get around regulations that normally require disclosure of corporate gifts:

Videos and photos from one recent ALEC conference show banquets, open bar parties and baseball games — all hosted by corporations. Tax records show the group spent $138,000 to keep legislators’ children entertained for the week. But the legislators don’t have to declare these as corporate gifts…legislators can just say they went to ALEC’s conference. They don’t have to declare which corporations sponsored these events.

I know that corporations regularly lobby legislators. That in and of itself shouldn’t be surprising — or even inherently problematic if done in a transparent manner. But I have to say, thinking about the fact that private prison industries are actively lobbying to get elected officials to create new categories of crime so they’ll have to lock up more people, and that this connection was ignored for over 6 months after the bill was implemented, struck me as particularly disturbing — as did the fact that once this came out, we haven’t seen any widespread backlash or citizen outcry at the idea that there are companies that directly stand to benefit from putting people in jail helping to write and pass criminal codes.

In the 2-and-a-half-minute video below, sent in by Lisa G., a decorated concert violinist named Joshua Bell plays in a Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza in Washington D.C. for 45 minutes. Over 1,000 people walk by without turning their heads, 27 give money, and 7 people stop to listen for a minute or more (source).  Lisa G. summarizes:

Bell recalls that an awkward moment ensued every time he was done with a song because no one applauded or even acknowledged his existence because to these passengers he was just another street performer begging him for a dollar.

What makes Joshua Bell worth listening to?  The experiment points to the importance of context.   How do we know that we are listening to a master musician?   One important clue is where they are playing, and how expensive it is to have the opportunity to listen.   In a concert hall full of seats paid for with large bills, Bell’s talent is authenticated by the arbiters of taste who are the gatekeepers of the venue. Concert-goers do not necessarily know whether or why Bell is any good. They rely on the arbiters to determine who is worth listening to. And listening to who it is that is worth listening to provides them with expensive, and therefore scarce, cultural cred. They have seen Bell in concert (“oh and it was glorious!”); have you?

But in the Metro, Bell is no one. The context of the Metro fails to authenticate Bell’s music. Everyone can listen, thus hearing offers no distinction at all. And almost no one cares.

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.

In Deadly Persuasion, Jean Kilbourne discusses the tactics of car advertisers.  Cars, she argues, are offered as keys to happiness.  Often they are anthromorphized, even positioned as a lover or a soul mate.

In this commercial, sent in by Jennifer G., we see just this sort of advertising. The car is described with the words “luxury,” “fire,” “bold,” and “daring.” It is, indeed, “…capable of moving your soul…”

The idea that we are moved by this advertising might seem patently ridiculous.  Phil Patton of the New York Times, however, reports the findings of a Mercedes/Roper survey:

…36 percent of Americans said they loved their car and 23 percent considered their car their best friend. The poll found that 12 percent of respondents said their car understood them better than their significant other.

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.

The NYT has posted an interesting interactive map showing the results of the last slave Census taken in the U.S., in 1860, which I discovered via Jessica Brown and Jim Yocom. The map, which shows county-level data, illustrates how slave ownership varied throughout the South

The shading (a new technique at the time, according to the NYT article) indicates what percent of the entire county’s population was enslaved:

You can see the percentage for each county, which is listed on the map, more easily if you zoom in on the pdf version. The cotton-belt area along the Mississippi River clearly stands out, as does Beaufort County, South Carolina, all with over 80% of the population enslaved. The highest rate I could pick out (the map got a little blurry as I zoomed) is in Issaquena County, Mississippi, where slaves appear to have made up 92.5% of the population.

The map also included information on the overall population and % enslaved at the state level; in South Carolina and Mississippi, over half of the total state population was made up of slaves:

Also check out Lisa’s post on geology, the economy, and the concentration of slavery in the U.S.

As the NYT post points out, the map doesn’t show the dramatic increases in slavery in some areas. For instance, while Texas ranked fairly low in terms of the overall slave population, the number of slaves in the state had tripled between 1850 and 1860. The number had doubled in Mississippi between 1840 and 1860. Those growth rates make it rather hard to swallow the argument sometimes presented by those romanticizing the Confederacy that slavery was actually on the wane and would have soon been ended in the South anyway, without any need for federal interference, and wasn’t why the South seceded at all.

Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore discussed this effort to frame discourses about the Civil War to erase the issue of slavery on The Daily Show:

Chloe L. sent along an analysis of a post-Thanksgiving advertisement she received in the mail:

The ad, Chloe points out, manages to cover quite a bit of ground.   The tag line at the very top (“Keep feeding yourself with shoes, not food!”) tells women to forgo eating in favor of figurative consumption. This resonates with the cultural expectation that women’s primary purpose is to be, as Chloe puts it, “aesthetically pleasing for others.” She is also presented as a sexualized object. Chloe again:

Though we cannot see more than legs, we know that it is a woman by her feminine high-heeled booties and shaved legs… [she] is presumably naked with her bra hanging on the door knob.

The image, then, harmonizes nicely with the copy; both suggest that women should make strong efforts to shape and display their bodies in ways that conform to cultural expectations.

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.

Last week I stopped in the candy store on State St. in Madison, WI only to discover a product that I remember consuming as a kid, but thought had been banned in the U.S. years ago: tobacco-themed candy.

According to wikipedia, candy cigarettes (I’m not sure about the other products) are banned in Finland, Norway, Ireland, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia; Canada has banned packaging that resembles real cigarettes.  A U.S. ban was proposed in 1970 and again in 1991, but it failed to pass in both instances.

I do remember feeling cool, as a kid, when I pretended to smoke them.

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.