Etan B. sent in this ad (found Etan’s blog) that the CDU, a conservative German political party, is using to compare its candidate, Vera Lengsefeld, to Angela Merkel. The ad shows a photo of Merkel on the left and Lengsfeld on the right. Both women are in dresses that reveal cleavage (the photo of Merkel generated a lot of discussion when it first appeared about whether she was dressed too sexily):

The text on the left, across the image of Merkel, says “We have more to offer,” the implication being, of course, that the conservative party has more to rely on than cleavage. Lengsfeld explained the ad this way:

If only a tenth of them also look at the content of my policies, I will have reached many more people than I could have done with classic street canvassing.

UPDATE: Now I’m confused. Elena says,

Merkel is the chairwoman of the CDU. Both women belong to the same party, and according to the ad both have “[more] to offer”.

I apologize for the confusion about Merkel’s party–I read in two different places the account I gave above. So I guess the CDU is basically saying you should vote for it because it has candidates that are sexy? I kinda think that’s actually worse than what I originally thought it was. Elena, thanks so much for the clarification!

You can also read an article about the controversial ad at NPR.

As Etan points out, it’s reminiscent of the scrutiny Hillary Clinton received after she wore this outfit on the Senate floor:

As far as men go, in 2000 Rolling Stone was accused of airbrushing this cover photo of Al Gore to make his crotch bulge bigger (via):

So there are lots of examples of efforts to delegitimize political candidates by focusing on their looks or sexuality, but the Lengsfeld one is the most blatant I’ve seen recently.

Teresa C. sent in this image created using UNICEF data to show what percent of women surveyed in various countries said it was acceptable for their husbands to hit them:

(Found at BuzzFeed.)

You can find the data and a breakdown of UNICEF data collection methods here. The data for many more countries are available there too. I can’t quite figure out why these particular countries were used in the image; they aren’t all of the countries with the highest percentages. As far as I can tell, the UNICEF data table only includes numbers for the “developing” nations and some countries from eastern Europe, which is UNICEF’s focus. But I do wonder what the numbers would be if you asked women in the U.S. a question along the lines of “is it ever acceptable for a man to hit a woman?” or “can you think of any situation where it might be understandable that a man would hit his wife or girlfriend?” You might get higher “support” for violence against women than you’d think. The UNICEF page doesn’t provide the wording of this question, which would be interesting to know.

That’s not to downplay the issue of women justifying or accepting violence against women, just that those of us in the “developed” nations need to be sure not to pat ourselves on the back too much about how enlightened we are about domestic violence.

And I can’t help but dislike the image, in that at first glance it would appear to be a pie chart in which all of the sections add up to 100%; really a bar graph would be a better way to illustrate this. But then, I had a dissertation advisor with a 5-page single-spaced document outlining his standards for data presentation.

UPDATE: Reader P. makes the point I was getting at above (that the wording might greatly impact how much “support” you find for violence against women) much better than I did:

What they were actually asked, in the MICS and the DHS (the two primary sources for the data), was this question:

“Sometimes a husband is annoyed or angered by things that his wife does.  In your opinion, is a husband justified in hitting or beating his wife in the following situations:

– If she goes out with out telling him?
– If she neglects the children?
– If she argues with him?
– If she refuses sex with him?
– If she burns the food?”

I bet you get very different rates for different “justifications,” which is important both for data-gathering/presentation and for anti-domestic violence campaigns. And, again, I bet if you broke down various “reasons” for hitting a woman, I bet you’d get higher-than-expected acceptance of them in countries in the “developed” countries that weren’t presented in the table.

The vintage ads from The Art of Manliness, submitted by Dmitrity T.M., reveal that we have been trying to use technology to change our appearance for quite some time.  Cosmetic surgeries are a brave new world of personal body modification, but they do not represent a break from the past, so much as a historical trajectory.

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

Giorgos S. sent us a link to a story in the Guardian about the cover of DVDs of the movie “Lesbian Vampire Killers.” Some stores are carrying censored versions. Giorgos says he’s seen the censored version at Borders stores in the U.K.:

So apparently the phrase “they won’t go down without a bite” is fine, and major cleavage requires just a tad bit of coverage with a sticker that says “Warning: Contains explicitly fit bloodsucking hotties!” The sticker that nearly entirely obscures the word “lesbian” says, “Warning: may display sexually suggestive cover image.”

The distributors blame stores, saying a number of large retailers requested that they obscure particular parts of the cover. The stores say they didn’t request that the word “lesbian” be hidden. I suppose we’ll never know what happened there. It does crack me up that you’d be willing to sell a movie called “Lesbian Vampire Killers,” but then be worried about the cover.

The issue of censorship leaves aside, of course, the content of the film itself. This may surprise you, but it was apparently widely negatively reviewed. IMDb summarizes the plot thusly:

Their women having been enslaved by the local pack of lesbian vampires thanks to an ancient curse, the remaining menfolk of a rural town send two hapless young lads out onto the moors as a sacrifice.

Here’s the original marketing poster:

I like how her nipples have been photoshopped out (unless lesbian vampires have nipples on the sides of their boobs).

If anyone’s seen it, I’d be interested to know if it portrays lesbians as ridiculously as I suspect it does.

See also: airbrushing out men’s nipples.

Kitty sent us this cover for Wad, an “urban fashion and culture magazine.”

It kind of sums things up, doesn’t it?

1. Women are objects.
2. Women are for consumption.
3. Women are violable.
4. Women are interchangable.
5. Women are rewards.
6. Violence against women is cute and funny.

Anything else?

UPDATE!  In our comments, KJK notes that there appears to have been a male version of the cover too.  There is no #10 and no text beneath the magazine title… so I’m a little confused as to whether it was a cover.  The production quality seems the same, though.  For what it’s worth, here it is:

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

Chrissy Y., Stacey S., and a former student of mine, Kenjus Watson, have all suggested that we post about the controversy over Olympic athlete Caster Semenya’s sex.

A lot of people are talking about whether or not it’s appropriate to be asking about her sex and why we would be so obsessed with knowing the answer. Those are fine questions (and I address them secondarily).  But first I would like to suggest that, even if we were to decide that it is appropriate to want to determine her sex (that we are obsessed with it for a good reason), it would be impossible to actually determine her sex definitively. Let me explain:

If you were to try to decide what qualifies a person as male or female, what quality would you choose?

I can think of eight candidates:

1. Identity (whatever the person says they are, they are)
2. Sexual orientation (boys dig girls, vice versa)
3. Secondary sex characteristics (e.g., boobs/no boobs, pubic hair patterns, distribution of fat on the body)
4. External genitalia (e.g., clitoris, labia, vaginal opening/penis and scrotum)
5. Internal genitalia (e.g., vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes/epididymis, vas deferens, seminal vesicles, prostate, etc)
6. Hormones (preponderance of estrogens/androgens)
7. Gonads (ovaries/testes)
8. Chromosomes (XX/XY, the SRY gene)

Most of us assume that these criteria all line up. That is, that people with XY chromosomes have testes that make androgens which creates a penis, epididymis, vas deferens etc… all the way up to a male-identified person who wants to have sex with women.  We also assume that these things are binary (e.g., boobs/no boobs), when in reality most of them are on a spectrum (e.g., hormones, also boobs, likely sexual orientation).

But these criteria don’t always line up and sex-linked charactertics aren’t binary.  Examples of “syndromes” that disrupt these trajectories abound (e.g., Klinefelter’s syndrome).  And all kinds of practices, including surgeries, are sometimes used to force a binary when there isn’t one (e.g., intersex surgery to fix the “micropenis” and “obtrustive” clitoris and breast reduction surgery for men).

If these criteria don’t always line up, then we have to pick one as THE determinant of sex.  But any choice would ultimately be arbitrary.  The truth is that none of these criteria could ever actually definitively qualify a person as male or female.

The alternative would be to require that a person qualify as male or female according to ALL of the criteria.  And you might be surprised, then, how many people are neither male or female.

I think the debate over whether we should test Semenya’s sex is getting ahead of itself, given that there is no such test.

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Yet, while we won’t be learning anything definitive about Semenya’s sex, the controversy does teach us something about our obsession with sex difference.  On MSNBC, Dave Zirin explains what the controversy over is really about:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK-w6lDOZ5Q[/youtube]

To me, one of the most interesting things that Zirin says is that sex isn’t actually a good indicator of athletic ability.  He may be a guy, he says, but having a penis doesn’t translate into outrunning anyone.

He is implying that sex segregation in athletics, as a rule, is more about an obsession with sex categories and their affirmation than it is about sports. Remember, Semenya’s sex is being questioned not just because she appears masculine to some (she always has), but because she kicked major ass on the track.

Kenjus, my former student, writes:

…why didn’t they test Usain Bolt?  He did amazingly well… Yet, his otherworldly accomplishments are considered the result of his never-before-seen body structure… Usain, however, is a big, strong, fast Black man. The fact that his times are just as mind-boggling as Caster’s gets lost in the widely accepted narrative that big, strong, fast Black men accomplish amazing athletic feats. It’s what they’re built for.

But this woman has apparently baffled the athletic and scientific experts because her body is not doing what a woman’s body is supposed to do. More specifically, her shape is too muscular, her voice is too deep, and her time is too fast. Essentially, “Semenya-the-woman” CANNOT exist in an exclusively two-gendered (i.e. men and women) society in which men are innately bigger, stronger, more deeply-voiced, and particularly FASTER than women…

Semenya is getting far more media attention than the recent cheating scandals of higher profile athletes. This is precisely because there’s something that separates Caster from an A-Rod, a Marion, a Sosa… The world is captivated by Caster because something that should be certain; unquestionable; medical; pre-ordained, is in flux.  It is regrettable that some athletes take illegal drugs to gain an edge over the competition. It’s entirely unethical, unnatural, and ungodly for an athlete to not fit into our narrow specifications of what constitutes gender or sex.

Indeed.  Our obsession with Semenya’s sex, in addition to being hurtful and invasive, says a great deal more about us, than it does about her.  And perhaps the reason we are so obsessed with proving Semenya’s sex, to bring this post back to its beginnings, is because binary sex doesn’t actually exist.  Me thinks we protest too much.

(Thanks to Mimi Schippers, via the Sociologists for Women in Society listserve, for alerting me to the video. Images found here and here.)

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

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.

Sociologists who study social movements note that the tactics available to activists are shaped by the activism that has proceeded them. We call this a “repertoire of contention,” or a set of tools available to any activist that most people in a society would recognize as “protest.” In most industrialized countries today, this repertoire includes things such as sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, and marches.

Repertoires of contention are shared and they pass from one social movement to another.   The sit-in, for example, was invented by civil rights U.S. labor activists, but all types of activists use sit-ins today (perhaps most memorably by the civil rights movement). Sidney Tarrow calls this kind of tactic “modular.” It can be borrowed from one kind of activism and applied to many different causes.  Similarly, protest tactics can in one country can be borrowed and applied in another, so long as the conditions for activism are similar.

I was reminded of this theory of modular protest tactics when fds and Mordicai K. sent us this link to photographs from a protest by the Alliance for Animal Rights in Russia. Like the protests PETA in the U.S. and Animals Awake in the Netherlands, this Russian protest personifies animals as (mostly) women and then displays them brutally murdered.  I think the trio (Russia, the Netherlands, and the U.S.), together, is an interesting example of the way that a social movement tactic can travel transnationally.

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.

Larry Harnisch of the L.A. Times blog The Daily Mirror sent in some old images from the Times archives that show how photos of stars were touched up to show less skin. Here’s one of Frances Farmer (from Larry’s post about her):

The image comes from the 1940 movie “Flowing Gold.” Apparently it was considered too revealing and the Times had someone draw in a dress above her wrap…with what appears to be a black magic marker.

Charlton Heston was also retroactively covered up. Both of the following images come from The Daily Mirror. This is a still from a 1957 episode of “Shlitz Playhouse.” Someone very obviously, and badly, drew a shirt on him:

Though the photo was touched up by the L.A. Times staff, it’s not clear whether it actually appeared in the paper. This photo most definitely did, however; it accompanied a review of “The Omega Man” from August 27, 1971. They did an even better job with the shirt this time:

It provides some perspective on how ideas of how much uncovered skin is appropriate to run in a mainstream media outlet have changed over the years. It’s also interesting that both men’s and women’s chests were covered. But mostly they just crack me up. The last one is my favorite.

Also check out the post about Sacha Baron Cohen naked on the cover of GQ and spoofing magazine covers that have naked people on them.