Katrin sent along one ad from a campaign by Louis Vuitton.  The campaign centers around the fantasy that young, beautiful women with porcelain (white) skin are hand-crafting their products.  A two-page spread:Text:

The Young Woman and the Tiny Folds.

In everything from Louis Vuitton, there are elements that cannot be fully explained.  What secret little gestures do our craftsmen discreetly pass on?  How do we blend innate skill and inherent prowess?  Or how can five tiny folds lengthen the life of a wallet?  Let’s allow these mysteries to hang in the air.  Time will provide the answers.

Another example is titled “The Seamstress With Linen Thread and Beeswax.”

But, of course, “Hardly any Vuitton bags or wallets are handmade.”  Or so says Carol Matlack at Business Week.  She continues:

While reporting an article on Vuitton in 2004, I visited one of its factories in the village of Ducey near Mont St. Michel. There I saw rows of workers seated at sewing machines, stitching together machine-cut pieces of canvas and leather. The partially finished bags were rolled from one workstation to the next on metal carts.

It was no sweatshop. The building was modern and airy, with windows overlooking the Normandy countryside. But the work being done there didn’t resemble in any way the painstaking handiwork shown in Vuitton’s ads. Indeed, the factory managers – who had been recruited from companies making such things as mobile phones and yogurt containers — talked proudly about the strides they had made in automating every step of the process. Just about the only Vuitton products still made by hand, they told me, were custom-made items produced at its historic atelier in the Paris suburb of Asnières.

UPDATE (May ’10)! Katrin and Anjan G. messaged us to let us know that the U.K. Advertising Standards Agency has decided that these ads violate truth in advertising.  They’ve been disallowed.

For other examples of marketing that mythologizes its manufacturing processes, see these posts on Goldfish crackers (mommies and daddies make them!) and Ecko Jeans (sweatshops are full of hot women in bikinis!).

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.

Martin M. pointed out some ironic happenings in Peru that illustrate the complexities of trying to deal with long-term stereotypes and prejudice. Back in November 2009, the Peruvian government officially apologized for discrimination against AfroPeruvians. So far so good–a step toward acknowledging that AfroPeruvians have suffered both economically and socially because of social attitudes and government policies.

But, of course, long-held stereotypes aren’t that easy to change. Peruvians of African descent have often been portrayed as backward, uncivilized, and possibly cannibalistic.

Just a few days after the government’s apology and declaration that poor treatment and negative stereotypes of this ethnic group needed to end, the newspaper El Comercio began advertising their new section on healthy eating with a TV commercial that draws on all the old stereotypes. The video is in Spanish, but I’m pretty sure you’ll get the gist of it, and I describe it below:

El comercio- Los canibales from Pao Ugaz on Vimeo.

What’s going on here? The mother is mad, not because her younger son ate someone, but because he ate someone who was too fat, and thus not good for them to eat. They need to eat less fattening people to improve their health. She warns him about his cholesterol. The caption says, “You eat healthy, you are healthy.”

According to Reportaje al Perú, the newspaper pulled the spot after receiving complaints and apologized for it.

As with any society with a history of widespread, blatantly racist stereotypes and discrimination, attempting to heal racial wounds will be a very long, painful, and difficult process. It’s one thing to officially apologize. It’s another to convince citizens that prejudice and discrimination are unacceptable and that everyone must play a part in ending them.

See also: El Correo ridicules Quechua speakers in government.

On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina sideswiped New Orleans.  The storm surge broke its levees, flooded 80% of the city, and killed almost 2,000 people.

The city is in recovery and it is emerging with a new identity tied tightly to that hurricane.  Though the storms have always played a role in the mythology of the city (consider its most famous drink), hurricane imagery increasingly has part of what defines New Orleans.  I’ve spent quite a lot of time there recently, and I can attest that the hurricane is everywhere: in jewelry, in art, and on bodies, for example.

In light of this, Casey F. thought it would be interesting to think about who gets to use hurricane humor?  Case in point:  A flickr stream by Editor B includes the following two images.  The first uses hurricane imagery to suggest that the New Orleans Saints is going to “attack” the Indianapolis, Colts at the Superbowl (in Miami, FL):

The second also uses hurricane imagery, but this time it’s an Indianapolis Colts fan using it against New Orleans:

Casey feels that those who suffered from the hurricane, including New Orleans, “…have reclaimed hurricane imagery for ourselves, because we survived it.”  But, she says, “That doesn’t make it acceptable for others to do so yet.”

For Casey, the use of hurricane imagery to suggest that a team is going to crush its opponent is like the use of the n-word or “queer.”  It was a hurtful term that has been reclaimed by those it most  hurt.  Thus, blacks and gays can use the words (respectively).  But, still, when others use them, they still carry a sting.

For someone who was harmed by a hurricane, using the imagery is a way of reclaiming the hurt they suffered, even appropriating the strength of the force that hurt them.  But, for others to use it, it is trivializing that same hurt, re-imagining the destruction they suffered.  It is not funny, from this perspective, to imagine that New Orleans could be hit again.

I sympathize with Casey on this, but think it’s also an interesting topic for conversation.

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.

Lynn S. sent us a link to a Carnegie Mellon story about a new robotic “nurse” for the elderly.  Her name is “Pearl.”

It should go without saying that robots do not need to be gendered male or female and that, in this case, gendering the robot female reproduces a wasp’s nest of stereotypes about who is responsible for caring for others.

I say it should go without saying but, in fact, it mostly does, in the most bizarre way.  The article is about trying to maximize Pearl’s effectiveness as a helper by testing various configurations of appearance, mannerisms, expressions, etc.  But they never address why she is female.  From the article:

To that end, a multidisciplinary team of roboticists, social scientists and interaction designers has drawn on theories of emotion from cognitive science and the principles of aesthetics to explore what happens when human characteristics are added—or taken away—from Pearl’s “persona.”
…
Appearance has a strong impact on a person’s expectations. Researchers want to learn whether facial characteristics will factor into the emotional reaction of people who interact with her. Pearl’s configurable head, the size and spacing of her eyes and the shape of her lips are all important elements in projecting a “persona.”

In the caption to this image, they mention the importance of her “configurable head” for her “persona,” but her gender remains conspicuously unexamined.

Only once in the entire article do they mention gender.  They say that they are “…studying people’s responses to a robot’s perceived gender by changing Pearl’s lips and voice.”  But they named her Pearl, so they seem to have rushed to a conclusion there.  It’s as if, despite the incredible range of concerns and experimentation, scientists are not seriously questioning her sex.

And I think they should!  Not only because it’s good science, and not only to avoid sexist assumptions, but because the robot is being designed for senior citizens, who are disproportionately women, most of whom have spent a lifetime caring for children and husbands; I’d bet they’d find a nursebot named Peter to be quite a treat!

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.

Katrin sent along links to visual portrayals of how much money goes, or could go, to various causes.  While sometimes it’s hard to comprehend what a billion, or 300 billion, dollars amounts to, these images give us perspective on just where our priorities lie.  The segments below are clipped from the visuals for the U.K. and the U.S. at Information is Beautiful.

The British example nicely illustrates how little social services like education, police, and welfare cost in the big scheme of things.

It also reveals how easy it would be to wave all of the African countries’ debt to Western countries. Just £128 spread out over the West.  Shoot, that’s the money for just a couple of corporate bailouts.

The U.S. example reveals how costly (just) the Iraq war has been.  All of our spending pales in comparison to that expenditure., with the exception of what we have spent bailing out the U.S. economy.

It also reveals that the U.S.’s regular defense budget is almot enough to feed and educate every child on earth for five years, and/or about the same as the revenues of Walmart and Nintendo combined.

If we diverted the money spent on porn, we could save the Amazon… almost five times over.  For that matter, if we gave our yoga money to the Amazon, that would just about do it.

Bill Gates could have paid for the Beijing Olympics and had money left over.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in an interactive breakdown of the US Budget for 2011.  In the figures below, the sizes of the squares represent the proportion of the budget, but the colors refer to changes from 2010 (dark and light pink = less funding, dark and light green = more).  These figures will give you an idea, but the graphic is interactive and there’s lots more to learn at the site.

See also our posts on how many starving children could be fed by celebrity’s engagement rings and where U.S. tax dollars go.

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.

The clip below is the trailer for a movie, The Code of the West: Alive and Well in Wyoming, that appears to be part documentary, part travel/tourism advertising, and part morality play. It emphasizes the moral superiority of a simple, truly “American” life lived in the great outdoors:

The clip is a great example of the way we socially construct both places and times.  Wyoming, a stand in here for “The Old West,” is mythologized as a place where people haven’t changed much.  Just as they were in the old days, they are steadfast, hard-working, and follow an impeccable honor code.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t great people in Wyoming, but it’s always wrong to say that something is always true (see what I did there?).  Further, today it is likely that many people work indoors in blue and white collar jobs and have little time to soak in the big sky that supposedly inspires such wholehearted goodness.  But the “idea” of Wyoming nonetheless privileges the cowboys (however many are left) over the office jocks.

Further, as Rachel at The Feminist Agenda writes “omit[s] a huge chunk of history”:

In cowboy country, there was one group of people with whom we never honored our word or felt bound by a firm handshake. If your skin was brown, all bets were off. We would make agreements with you, sealed by a handshake and a written contract, which we would disregard the minute it became convenient for us. Our word was worthless if your skin was brown and your culture didn’t look like ours.

Of course Rachel makes the same mistake here that the film makes:  There were (white) cowboys who would honor a handshaking with an American Indian.  We shouldn’t demonize the past/a people any more than should romanticize it/them.  Still, Rachel’s point stands: in the big scheme of things, the new Americans were not honorable by any measure.

The fact that the romanticization of The Old West wins out over its demonization is part of the larger revisionist history that the United States encourages (in school, in politics, and in popular culture).  There is what power looks like: to the victors go control over the narrative.

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.

As a white woman between 25 and 44 with a college degree, I am the least likely category of person to be unemployed according to an interactive graphic detailing the joblessness rate for people according to their race, education level, age, and sex (since Jan. ’07).  It is a rather devastating look at social inequality.  I recommend visiting the site to see for yourself, but below are some screen shots with some comparisons.

For comparison, the overall joblessness rate which, as of Sept., was at 8.6 percent:

The joblessness rate for white people (notice it is lower by 1.4 percent):

The joblessness rate for black people is almost twice that of whites:

Let’s add education level.

The joblessness for whites who have not yet graduated from high school is 17.5 percent:

The joblessness for comparative blacks is 10 percentage points higher.  Notice that the scale on the right hand side has changed from 0-20 percent (above) to 0-50 percent:

If we look at young blacks (15-24 years old) who haven’t been able to complete a high school degree, the joblessness rate is 42.7 percent:

If we restrict the numbers to young black men without a diploma, we see a whopping joblessness rate of 48.5 percent.

For comparison, here is the same kid, but white (the joblessness rate is cut in half, but is still huge, even by recession standards):

Ever wonder why young men turn to the underground economy?  Well, this is why.  Somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of them can’t get a job in the “above ground” economy.  What’s a kid to do?  Add in the rational choice of choosing work that pays more than minimum wage, and you’ve got a whole group of young people who participate in illegal activities.

Then, of course, we police black neighborhoods more aggressively than white neighborhoods, convict black people more frequently than white people, and send them to prison more often and with longer sentences (see also this post).

And, too add insult to injury, after all is said and done, a black person without a criminal record is less likely to get a job interview than a white person with one.  A black person with a criminal record: his chance of getting a call back after dropping off a resume (even at a place like McDonalds) is something like five percent.  No I’m not joking.

<sarcasm>Oh, but if they just had a good attitude and learned to talk right, they too could be successful in this life.</sarcasm>

It’s almost too much to bear.

Via Matthew Yglesias.

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.

Kelly V. sent in a video by Alisa Miller of Public Radio International about the impact of news coverage on what we know about. In particular, she argues that changes in the U.S. news media, such as shutting down expensive foreign bureaus, have led to less coverage of events or issues in other countries:

For other examples of the role of media outlets in signaling what’s worth talking about, check out our posts on media outlets covering celebrity stories while chastising us for caring, presenting polls in the media, what stories get covered?, people are more interested in Tiger Woods than Afghanistan, meaningless statistics, U.S. and international versions of magazine covers, “us and them,” which missing kids get news coverage?, covering Obama and McCain, covering Obama and Clinton, and what’s worth covering in a slideshow?