While some companies are capitalizing on Obama’s election, others are using the end of Bush’s presidency in advertising. Check out the ad at the bottom of this page:
(Veet is for hair removal.)
Found here.
This graph, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics and current as of February 6th, compares the number of jobs lost during the 1990 (blue), 2001 (red), and current (green) recessions:
Found at The Daily Kos thanks to Jerry A.
I spent the last few days in Savannah, Georgia at the winter meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society. I’m from Maine and didn’t travel much in the U.S. as a child. It wasn’t until I was 27 that I ventured south of Washington, D.C. The history of slavery is something that I’ve always wanted to learn more about.
After spending a day at the Civil Rights Museum and touring the historic First African Baptist Church, I was stunned to find these items for sale in nearly every tourist souvenir shop.
These make me uncomfortable. They’re caricatures of Black women without any kind of historical context. Like Gwen in this post, I have less of a hard time with old, historic artifacts (like the antiques pictured below that I found at a flea market). But, I do think they belong in a museum alongside other historic artifacts and information.
But, newly made, currently produced reproductions of Black women slaves, as salt shakers and magnets? How is that alright? To me this is almost as creepy as if they were selling Klu Klux Klan robe magnets. Is it that as a Northerner I’m more uncomfortable around issues of slavery, than, say, a Southerner would be? I feel a similiar way when I see confederate flags outside of their historical context– and there were plenty those for sale in tourist stores as well. I’d love to hear thoughts on this use of racist “history” for marketing and tourism in a city like Savannah that is filled with history of slave trade and segregation.
Stephen W. sent in a link to a music video promoting the National Guard. He saw the video before a screening of Taken in Sioux Falls, SD. At the moment, the National Guard website (warning: noisy) features Kid Rock and Dale Earnhardt Jr. The opening graphics, set to a snippet of Rock’s Warrior, feature a military helicopter followed by a race car and then a picture of an anonymous African-American National Guard member with the rock star and car star:
A few clicks into the website leads you to this music video:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeVt4j_T7-8[/youtube]
In the photographs made available, pictures of Kid Rock’s life as a rock star are mixed with pictures of people in the National Guard, and the lines between the two blur:
Some observations on the marketing of military service:
First, the glorification of military service is an American phenomenon. (See this post which features an American and a Swedish military recruitment commercial back-to-back. The difference is quite amazing.) In this video, the glorification is particularly acute when the light-skinned driver of the Hummer manages to avoid hitting the blue-eyed, olive-skinned, dark-haired boy and then comes out with his giant gun to kick the ball back to him, inspiring a look of awe from the child who’s country he is likely (given the politics in the last 8 years) invading. We’re left, assured, that the U.S. military are all around good folk.
Second, in this case we have military service being marketed with celebrity tie-ins. The website deliberately blurs the line between being a famous rock star, a celebrated race car driver, and a member of the National Guard. Similarly, this Air Force recruitment ad blurs the line between various extreme sports and military service:
These links between military service, skateboarding, and being a rock star are disingenuous, to say the least. And it reminds me of a series of recruitment ads I’ve been seeing lately that highlight the super cool jobs you could end up doing in the Air Force (like being a fighter pilot). I don’t know about you, but both of my family members who joined the military (in their cases, the Army) ended up being bus drivers.
Third, which celebrities are being used to market the National Guard tells us something about who they are trying to recruit. Clearly, they are reaching out to young, working class, perhaps rural, white men. This is not part of the National Guard marketing aimed specifically at this group, the entire National Guard website (warning: noisy), at this time, is entirely devoted to this theme. It speaks to who fights American wars? Studies have shown that, while once military service was required of elites, this changed during Vietnam. Today military service is overwhelmingly performed by working- and middle-class men.
Finally, the re-framing of the role from “soldier” to “warrior,” one who wages war, is very interesting. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.
More fodder for discussion, if you need it:
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.
Behold, “The Ugly Truth” about women and men:
Amanda at Pandagon offers a nice analysis:
It’s the classic modern attempt to mollify women about vicious gender stereotyping by phony flattery through insulting men—men are such dogs, amiriteladeez?! But the “men are dogs” stereotype is ultimately about putting women in their place, because it packages these assumptions:
* Women are naive, emotional, and kind of stupid, which is why men can exploit these “feelings” women have to steal sex from us.
* Women are obsessed with irrational things like weddings and getting flowers, and they lose their minds over this. (Men are compelled by their supposed out of this world horniness, but rarely are they depicted as losing control of themselves to the point where they lose their dignity.) This is why men have the upper hand, because women are too crazy to hang onto it. It’s certainly not that this is a male-dominated society, no siree, and to make that abundantly clear, female rom com characters now usually have a lot of professional power.
* Women don’t really like sex that much; they just tolerate it to lure unwilling men into pretending to care about us.
* Men are cold, unfeeling creatures that just want sex and nothing more. Women cannot change this, so we have to accept it. For some reason, just abandoning men altogether if they suck this much doesn’t occur to anyone.
* But for some reason, if you buy into this bleak worldview where men and women are completely different, and at war with each other, you’ll be rewarded with True Love.
Via Jezebel.
The ad depicts a horde of completely insane women, screaming with excitement… if, as the ad claims, these packs are “goodies for grown-ups,” then why are women the only ones going crazy over the cookies in this ad? The men in this ad react to the woman with a mix of “WTF” and “oh my god, you’re crazy” which only serves to make the women look even more pathetic and ridiculous.
This commercial tells a similar story: women totally lose it in the face of low calorie sweets.
NEW (Nov. ’09)! And, of course, there is holiday shopping (found at Ad Freak):
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wer7b29mreA[/youtube]
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 graphic shows the age at which successive cohorts of French women are marrying. Along the bottom of the graphic, the thick grey line represents women who were age 15 in 1987 (the oldest at the end of data collection is a little less than 30, which is why the line stops). Each line above that represents an earlier cohort of women. The data shows that, while the earliest cohorts largely married in their early 20s, with just a few stragglers. The younger cohorts increasingly spread out the typical age of marriage. It takes nearly 15 years for the most recent cohort to have married off the same proportion of women that were married in the older cohort in the five years between 15 and 20.
This image was borrowed from a new Contexts blog called Graphic Sociology. Check it out.
In case you missed it, a few years back there was a major brouhaha (limited mostly to the U.S.) because some astronomers began to argue that Pluto should be reclassified as a dwarf planet, part of the Kuiper belt. This started when, in 2001, the American Museum of Natural History (in New York) created a display about the solar system that did not include Pluto. At first the museum received letters (often from children) pointed out that Pluto was missing, such as this one (from an NPR story on the subject):
But then word got out that the museum left Pluto out of the display on purpose, and that the director of the museum argued that Pluto is not a planet. Then a real letter-writing campaign began, from both kids and adults (found here):
Text [some errors corrected for ease of reading]:
Dear Scientist,
What do you call Pluto if it’s not a planet anymore? If you make it a planet again all the science books will be right. Do people live on Pluto? If there are people who live there they won’t exist. Why can’t Pluto be a planet? If it’s small doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have to be a planet anymore. Some people like Pluto. If it doesn’t exist then they don’t have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive.
A Save Pluto movement had begun, including pro-Pluto websites, t-shirts, bumperstickers, and so on (at CafePress):
Some of these were clearly meant in a joking manner, but many of the letters sent to the museum or published in newspapers expressed realy anger over the change. Headlines announced that Pluto was being “demoted” from planet status. Amid lots of angry debate even among themselves, astronomers eventually voted to recategorized Pluto as a dwarf planet.
You might use these to talk about public controversies about scientific research. This is a particularly odd example because the public concern didn’t spring from arguments that the research was immoral or dangerous (claims used to oppose, say, embryonic stem cell research or cloning). The outrage about Pluto’s change in status mostly occurred in the U.S. and was based on the fact that people just seem to really like Pluto and consider it their “favorite” planet. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the museum, suggests that this might be because of Disney’s cartoon dog Pluto. Regardless, a significant number of people wrote angry and even threatening letters to various outlets about a scientific reclassification that didn’t affect them in any real way; they just didn’t like it.
It’s also interested that Pluto’s reclassification was interpreted as a “demotion,” as though being a dwarf planet is clearly inferior to being a “real” planet, as though the objects in the solar system are arranged in a hierarchy based on size, and being anything other than a planet is a sad, sad fate. DeGrasse Tyson stresses that to astronomers, a dwarf planet isn’t “inferior to” a “regular” one–it’s just another category of things that exist in the galaxy. It’s an interesting example of how scientists’ perceptions of what their research means and the public’s interpretations may differ wildly.
NOTE: Mordecai comments,
First I want to say: All scientific classification is arbitrary. There is no such thing as a planet, or a mammal. These are terms humans put on them to try to make sense of the universe, not some built in truth.
Absolutely. I didn’t mean to imply the scientists were applying some ultimate truth about the universe when they re-classified Pluto. What I find interesting is what the controversy was based on: not “we think the data is wrong,” or “this is immoral or harmful,” but “Leave Pluto alone! It’s our favorite!” And the fact that it was really only a scandal in the U.S. is striking as well–whether it’s the character of Pluto or not, for some reason Americans are pretty much uniquely concerned about Pluto’s status.