db, Lindsey B., and ABC News asked us to talk about the recent scandal over Walmart pricing a darker-skinned version of the Ballerina Theresa doll less than its white counterpart.  The evidence (from FunnyJunk):

Walmart claimed that the doll was priced less because they were trying to move inventory (ABC News).  It’s possible that the doll wasn’t selling (low demand) or they had ordered more than they could sell (high supply) and so the doll went on sale.  In fact, we know that people of all colors tend to absorb a color hierarchy in which whiteness is nicer, more beautiful, and more valuable (test your unconscious preferences here), so maybe the white doll WAS outselling the non-white doll because both white and non-white people were buying it, but not the darker-skinned doll.  Walmart, in this case, would only be following the market so as to maximize profits.

Walmart, however, could have chosen, in this case, to opt out of profit maximization.  The market isn’t physics; a company doesn’t have to follow its laws.  Walmart could have said, “You know, putting the dark-skinned doll on sale symbolically values whiteness higher than blackness.  Perpetuating that stereotype isn’t worth the money.”  That is, they could have decided that anti-racism trumped profits.

But they didn’t.

It’s important to say that I know of no study showing that, as a rule, white dolls are priced higher or are less likely to go on sale than other dolls.  It may be true that, if we were paying attention, we’d see all kinds of disparate pricing and it wouldn’t pattern itself on race.  Even in this case, I still think that companies need to be cognizant of the context in which they price their products.  In fact, I will go so far as to say that I think it is perfectly fine to discount white dolls while other dolls are left undiscounted, but not vice versa.  Why?  Because we live in a world where discounting dark-skinned dolls resonates with a discourse the symbolically devalues dark-skinned human beings.  Discounting white dolls simply does not carry the same problematic message.

Costco faced this kind of problem when it’s black Lil’ Monkey doll was pulled from shelves.  It turned out that the Lil’ Monkey doll came in three different races, but the black doll carried connotations that the others did not because black people have been compared to primates for centuries in an effort to dehumanize them.  A black Lil’ Monkey is wholly inappropriate in a way that a white Lil’ Monkey is not.

Companies make and sell products in a context.  Following market demands is not opting out; often, it reproduces the status quo.

NEW (Mar. ’10)! Sarah G., after seeing a different post on a multicultural cast of Barbies, looked them up on Target only to discover that the light-skinned Barbies were all priced at $19.99 and the dark-skinned Barbies were all priced at $19.95.  Here are all of the Barbies:

I don’t know, people.  I just don’t know.

See another example here.

NEW! (July ’10): Christine B. sent in images from Target that show Black Baby Alive dolls (two different types) on clearance (down from $19.29 to $13.50) while the White versions aren’t; the Black dolls are clearly marked on the shelf and with individual stickers:

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.

Prolific sender-inner Dmitriy T.M. sent in some maps found at F.A.D. that illustrate where various agricultural items are produced. This one shows the population density of cows (pink), pigs (yellow), sheep/goats (turquoise), chickens (blue), and turkeys (green); the darker the shade of each color, the higher the density. Note that the data is broken down at the county level:

You can see a larger image here, where it’s easier to read the info at the bottom about the highest population density for each animal, per square mile: Cows = 700, pigs = 2,800, sheep/goats = 85, chickens = 75,000, turkeys = 5,500. I suspect the highest density for cattle is based on a county with a lot of feedlots, which put many more cattle in a small space than you’d see on grazing lands.

Notice the high levels of production of chickens throughout the southeast. This is a relatively new occurrence; poultry producers moved into the region due to lower wages and fewer environmental regulations compared to other areas, making it less likely their huge containment facilities would lead to a lot of opposition.

The low densities of sheep/goats are due to a few things. Most obviously, there isn’t nearly as much of a market for sheep or goat meat in the U.S. as for other meats, so they aren’t produced in large numbers. Beyond that, they’re more likely to be raised by people with a small amount of land, or even in a back yard, because they don’t need a lot of space, so you don’t have to have a lot of grazing land devoted just to them the way you do with cattle (though in the western states there certainly are very large herds).

Random bit of info: in the U.S., wool production is just a by-product of sheep meat production in most cases. I worked on a sheep ranch for a few months; they sheared their sheep just to reduce the weight the sheep had to carry around and the chance of overheating. The amount they got for the fleeces just barely covered the cost of hiring a shearing crew. The real profit was in selling the lambs for meat.

Also: you think lambs are super cute, with the jumping and baa-ing and all, but when you have to bottle-feed 40 of them twice a day, they quickly lose their allure. [Note: since commenters are already getting worked up about this being my way of justifying my brutality toward animals, I’ll just state that I’m a vegetarian, so that line of reasoning isn’t going to get you far. That is entirely irrelevant to how exhausting it got to feed lambs.]

Here we have % of land in each county devoted to corn (gold), wheat (green), soybeans (pink), cotton (blue), hay (yellow), and fruits/nuts/veggies (red):

Larger version here.

Dmitriy also sent in an image from GOOD that shows where the various elements that go into a taco in the U.S. come from, and how far they travel on average. I can’t get it large enough here to read the info on the various ingredients, but there’s a larger version here.

From the article on GOOD:

The various spices in the Adobo seasoning, for instance, had traveled a combined 15,000 miles. The avocados had traveled from Chile, home of the world’s largest avocado grower (a company that was said to produce 300 million fruit per year). The rice was imported from Thailand, despite an abundance of California-grown rice, and was packaged under an array of brand names.

Read more: http://www.good.is/post/your-taco-deconstructed/#ixzz0hnQh4I94

Dmitriy T.M., Christina W., Kelly V., and George asked us to comment on Vajazzling. Dmitriy, who sent in the video link, said he was too frightened to press play, but I am very brave and now I know what vajazzling really is! It’s hard to know because the term “vajayjay” is, um, who knows what that word means… and the term “vagina” (which actually refers to what is otherwise known as the birth canal) is now used to mean the vulva and, apparently, anything within 12 inches of it.

In any case, the video below, in which a woman documents the vajazzling of her “vagina,” reveals that the term refers to the placing of a field of tiny crystals where your public hair would be. So, you essentially replace your pubic hair with shiny objects.

So, brave souls who pressed play, sociologically analyze away.

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.

E. W. sent in a three-page internet ad for the 2010 Chevy Traverse.  The Traverse seats eight, but the ad campaign suggests that it is perfect for just four.  E.W. offers the play-by-play:

The first image of the ad shows a young boy and girl in the first row of seats in an SUV.  They are separated by at least a foot of space.  The young boy is poking the girl (presumably his sister) in the shoulder.

The following images show the two kids in various seating arrangements where they are always separated by the seating rows (one in front and one in back).

The end tag (car-two) states “Finally, you can separate them.”

“To summarize the ad in my words,” said E.W., “Buy a car that can seat 6 kids because you can’t control your 2.”

Or, in my words, in the face of an economic crisis peppered with sky-high fuel prices, we are desperate for another way to try to convince Americans that they need giant cars.

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.

If you’re interested, I wrote a piece for The Daily Mirror about my recent trip to the LAPD’s “Behind the Scenes” exhibit here in Vegas (which got a lot of media attention when the Kennedy family protested the inclusion of bloody clothing from Robert Kennedy’s shooting). My friend Larry was interested in the politics involved–whose personal tragedy gets put on public display? Were the displays as sensationalistic as he suspected they would be? He was particularly interested in how the case of the Black Dahlia (aka Elizabeth Short) would be presented, and what the LAPD would think was appropriate to display for public consumption.

So I agreed to go take a look. And I was horrified in so many ways. Absolutely stunned. You can find the piece here.

This is the second post using material borrowed from the essay, “Facts and Fictions About an Aging America.”  Our online host, Contexts magazine, is offering some free content, including this essay, now through March 15th.  See yesterday’s post here.

While people in industrialized countries live longer and healthier lives than ever, more educated people enjoy even less morbidity than less educated people.  The figure below illustrates the decline in mental and physical function over time for people with a college degree, a high school degree, and no degree at all:

The figure shows that more educated people experience “excellent health” than less educated at every age, except perhaps 85 and above.  Why might this be?

Well, higher educated people may come from wealthier families who were able to provide their children with health care, good nutrition, and exercise.  Having degrees may also correlate with jobs that are less harmful to the body and offer both health insurance and more free time to exercise.  Lower educational attainment is likely correlated with economic insecurity; a lifetime of struggling to make ends meet could create the kind of bad stress that interferes with both mental and physical health.

Other theories?  Thoughts on these?

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.

Our online host, Contexts magazine, is offering some free content, a selection of essays on aging, now through March 15th.  I borrowed the material below from the essay, “Facts and Fictions About an Aging America.”

The average American is aging… and fast.  Advances in public health — especially related to childbirth, infant mortality, and infectious disease — have led to longer lives.   “The result is that death has been permanently shifted from a phenomenon among the young to one of the old.”  This means that the age distribution in the U.S. has shifted from one shaped like a neat pyramid (in 1900), to one shaped kind of like a house (in 2000), to whatever shape that is they’re predicting in 2050:

The great news is that “active life span is increasing faster than total life span.”  That is, even though we live longer, we spend fewer of our years sick or disabled than ever before.  This is called (so you can impress your friends) the “compression of morbidity.”

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.

Sometimes when we put up hyperfeminine clothes and toys for girls, people argue that no one has to buy those clothes, so there is no point in critiquing their existence.  The implication is that all conformity to gendered expectations is voluntary (on the part of both mothers and their daughters).

However, the recent furor over Shiloh Jolie-Pitts haircut and boyish outfit, sent in by Tara C., Cailin H., and Lindsay F., shows us that having a gender-consistent appearance isn’t simply voluntary; when you don’t perform gender, other people will police your choices.  In this case, people are questioning whether she is harming her child by turning her “into A BOY?”

In this case, of course, it’s mass media doing the policing (or inviting readers to do the policing).  In the lives of non-celebrities, this same sort of policing is often done by family members, friends, and even strangers.  For the non-conformist (parent), then, gender non-conformity can be a real drag.

Image borrowed from DListed.

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.