My friend Matt M. let me know about this video from The Second City Network that nicely sums up some of the disturbing messages about love, dating, and gender in animated movies such as Beauty and the Beast. Enjoy!

Also watch an earlier on on The Little Mermaid.

The Daily Kos highlighted an ad for Summer’s Eve in this month’s Woman’s Day magazine.  Women’s magazines are peppered with douching advertisements, so why did this one prompt nine people — Tony S., Pharmacopaeia, Frank B., Jason W., Tom M., Jesse W., Sarah P., Ilysse W., and Philippa von Z. — to send it to us?  Take a look:

What makes this a remarkable instead of a regular douche ad is the suggestion that Summer’s Eve is interested in women’s empowerment.

This is odd because douching is well understood to be bad for healthy women’s bodies.  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for example, explains:

Most doctors and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommend that women don’t douche. Douching can change the delicate balance of vaginal flora (organisms that live in the vagina) and acidity in a healthy vagina. One way to look at it is in a healthy vagina there are both good and bad bacteria. The balance of the good and bad bacteria help maintain an acidic environment. Any changes can cause an over growth of bad bacteria which can lead to a yeast infection or bacterial vaginosis. Plus, if you have a vaginal infection, douching can push the bacteria causing the infection up into the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries.

Douching is bad for you, ladies.  So the fact that the C.B. Fleet Co., the company that owns Summer’s Eve, tries to convince all women that they need to regularly douche is not only manipulative, it’s harmful.  If it wants to maximize its profit, however, the company needs healthy women to feel that their vaginas are disgusting.  And so they tell us that it is over and over again.

You see, C.B. Fleet ‘n friends doesn’t give a shit about you.  They don’t care if you get that raise; and they certainly don’t care if their product is unnecessary and potentially harmful in most cases.  They just want to make money.  And if using a feminist-sounding you-go-girl ad will do that, then they’ll slap on a smile and laugh all the way to the bank.

In our more fledgling days we highlighted quite a few examples of marketing that co-opted feminist messages.  See our other examples of ads for bras, cleaning products and contraceptives (see here and here), botox (here and here), diamond rings, moisturizer, makeup, cars, cigarettes, and credit cards, Whirlpool, Philip Morris, Virginia Slims (here and here), and the new Disney princesses.  And none of this is new, see this example of a woman’s magazine marketing to suffragettes in 1910.

See also our collection of vintage douche ads.

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.

James O’Byrne and Doug MacCash retrace their steps through the post-katrina devastating, comparing the photos of flooded neighborhoods with photos of those neighborhoods today.

Via www.nola.com.

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.

Allie B. sent us a link to an image at GOOD that presents some pre- and post-Katrina information about New Orleans. The map indicates levels of population recovery; the darker the shade of green, the more the population has rebounded:

A close-up of one section (areas with black shading had over 6 feet of floodwater):

Notice that the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the hardest-hit areas, has among the lowest level of redevelopment.

There’s a much larger version of the map (with a not-too-specific list of sources) here.

Changes in the populations of different parishes:

The income distribution has changed somewhat as well, with a smaller proportion in the lowest income categories (though notice that the dollar range included in each color isn’t consistent as you get into the higher incomes):

Trigger warning: racial violence and racist language.

A disturbing picture of racial slaughter emerges in the days following Katrina, at the hands of private residents and police officers. Racially-motivated murders were carried out in Algiers Point, a predominately white enclave nestled in mostly black Algiers, not far from Gretna. This part of the city is connected to the rest of New Orleans by bridge and ferry only, and it did not experience flooding. After the storm, a band of 15 to 30 white men formed a loose militia targeting anyone whom they deemed “didn’t belong” in their predominately white neighborhood (source). They blocked off streets with downed trees, stockpiled weapons, and ran patrols.

At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher. On July 16, 2010, Roland Bourgeois was charged with shooting three black men in Algiers in the days following Katrina (source). He allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot.”

To date, this is the only arrest of militia members, but the FBI is investigating the situation and will likely make more arrests given that two Danish filmmakers interviewed multiple residents who admitted shooting black people. In “Welcome to New Orleans,” militia member Wayne Janak smiles at the camera: “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” A woman nearby adds “He understands the N-word now… In this neighborhood, we take care of our own.” Many of the victims reported that militia members called them racial epithets during attacks, and a family member of militia members reports that her uncle and cousins considered it a “free-for-all—white against black,” and her cousin was happy they were “shooting niggers.”

Malik Rahim, a long-time Algiers resident and activist who co-founded Common Ground Relief after the storm, took me on a tour of bodies in his neighborhood a week or so after the storm. I only made it through one viewing – a bloated body of a man under a piece of cardboard with a gunshot wound to his back. I assumed that this death was being investigated, but should have known otherwise given that the state had essentially sanctioned these actions with a “shoot to kill” order that allowed civilians to make their own assessments of who should live or die.

One of Many New Orleans Vigilante T-Shirts Slogans:

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s blog.

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

David Mayeda at The Grumpy Sociologist discussed a commercial, for Best Buy, encouraging us (men?) to feel embarrassed if we don’t have the most recent technology:

Mayeda sees this as an example of the making of deviance. He writes:

So, as a male, if you don’t have the financial capital to possess a kick ass phone, you are a deviant male, with a low-end job (sharing a cubicle), without technical prowess (can’t stay on top of your e-mail or access the net), and bottom line, you aren’t an attractive mate.

How far “behind” does a person need to “fall” before they are so “out of the loop” that they are not really part of respectable society anymore?

I have only had a cell phone myself for four short years. Yet, when I learn that someone doesn’t have one, the neurons in my brain short out a bit.  How do two people even know each other if one doesn’t have a cell phone?  How do you let someone know you’ve hit traffic?  Find them in a crowded place?  Cell phones have become so ubiquitous that not having one seems deliberately counter-cultural.  Like face tattoos or men in skirts, eschewing a cell phone seems deviant indeed.  So maybe Best Buy isn’t that far off the mark.

UPDATE DEC. 20, 2010: I failed to mention that, at the time of this post, I did not own a smart phone at all. Now I have joined the hip cats of the 21st century: I have a smart phone. Though, I would like to specify, that I was able to attract a mate without one. Then again, I am a chick, so how much money I can spend on a phone is slightly less important, or so I hear.

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.

Miriam H. noticed that the “Plus Size” section of the Frederick’s of Hollywood website uses very thin women to model the clothes, a phenomenon we’ve documented at Woman Within, even as it boasts “SEXY AT EVERY SIZE” and “Styles in sizes up to 3X and 42F”:

I browsed through all of the front pages for the categories at the left and noticed only one photograph of a woman that could pass as a “plus size” model:

This got me to wondering where these photos come from… and I have absolutely no answer to this question.  I don’t know if Frederick’s arranges for these photos to be taken, if they hire a company to take these photos, if the manufacturers have the photos taken and give or sell them to Frederick’s.  That might explain the single image with a plus-sized woman.  It also seems to me that the photos vary quite a bit stylistically, suggesting that they were coming from different places.  For example:

I suspect, as well, that the reason all of the products are modeled by thin models is because only one photo of each product is produced (one with a thin model on the assumption that plus-sized models could not be used to sell to non-plus-sized people).  That is, it would be twice as expensive to show two differently sized women in the garment, so women searching for plus-sized clothes don’t get to see the garment in their size.

Then again, as I continue to think out loud, almost no women buying any of these clothes has a body that approximates that of the models in these photos.  So this is not a non-representation issue for larger women, it’s a non-representation issue for almost all women.

So this seems to me to be an issue of representation, but also an issue of the institutional and financial constraints of the fashion industry.  Thoughts?  Insights?  Answers?

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.

This 8-minute video from Powering A Nation documents the fight of Kindra Arnesen to save her family and her Gulf Shores community. It’s a stirring portrait of how one family has been affected by the oil spill and is trying to fight back:

Via NPR.

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.