Jayna T. and V. sent in a number of commercials for home security systems. They point out that in all the commercials they’d seen (there are many, many, many more than what I have here), the intruders are men (White men, from what I can tell) and the person endangered is a White woman, either alone or with her daughter:

So they’re selling home security systems by playing on the idea of the vulnerable middle-class White woman, easily victimized in her home. Luckily, home intruders are easily frightened away by an alarm system and run for the hills.

Saturday Night Live recently parodied these commercials, and I think the skit sums them up nicely:

UPDATE: A commenter pointed out this Target: Women segment on the same topic:

Anna sent in another example of a brand marketing itself as for-manly-men-only.  Add this one, featuring McCoy Crisps, to some of our other examples: Dockers, Klondike Bar, Alpo, Oberto beef jerky, and Ketel One.

The first thing that the McCoy Crisps Pub site requires is that you tell it what kind of shoes you’re wearing:

If you answer “incorrectly,” the website says: “No, not right.  Get inside and learn how to be a real man.”

When you enter the online pub, the first thing you see is a woman that you are supposed to be disgusted by.  Immediately a set of beer goggles flies up onto your face (because you wouldn’t want to look at her for more than a split second, apparently):

Then you see this (phew! that was close!):

Alongside playing darts, drinking games, and playing manly trivia, you can get tips on how to be more manly.  Such as “How Not to Look Like a Girl Watching TV” and “How to Get Away with Not Ironing”:

And you can also take a manly quiz to find out how manly you are.  The quiz nicely tells you exactly how you are allowed to behave and what you are allowed to like.  Some examples of questions:

So being a guy means manipulating women with puppies, making fun of your brother-in-law for being a good husband and father, making women cook for you, eschewing personal grooming and healthy eating as much as possible, objectifying women, and enjoying the Pirelli company calender.

Oh, and, if you haven’t seen the Pirelli calendar, you really, really, really don’t want to click here (NSFW; trigger warning).

So there you have it: another marketing campaign that assumes that men are stupid, shallow, sexist, sport-o-holics.  I don’t understand why men tolerate it.

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.

Everyone knows phones and other devices are a major source of distraction to drivers, with deadly consequences. Six states — including New York and California — ban handheld phones while driving. The New York Times is running a major series on the danger, reporting that 11% of drivers are on the phone at any one time, causing 2,600 deaths per year.

I don’t doubt the danger. But this is my question: Where is the upward trend in traffic deaths and accidents? The number of wireless phone subscribers increased by 10-times from 1994 to 2006, but the rate of traffic fatalities per mile traveled dropped 18% during that time. Here’s my chart based on those numbers.

I don’t doubt it’s dangerous to talk on the phone while driving, and texting is reportedly even worse. So I’m left with a few possible explanations. First, maybe cars are just safer. So there is an increase in accidents but fewer deaths per mile driven. Second, maybe distracted driving is more likely to cause minor collisions, because people jabber and text less in high-risk situations. (OK, I checked it out and those explanations won’t do: Accidents causing property damage only, per mile driven, have also declined, by 24%, from 1994 to 2007.)

Or third — and I like this idea, though I have no evidence for it — maybe phone-based distractions are replacing other distractions, like eating, grooming, listening to music, supervising children, or interacting with other passengers.

Can you explain this?

(And no, I don’t work for the telecommunications industry.)

The March, 2010 issue of Details, sent to us by m&k, “stars” Robert Pattinson. Other than Pattinson, the most important part of the magazine is the discussion of “the remasculation of the American man,” but that’s for another day. What struck me was the way that the photo shoot uses naked women as props for Pattinson’s masculine display. Not safe for work, so after the jump…

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Welcome Guest Poster Brady Potts, who just put together this post about online communities and collective mourning of Alex Chilton’s death. Brady is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Southern California who studies discourse in the public sphere. He is also the co-editor of The Civic Life of American Religion, and an inveterate music junkie.

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Flags are at half-mast today mourning the death of Alex Chilton, former Box Top, Big Star, producer of The Cramps and Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, and truly eclectic solo artist. It got me thinking about the way people use the internet to collectively mourn the passing of public figures, and how online spaces have developed cultures of their own.

In the comments to a New York Times story about Chilton’s death, you’ll find a variety of comments ranging from brief RIPs to lengthy statements about what Chilton’s music has meant to them. Over at the Onion AV Club, which has a robust-yet-often-snarky commenting culture, you find lengthier, more thoughtful comments that are more like a dialogue between members of the site, as members trade stories, recommend songs to each other, and post links to Chilton’s work.  The comments also reveal a shared knowledge of “what kind of place this is and what kind of discussions we tend to have here,” as is the case with “PB,” who writes:

“Seriously, folks……the first person to make a snarky “Who?” comment gets a punch in the mouth.
Not just because this guy was a legend and your ignorance of him should be viewed with pity and disgust. But also because it’s obnoxious and ghoulish.Remember, just because you’re on the internet doesn’t meet you have to say something.”

“PB” acknowledges the speech norms of the site (“Who?” is a frequent, if contentious, comment regarding cult artists on the site) and, given the occasion, suggests that the usual sarcasm would be inappropriate.

On the other hand, if you click over to this Chilton tribute song by the Replacements and poke around the comments, you find mostly one or two lines of “RIP” and “You’ll be missed”. This is about par for the course with YouTube, whose commenters seem to favor mostly brief remarks (and, it should be said, often veer into speech that many would find wholly objectionable).

So are the differences in these patterns of commenting evidence of a shared collective identity (“AV Clubber”), as opposed to the more anonymous “anything goes” posting style of YouTube? I think that many observers would agree that it is, but looking at the different sites, there also appears to be a “group style,” what Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman describe as “recurrent patterns of interaction that arise from a group’s shared assumptions about what constitutes good or adequate participation in the group setting.”* Some online spaces we implicitly understand as places for anonymous commentary (with all that entails) while others we recognize as places where one should comment in a certain way, regardless of the identity we may or may not share as visitors to the site. This would suggest that visitors to web sites draw on collective understandings of what it means to be a good commenter in certain kinds of online spaces and post accordingly.

In any case, discussions like these are a starting point for all manner of interesting conversations about how we negotiate interaction online, and for that matter, how we use spaces like these to collectively mourn the passing of public figures whose life’s work is deeply meaningful to many people. And to that end, here are a few of my favorite of Chilton’s tunes, so feel free to use the comments to commemorate his work, wonder what the big deal is, lament the fact that they’ve been missing from your life thus far, or otherwise muse on the uses of the internet.

* Nina Eliasoph & Paul Lichterman, 2003, “Culture in Interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 108(4):737.

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So there’s your late-night Alex Chilton memorial post and rumination on the creation and maintenance of online communal identities. For a somewhat different example, see Jay Smooth’s discussion of people mourning Michael Jackson’s death.

The vintage ad below is another great example of how “tasty” is socially constructed (i.e., culturally- and historically-contingent). If I’m not mistaken, this ad for canned deviled ham is suggesting that it makes a great sandwich when combined with jelly:

For more fun food-related examples of social construction, see our posts on meat-flavored gelatin, savory veggie jell-o, vitamin beer, cucumber flavored soda, soup for breakfast, and 7Up milk.

Source: Vintage 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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Sarah Barnes, who blogs at Uplift, expressed surprise at seeing the ad below in Grazia magazine:

She found herself surprised, she explains, because it took a minute for it to sink in that the dolls weren’t real people…

She explains:

In a time when everything is photoshopped to such disastrous levels, there really isn’t that much difference between a Ralph Lauren advert using a real model and an ASOS ad using Barbies. When fashion just has to be seen on ‘perfect’ women, we are becoming used to seeing a Barbie-like cookie cutter version of what women look like in our magazines.

So, this is why I screamed. Because, for a second there, I thought the Barbies were real women.

Do they freak you out a bit?

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.

Jay Livingston, who blogs at MontClair SocioBlog, put up a set of ads for a bank that illustrate a basic sociological insight. The message in the ads is “Different values make the world a richer place” and they each feature the same image triply labeled.

Privilege.  Sacrifice.  Role model.

Decor.  Souvenir.  Place of prayer.

Freedom.  Status symbol.  Polluter.

Style.  Soldier.  Survivor.

Glorified.  Vilified.  Gentrified.

They say that a photograph is worth a thousand words, but this exercise reminds us how much words, even one word, can shape our interpretation of an image. The world doesn’t just exist, it must always be interpreted. Those immediately around us have a great ability to influence how we see the world, but the people with power over media do also… and their power is vast.

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.