If you’re designing a cover for a book by a Chinese or Japanese writer, or with a Chinese or Japanese setting, it seems that there are some compulsory elements which must be included. For variety’s sake, there are four elements, but you MUST use at least one of them. Advanced designers, of course, may use two or more.

Element 1: Blossoms (preferably cherry, but anything red or pink will do)

Element 2: Fans (preferably held so as to partly obscure a woman’s face (or genitals), and if you can get blossoms on the fan, you get bonus points)

Element 3: Dragons (for use only on crime novels, or other exciting tales)

Element 4: Female Necks (preferably that of a geisha, but any female neck will do in a pinch)

For more on this trend, see this article from Hyphen Magazine, which features a brief interview with ace designer Henry Sene Yee. It was that article which also drew my attention to two covers featured above, those for On a Bed of Rice and The Street of a Thousand Blossoms.

(To be fair, I ought to note that several of these covers are actually very nice–it’s just that they lose rather a lot of their impact because of the familiarity of the elements used.)

James Morrison (jrsmorrison@yahoo.com.au) is a writer, editor and graphic designer who lives in Adelaide, Australia. He writes about book covers and book design at causticcovercritic.blogspot.com, and used to write about novellas at Book Slut.  He blogs at Caustic Cover Critic. Thanks to Lisabee for the hat tip.

Nikki L. sent in images of an article titled “Are You Turning Your Boyfriend into a Girlie Man?” from the February 2010 issues of Cosmo. Nikki says,

The article discusses how many women are treating their boyfriends like their girlfriends, making them go shopping, do yoga, and eat vegan food. It says the gender roles are being blurred, and that’s a good thing up to a point. The article says that eventually your man will push you away and resent you for making him girlie. It gives a list of things your man shouldnt be doing, as it might damage his masculinity…

The first page:

Notice the subtitle in red and the text below it:

First, why would you want to act like your BF or husband is one of the girls anyway? Your pull to do girlie things with him stems from experiences with your female friends. “Women are intimate with their close friends, we share everything,” says JoAnn Magdoff, PhD…

Yes. Why on earth would you want to recreate that type of relationship with a guy? Who wants to be intimate, emotionally close, and share everything with their partner? Yuck!

Here are some things you do not want your boyfriend/husband to do:

Just to reiterate: men cannot care too much about their personal appearance. They cannot try to eat healthily, or be vegetarian/vegan. If they’re gonna cook, they better not try to keep from burning their hands by wearing items specifically designed for that task. Sissies!

The article also provides a list of “manly date ideas” you can do with your guy to avoid turning him into one of the girls:

That’s just…stupid! It’s stupid! Gah! It’s such a ridiculous division of the world into the stereotypically masculine and the stereotypically feminine with policing to remind us that men must never be feminine. Ever! And women, stop emasculating men!

Men like meat! And pizza! Girls like chef salads without eggs, bacon, or cheese in them. Men like dogs! Women like cats. Have you ever known a woman who liked dogs? As if! Men like walking in the park and the beach. Except in movies where walking on the beach is portrayed as all annoyingly mushy and romantic, something men do because women like that sort of thing.

I’m also pretty sure if his favorite video game turns out to be Bejeweled, that goes up on the list of things you never wanna see.

Z at It’s The Thought That Counts asked us to submit for commentary a product called the BeBand on sale at Target.  The Band is designed for pregnant women and women who’ve recently given birth:

(Note the carefully placed rings!  This model is no unwed mother!)

The box says that it will “cover unbuttoned pre-pregnancy jeans,” “hold up too-big maternity pants,” and allow you to “fit into pre-pregnancy pants sooner after giving birth”:

But it’s interesting that that’s the fine print.  The large print emphasizes beauty (“Be Belly Beautiful”) and the product is also sold under the name BellaBand.

Questions:

I’ve never been pregnant, is this a new product?  If so, is it a useful product or an invented need?

Even if this is a useful product, what do you think of the emphasis on beauty on the part of the marketers?

Is this not just another part of a demand for women to be freakin’ gorgeous at every part of their lifecycle?

NEW! (Mar. ’10): Along the same lines, R. Walker told us about a product called Shrinkx Hips:

For the low price of $54.99, “Shrinkx Hips provides constant, even pressure to gently guide hips back to their pre-pregnancy position” (if you wear it for 8 weeks). R.W. said it seems like a torture device, and I rather agree. But hey, apparently it makes you look like that model afterward, so what’s a little pain?

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.

Christina S. sent along a link to the British commercial below for Twingo. There’s a twist ending, so I’ll let you watch it:

Notice that, at the very end, the narrator refers to how “we live in modern times,” meaning that we drive socially responsible cars and tolerate cross-dressing.

The idea embedded in that commercial is: now that we’re “modern,” there is no more prejudice and intolerance. Or, “modern” people are tolerant of social differences. Things like bias, hate, and discrimination are “in the past,” confined to those who are “traditional” or otherwise somehow regressive.

This makes sense to us (and the commercial, therefore, works) because many of us have a model of history that assumes that everything will, inevitably, always get better… or at least not get worse. This is a linear model where the line for “progress” keeps going higher and higher over time.  However things are today, we assume, things must have been worse before.  Thinking like this makes invisible the possibility that people were more tolerant in the past as well as the possibility that we could become increasingly intolerant in the future.  As I wrote in a previous post about cavemen:

There are serious problems with this idea:  (a)  We may stop working to make society better because we assume it will get better anyway (and certainly never get worse) with or without us.  (b) Instead of thinking about what things like gender equality and subordination might look like, we just assume that equality is, well, what we have now and subordination is what they had then.  This makes it less possible to fight against the subordination that exists now by making it difficult to recognize.

History doesn’t move along in a linear or predictable way.  And it certainly doesn’t produce equality just by plodding along.  We need to do the hard work of figuring out what an egalitarian society looks like and how to get there.  Conflating “modernity” with social tolerance makes it seem as though the work is already finished.

UPDATE! Ashleigh V. sent in another Twingo commercial.  This one conflates modernity with sexual permissiveness:

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.

Last night some friends and I were on the Strip here in Vegas and wandered over to look at City Center, the new casino/very high-end shopping center/”walkable city within a city” that was such a big deal when it opened recently that national news outlets, including NPR, talked about it. Anyway, we were wandering around and came upon a lingerie store with this mannequin in the window:

She’s blindfolded, handcuffed, on her knees. Another mannequin was also blindfolded, with ties around her ankles, and a third had a long pearl necklace wrapped around her neck and then tied around each wrist.

Our reaction was, basically, “Agh! Agh! WTF? Why?!?” We all, men and women alike, interpreted it as an icky depiction of sexual domination of women, perhaps even violence.

But of course, there’s another way to interpret it, particularly given that it’s a lingerie store: as consensual participation in S&M/bondage or sexual role-playing.

I still can’t shake off my initial feeling. We often see implied, or obvious, violence toward or sexual harassment of women as marketing or entertainment (see the trailer for the movie Bounty Hunter, vintage Betty Crocker ad, PSA for labeling cleaning products, violence against women in prime time, ad for CSI, t-shirt to show team spirit, ad for shoelaces, Lanvin ads, trailer for Dead Girl, Barney’s window display showing splattered blood and mannequins under attack, is stalking romantic?, trailer for Observe and Report, Rene Russo photo shoot, ha ha! She wasn’t being beaten!, “going in for the kill has never been so satisfying”, oops, I strangled a woman, and…oh, there are many more, but I don’t have time to link to them all). It seems naive to think that people can see mannequins posed like this and completely disconnect them from other portrayals of women bound, gagged, dead, sexually assaulted, etc., that are meant to be funny or sexy.

But it also seems problematic to dismiss the idea that in at some situations, such as this one, the situation could be consensual S&M. Allusions to at least light bondage has become more common in pop culture, particularly handcuffs as a sexy prop (sometimes used for laughs if one partner ends up handcuffing the other to something and then robbing them, stealing their clothes, etc.). Yet those who participate in S&M are also often stigmatized as sexual deviants.

But then, how do we think about S&M/bondage given that the sexual norms common in the U.S. include the idea of female sexual passivity and submission? Is this mannequin problematic in any way even if the store meant to invoke the idea of sexual role-playing?

I am confounded by this. The mannequin creeps me out. I don’t like it. But I’m sure many people can make eloquent arguments against my reaction, or how we approach the various issues involved. So what to make of this mannequin, readers? Help me out.

NEW! (Mar. ’10): SOM sent in this photo of the display in the window of the shoe store Sole Experience in Edmonton, Alberta, that shows a woman in high heels with her feet bound. This image, to me, seems to more clearly imply violence than the one above, possibly because of the use of rope rather than handcuffs, which are associated with sex role-playing:

Gwen M. sent in a story about a performance by Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin at the Russian National Figure Skating Championships:

The pair won first place and plan to use the routine at the Vancouver Olympics next month. They explained that the routine (video below) was inspired by clips of Australian Aboriginal dance on the internet. About the idea, Domnina wrote: “I thought it was just crazy, but once we have tried it, we immediately fell in love with it.”

Bev Manton, the chair of the New South Wales Land Council thinks it’s less “crazy” and more offensive. She says:

I am offended by the performance and so our other councillors… Aboriginal people for very good reason are sensitive about their cultural objects and icons being co-opted by non-Aboriginal people – whether they are from Australia or Russia.

It’s important for people to tread carefully and respectfully when they are depicting somebody else’s culture and I don’t think this performance does.

The routine:

Sources (text; image).  Via Racilicious.

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 week the Supreme Court overturned a ban that “prevented corporations [and unions] from using their profits to buy political campaign ads” (source).  The ruling enhances the ability of these organizations to throw money behind candidates, potentially increasing their ability to influence political decision-making by shaping who ends up in, and out of, office.  The majority argued that the decision honored the First Amendment right to free speech.  And, since corporations, according to U.S. law, are persons, they have the same right to free speech as any of us.

They also, of course, happen to have a lot more money.

So much money, Senator Charles Schumer (D – New York) said, that “…the winners of next November’s election. It won’t be the Republican or the Democrats and it won’t be the American people; it will be corporate America” (source).

Matthew Yglesias puts this in perspective (source):

Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million). And if you can have it be the case that just one Senator goes down to defeat for having pissed off BofA then everyone else will learn the lesson and avoid pissing them off in the future. You don’t need to actually sustain that volume of campaign spending.

Others argue that the ruling doesn’t so much change the political landscape as make it more honest, since corporations have always found ways around the rules anyway (source):

“Whether there’s a vast increase in the amount of resources spent, it’s hard to say,” said Joseph Sandler, a former lawyer for the Democratic National Committee. “There’s already so much they can do.”

…

Republican consultants, in particular, argued that the decision would simply shift spending by political action committees and issue-based “front groups” to the corporations themselves.

“I don’t believe that the ruling will fundamentally change the outcome of the elections given the obscene amounts of money that was spent independently in the last two years by everyone,” said Jim Innocenzi, a GOP strategist in Alexandria, Va. “You could argue that since everyone has figured out a way to get around the rules, we’d be better off with full disclosures of who is really paying for this stuff and let everyone just promote whatever cause they want.”

The decision left unaddressed the question of whether this meant that multinational corporations, with non-U.S. roots and branches, were allowed to throw money to candidates (source).  Right now, the answer appears to be “yes.”  This, then, allows for an unprecedented “foreign” influence on U.S. elections.

So, with all  that said:  How do unions and corporations spend their money in elections?  What can we expect?

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to the Center for Responsive Politics listing the 100 corporations with the largest contributions to political campaigns between 1989 and 2009, as well as the direction of their donations (to the left or right).  Donations include:

Direct “soft money” contributions from the organization’s treasury. Under federal law, contributions from the treasuries of corporations, unions or other organizations may only be given to the parties’ “non-federal” (soft money) committees.

Contributions from the organization’s political action committee, or PAC. The money for these comes from individuals who work for or are connected with the organization, and it’s given on behalf of the organization.

Contributions by individuals connected with the organization. This includes employees, officers, and members of their immediate families.

Here are the results:

At last as far as these top 100 are concerned, it doesn’t appear that there is an overwhelming preference for Republicans, as one might expect.  Then again, a lot of these are unions.

But what does it mean when corporations and unions are sitting “on the fence”?  Basically it means that they’re covering their bases.  They win influence whether Republicans or Democrats end up in office.  Interestingly, 46 of the 100 are on the fence.  This doesn’t mean that things are somehow more fair or balanced, it means that, no matter who wins, corporations and unions win.

For another look at this type of information, see our post on partisan political contributions by U.S. companies.

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.

We at Sociological Images are having fun with forms lately (see here and here). This time the fun is thanks to Bri A. who sent us some screen shots from the website Trillian.

Against heteronormativity, you can choose your sexual orientation.  If you choose female and gay, you are represented by two side-by-side female symbols (on the right):

However, if you choose straight, you aren’t represented by a male and female symbol, you’re just represented by a female symbol:

This reveals that straight is the default (without  a male by her side, everyone assumes she’s straight), and gay is the different, odd, marked category.

Bri then added “in a relationship” and noticed that, despite choosing gay and female, the “in a relationship” icon featured a man and a woman:

Oops.  Heteronormatity is back!

And, if she clicked “single,” the icon simply represented her as a man:

Presumably all people are represented by a male figure.  And we can’t even pretend that it’s neutral and supposed to represent “person,” because the “in a relationship icon” clearly includes a male and a female figure.

What’s funny is that these seem like really easy problems to fix, but either no has noticed or no one cares.

For  more posts on default and marked figures, see our posts on traffic lights with female figures, stick figures and stick figures who parent, and default avatars.

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.