Students at my college, Occidental, are required to live on campus through their junior year.  So most students live in the dorms.  I saw this flyer, advertising what I am sure is intended to be a harmless and fun competition, taped to the door of my building:

Of course, having the “best room on campus” is only partly about creativity.  A person with money would have a significant advantage in this competition, as you can clearly see in the flyer itself (extra pillows, a rug, two extra lamps, extra furniture, etc).

I am sure that the people behind this had no intention of reinforcing a class hierarchy on campus.  But I’d bet my extra money that they were middle class or better.  Part of class privilege is the ability to forget that some people do not have the resources to put together a bangin’ room.   And part of being an economically disadvantaged student at a private college sometimes means being alienated from many of your peers for just that reason.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Los Angeles is widely reviled as the city in which no one walks. But Los Angeles is not the most car dependent city according to this data:

Via Matthew Yglesias.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Eloriane sent in a photo shoot for V Magazine (September 2009) that is both fascinating and confounding.  I noticed two things:

First, while the women are more or less fully-clothed, the men are naked.  Really naked.  Well, about as naked as they could be.  But the effect is really eerie, with one model looking like some combination of distressed, surprised, and high in most of her shots.  It’s nothing like our previous post featuring a photo shoot with clothed women and naked men, where the women appear gleeful about the situation.  To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of it, but my instinct is that, for some reason, this is not reversing the gendered power dynamic we typically see.

Coincidentally, Elle P. sent in a Dolce & Gabbana ad to similar effect.  You can see it below as well.

Second, the photo spread is titled “Wild Things” and subtitled “Adopt a Neo-Hippie, Anything Goes Approach to Dressing with Furs, Fringe, and Everything Animal Print.”  Then the photo titles refer to American Indians (“Warrior Princess,” “Navajo Sun,” and maybe “Indigo Girl”), Asians (“Eastern Promises”), Gypsies (“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”), and Africans (“Tribal Council”) alongside animals (“Animal Instincts,” and “Wild Things,” of course), and Bohemians (“Boho in Paradise”; more akin to “neo-hippies”?).  So, again, we have the association of people of color with animals and human primitivity (here, here, and here)… even as no actual people of color show up in the photo shoot.

Images after the jump because WAY not safe for work:

more...

I hate you, Zach A., for making me play the Klondike Bar Mancave video game.

Are you bored of companies targeting their products at men with tired and insulting stereotypes? Well, too bad. Because ya’ll keep sendin’ them to us and it’s our job to show them to you.

In this installment of “men-are-idiots,-let’s-try-to-sell-them-shit-p.s.-women-are-annoying”: the Klondike Bar.

First, the Klondike Bar “Mancave” home page:

Notice the Mardi Gras beads?  Nice touch.

Also, is that splooge in the corners?

If you click on the video game, you get to the entry page.  It is for “Big Boys” only:

Poor Pete.  He lives in the (domesticated and feminized) suburbs and wears khakis.  Accordingly, he has become a woman:

Gah.  Being a family is so crappy.  It involves hiding in the basement while your wife takes care of “her” kids, until she cock blocks your cock rocking of course:

Not being able to watch violence and sex makes Pete’s testicles shrivel up:

And when he pops in his secret porn DVD (featuring college age women, of course), your wife just nags and nags:

YOU LOSE:

So, tell me why this guy is so appealing to so many men?  The man is selfish: his wife and the babysitter are desperately trying to get the kids to bed and he retreats from the chaos; it’s annoying that the TV is set up so as to make sure his kids don’t watch violence and sex; he hides a stash of porn featuring college age women from his wife.  But at least doesn’t have to do housework!  Amirite!?  Oh yeah, and women are annoying!  Go dudes!

It’s pathetic, really.  Sociologically, I mean.

Finally, in case you thought Klondike was equal opportunity, here is the screen shot of the generic (non-Mancave) website.  It leads you straight there:

“Dude,” now it’s “thicker.”

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Before Sociological Images was widely read (when it was just us and our friends), we used to occasionally title posts “Sigh.”  But these days, what with people following us on twitter, we must offer more imaginative titles.  But really, my instinct was to title this with good ol’ resignation:

Via Racialicious.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Nora R. sent us a link to an article at Band of Thebes about how promotional materials for the movie “A Single Man,” staring Colin Firth, have been altered to imply that the central relationship in the movie is heterosexual, and to eliminate references to the fact that Colin Firth’s character also has male lovers. A poster for the movie:

The first trailer:

The second trailer, which emphasizes heterosexual desire:

From the post at Band of Thebes (quote is originally from another article, but you have to sit through a 30-second ad to get to it; there’s a link at the Band of Thebes post if you want to see it):

Peter Knegt reports:

“The new trailer essentially is altered to suggest the core of the film is the relationship between Colin Firth and Julianne Moore’s characters, even removing from the end of the trailer the names of both Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult (who play Firth’s love interests). Moreover, in the first trailer, we see Firth’s character kiss both Goode and Moore, in the second we just get Moore. There’s also a sequence of shots in the first trailer which crosscuts Firth, who plays a professor in the film, staring into the eyes of both a female student and a male student. In the second, as you might guess, we only get the female (in a telling twist, instead of cutting to the male eyes, the trailer cuts to a quote from Entertainment Weekly saying ‘[Firth’s] performance is bound to win attention in this year’s Oscar race’).”

Of course, studios often manipulate what a movie appears to be about to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. If you saw some of the previews for “Twilight” that were shown before movies that targeted men, you’d think the movie was a lot more violent and action-heavy than it actually was (I presume to the dismay of some of the viewers who went to see it thinking they were seeing a vampire action movie).

But it’s interesting that a movie in which the main male character’s relationships with other men is a central element is advertised with that main plot point obscured.

I was at the Pittsburgh airport last week and I saw this concourse map and I thought to myself, “Wow, they used pink and they’re not trying to signify WOMAN!  That’s something else!”

Then I looked closer and noticed that this concourse map was specifically for the shopping in the concourse.  Notice it’s a map of the “AirMall”:

Sigh.

Rebecca H. sent us a link to the Clorox website and I thought “Holy Moly! There is actually a MAN on a cleaning product website!” (in the lower right):

Then I looked closer and realized that the man in question is a gay man famous for being on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

Sigh.

Two opportunities for suffocating stereotypes to be undermined; two opportunities lost.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I saw this ad for permanent makeup last week in a Las Vegas regional magazine:

What struck me is the way that permanent makeup–that is, tattooing your face so you appear to have makeup on all the time–is being marketed as “natural.”

The phrase “permanent makeup” serves a lot like “cosmetic surgery” does–to obscure what’s really going on. “Cosmetic” surgery sounds harmless, superficial, not like “real” surgery. “Permanent makeup” probably sounds less frightening and invasive to many people than “face tattooing” or “makeup tattoos.” Permanent makeup procedures are now widely available, and in a lot of states there’s not much training required to start doing them (I knew one cosmetologist who had no tattooing experience but took a weekend-long seminar and then was certified to do permanent makeup; I presume in some areas it requires more than that to be certified.). Anyway, I’m just generally fascinated by the way we use language to try to make the often extreme things we do to our bodies seem non-invasive, simple, and harmless.

For another interesting example of how language is used to marketing cosmetic procedures, see our post on Botox as “freedom of expression.”