NEWS:

This month Gwen and I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who have submitted ideas for posts.  Our inbox is alive with ideas and it makes our job exceedingly fun!  We absolutely could not do it without all of your eyes.  So thank you for your submissions!  Also, if you’ve submitted an idea and it was never posted, please don’t be discouraged.  We get far more ideas than we could possibly use.  And, even if yours was a submission that we decided against using, be assured that we read it, thought about it, and sometimes talked about it together before setting it aside.  We appreciate all of your help, even if it doesn’t make the front page.

In other news, we’ve entered a new partial syndication agreement with BlogHer and we’re super excited to add that partnership to our one with Jezebel.  Our first syndicated post was our recent discussion of the Vaseline skin-lightening Facebook application.

Finally, please do remember that you can follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook.  Soon we’ll be launching a MySpace page as well.

NEW PUBLICATIONS:

(If you don’t have the subscriptions required to access either paper, we’re happy to send you a copy,  Just send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.)

Gwen and my most recent essay in the print-magazine Contexts, Flesh-Toned, is now online.  It draws on the long conversation we’ve been having here about the way that the use of the terms “flesh,” “nude,” and “skin” to refer to light beige colors makes darker-skinned people invisible.

Also, a paper I wrote with Caroline Heldman is now available at Sexuality Research and Social Policy.  How and why hook-up culture came to characterize U.S. colleges remains a mystery.  In our paper, Hook-Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda, we argue that the emergence of hook-up culture on college campuses is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how sexual cultures change.  We review the literature, offer some hypotheses to explore, and discuss methodological requirements.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! July ’10):

This month we added new material to some older gender- and race-related posts.  Thanks almost exclusively to Gwen for doing the hard work of updating!  And thanks to those of who sent the images along!

Race

When a racially diverse group of people is included in ads or other materials, darker-skinned people are typically behind or below the lighter-skinned.  We updated our post on how people of color are subordinated in advertising with a new example of a church welcome banner.

Another ’70s book on useful Spanish phrases for talking to your maid.

Givenchy has some rather light “nude”-colored dresses, but Esquire responded to complaints about ignoring Black men by following up a story with a segment that acknowledged that African Americans might require or prefer different hair maintenance techniques and styles than other groups.

Black dolls sell for less than White dolls at Target.

A second example of vintage soap advertising suggesting that African Americans are dirty.

Gender/Sex

Haven’t found quite the right string bikini for your infant girl? We added another example to our post about bikinis for babies to help you out.

Two more examples in which men are people and women are women.

Another example of large clothes on small models.

More parking spaces just for women.

Using the PETA demonstration model in Jordan.

More gendering of language.

Rosie the Riveter was “maid to clean.”

More gendering of boys’ and girls’ (coloring) books.

eBay continues to gender gift suggestions…while simultaneously degendering them.

Only dudes use technology. Didn’t you know?

Don’t smoke. It makes you ugly.

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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Sully R. drew our attention to a set of images of wedding-related dresses at brides.com. She searched through the thumbnails of brides in the entire gallery; out of 684, there were about 43 African American women, a few identified as Hispanic, and none, as far as she could tell, of Asian women. She also points out, “Of all the models that could be considered full-figured or curvy, most…were black.”

There’s something else going on here, the type of thing that just makes you wonder, given how much businesses spend on marketing and design and such, how it still made it through. Here is an image of the front page of the gallery, showing the only two thumbnails with Black women in them:

Did you catch it? The only two pictures that have Black women in them…are in the category “Maids in Heaven.” I’m sure this was referring to being a “maiden” or something of that sort (I first thought of “bridesmaid,” but then it’s a bride in one picture, so that doesn’t really make sense).

I can’t really fathom how no one noticed and thought, “maybe we should change that title, just to be safe.” It shows, at the very least, a remarkable insensitivity to part of the presumed audience —  not thinking about how the language of the categories might have different meanings depending on who it referred to and that for some groups, the use of “maid,” however innocuously meant, would have unpleasant connotations.

Interestingly, the one area where Sully noticed interracial groups, including Asians, was in pictures of flower girls:

She said there were actually quite a few Asian girls in these photos. Presumably this is a safe place to show interracial mixing; it implies a childhood innocence where everybody gets along and is less likely to alienate adults who might be more uncomfortable with images of an interracial couple getting married.

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NPR recently featured a story on Kevin Michael Connolly. Connolly is an athlete, adventurer, author, and photographer who was born without legs.

In his memoir, Double Take, he talks about travel. People around the world, he explains, tend to stare.  And, with his camera, he stared back.

Curiosity, it appears, is very human. But people in different places tend to speculate differently as to the source of his lost legs and that, he discovered, is quite culturally specific.

In Sarajevo, people tended to think that he’d lost his legs in mines during the Balkan conflicts.  In New Zealand he overheard a child asking his mother if he’d been attacked by a shark.  In Montana, he was asked if he still wore his dog tags from Iraq.

I broke my leg five weeks ago and, for what it’s worth (not much really), my experience, also, is that people speculate based on their own experiences and their relationship to you.  An avid lindy hopper (12 years now… well, not now exactly, but again real soon), many of my dance friends immediately inquire as to whether I broke my leg dancing.  My raunchy friend, Fancy, asked if I broke it “doin’ it.”  The second most common guess is that I broke it stepping off a curb.  It turns out lots of people do that.  Who knew!

For more, see Connolly’s website or listen to the NPR Radio Story.

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 ad for Scünci in Elle magazine, sent in by Bronwyn H., claims “A full line of hair accessories, that highlight and complement all shades of hair color.”

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.

I’ve written previously about the portrayal of women in the military — in particular, the U.S. Navy’s attempts to redefine femininity to make the Navy more appealing to women by assuring them they can be strong, smart, and still go shopping and stuff. In another example, a number of former female Israeli Defense Force soldiers posed for Maxim magazine back in 2007. The first line of the article:

They’re drop-dead gorgeous and can take apart an Uzi in seconds. Are the women of the Israeli Defense Forces the world’s sexiest soldiers?

I’m putting the images after the jump because they’re potentially not safe for some workplaces — the women aren’t nude, but they are quite scantily clad.

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We previously posted Annie Leonard’s breakthrough video, The Story of Stuff, and a follow up, The Story of Bottled Water. Kraig H. sent along another by Leonard on how cap and trade will not stop climate change:

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.

I wish I could spend all of my time in New Orleans, my favorite city in the world, so my friends are kind enough to send anything they run across that involves the Crescent City. Two friends forwarded a recent New York Times article on the rise of “sissy bounce,” a new take on bounce — an energetic form of rap/hip hop that originated in New Orleans. “Sissy bounce” refers to a handful of transgendered/gay rappers, some of whom perform in drag. Katey Red and Big Freedia are two of the biggest names in “sissy bounce.”

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

Data from the Pew Research Center shows us the extent to which the recession has hurt the economic health of American households, especially the middle and working classes:

More than half of all Americans report some sort of work-related disruption:

Nearly half state that they are worse off than they were before the recession:

An additional four percent (since 2008) identify themselves as lower class:

Pew specifies:

Blacks, as a group, are an exception to this overall pattern. The share of blacks who now identify with the upper class has gone up during this recession, to 20% now from 15% two years ago.

Forty-eight percent have lost equity in their homes:

Sixty percent of Americans fear that they may have to delay retirement:

A larger percentage lack the confidence that they have enough income and assets for retirement, even compared to last year:

“Is America still a land of prosperity?”

The question in some historical perspective:

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.