We recently posted about an ad for internet service that used the metaphor of a prostitute.  It/she was “fast” and “cheap” with “satisfaction guaranteed.”  We also recently posted about national personifications, fictional or semi-fictional people used to represent countries.  This ad campaign, submitted by Mary S., has both.

Victoria, a city in British Columbia, is personified as “Victoria,” the sex worker.  “Victoria’s cheap,” the ad reads, “but she’ll show you a great time.”  The larger message, of course, is that places are like women and women are like places.  They are experiences to purchase and consume, preferably cheaply.

UPDATE: Some in the comments have suggested that I cropped the ad to make my point.  So here is the whole front page of the website, victoriascheap.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.

Fox sent us this image from a Sephora email; clicking on the various skin tones would take you to a section on makeup for your complexion:

What struck Fox is how light all three skin tones are. I’m pretty pale — I often match shades with names like “ivory” — and I think I’d still be “medium” toned according to this graphic. Also, all three women have pretty similar, stereotypically Caucasian, facial features.

And while any skin tone categorization is going to throw together a wide array of shades, in this case, it seems like a lot more skin tones are going to be subsumed under the “dark” category than the others, since it starts out at a pretty light shade and contains every shade darker than that. The options here separate out lighter skin tones from one another pretty finely while throwing an enormous range of skin types together under “dark.” Presumably Sephora conducted intensive research and discovered that while lighter-skinned women required carefully customized makeup color schemes, women with even slightly darker skin can all make do with the same one.

Kasia G. and Tom M. sent in this remarkable product designed to smooth out…     wait for it…     camel toe.

That’s right, women.  Listen up.  We want you to wear clothes so tight that we can see every bump and crevice on your body, but see… we don’t want you to actually have bodies.  Can you work on that for us, please?

(source)

(source)

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.

Sent along by Dmitiry T.M.

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.

Diego Costa recently pointed out to us the sexualization of Jaden Smith. In that post, I wondered if race played much of a part in this process; while non-White boys are often adultified, it wasn’t clear to me that it was a major factor in this case. Diego followed up by sending along some photos of White teen heartthrob/pop star Justin Bieber, who you may know better as that kid on the cover of magazines whose hair you desperately want to brush out of his eyes. He’s a bit older than Jaden, so the idea of him dating or talking about girls isn’t surprising, but the specific example Diego sent in is.

Apparently Justin Bieber, who is 16, met Kim Kardashian, the 29-year-old reality-TV personality and model, earlier this year at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (and no, I didn’t know teen pop stars go to the Correspondents’ Dinner, either). Apparently after she Tweeted that she had “Bieber fever” and he joked about her being his “girlfriend,” Bieber fans flipped out and sent her death threats and such.

Following this, the two recently posed together for a fashion shoot for Elle, presumably making fun of and capitalizing on the earlier frenzy and publicity regarding their friendship. The photo shoot had them walking on the beach, in the water, holding hands, and in other ways hinting at romance; in some cases, Bieber’s light-colored shirt is wet and you can see his entire chest through it:

Diego asks how this would go over if the roles were reversed: if Elle had images of a 16-year-old female teen star in a see-through shirt walking on the beach with, or getting a flower from, a 29-year-old male celebrity “mostly known for…posing nude several times and making money off of his condom-free sex tape…” (after a sex tape of Kardashian with her ex-boyfriend appeared, she sued and settled with the company distributing it for $5 million).

I’m not trying to stigmatize Kardashian; I’m not interested in her, or why she’s famous, here. But I think Diego has a very good point: it’s unlikely many people will think this is an inappropriate sexualization of Bieber (though perhaps Kardashian will need some extra security guards when Bieber’s fans see these). As the reaction to Jayden Smith indicates, we accept the idea of boys being sexual, or sexually interested, at younger ages than girls, and any interest they show in older girls or women is a sign of their sexual precocity — and, of course, heterosexuality — not a sign that they are either in danger of being preyed upon or that they are tempting Lolitas (and thus dangerous to men). We simply don’t worry as much about a 16-year-old teen boy shown in a photo like this because we don’t think of sexuality being dangerous for them in the way we think it is for girls.

UPDATE: Sorry comments were previously turned off — some type of glitch.

Stephanie DeH., Cara McC., and our intern, Lauren McGuire, sent in this CPR certification campaign that embraces the idea that sex sells.  I initially added it to our post on using sex to sell unlikely things (e.g., organ donation and sea monkeys), but I changed my mind and decided it deserved its own discussion.

What was interesting to me about this example is the sexualization of the possibility of dying. The fact that a person might die is apparently not serious enough to make it unsexy.  It actually took me a minute to even notice the weirdness of sexualizing the risk of death.  After I noticed I thought “How crazy!”  But then I thought again: in a society that regularly sexualizes violence and murder, the sexualization of near-death is par for the course (which, of course, is why it didn’t strike me as particularly weird in the first place.

NSFW and possibly triggering, so images are after the jump:

more...

This ad, spotted by Stephanie DeH. in a physical therapist’s office, asks viewers to donate blood with the argument that it’s “easier” to save a life than to save the world:

Text:

Saving the world isn’t easy. Saving a life is.
Just one pint of blood can save up to three lives.

The ad commits two fallacies.

First, it compares saving the whole world (or maybe every tree in the world) with saving just “a” life.  Saving a life may, indeed, be easier than saving the whole world, but it’s not a fair comparison.  Saving the whole world is hard, but about as hard as saving every life on it.

Second, it suggests that we have to choose.  “You could try to save the world,” the ad says, “but it’s pretty hopeless.  It’s much easier to save a life.  So put down that tree and donate blood.”  Giving blood, then, is placed in competition with environmental activism as if (or because) volunteerism is a zero sum game.

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.

Andrew M. sent us a link to an interesting post by Lewis Denby at Beef Jack about the video game APB. The game lets you customize the characters in a variety of ways, including height and weight. Denby noticed something interesting about the customization, however. Here’s a male figure with the weight at the maximum level:

As Denby points out, it’s pretty unusual to have main characters that give the option of not being super muscular and slim, so this is pretty surprising. Perhaps less surprising is what he found when he maxed out the weight scale for a female character:

While she’s certainly larger than most women in video games, the maximum body proportion for her seems quite a bit thinner than the maximum allowed for the male character, and she still has an hourglass shape. So you’re given the option to customize the characters’ bodies, but it appears you get less choice for the female figures than the male ones. The question is why; did the designers think this is as large as anyone was likely to ever want a female character to be? Were they, for whatever reason, more concerned about female than male characters being too much outside the video game norm, to the point of limiting customization options? Some other reason for this disparity? If it were due just to technical design issues, I don’t see why it would be possible to give more weight range for the male character than the female one.

Beef Jack contacted the company for comment but, it being the weekend, they’re still waiting to hear back.