Marc sent in a link to some sexist vintage ads found at Blog of Hilarity [note: I had an actual link to Blog of Hilarity, but commenter LillyB pointed out that when she clicked on it, she got warnings from her AntiVirus about the site; I just had the same thing happen, so I decided for safety’s sake to remove the link]. Some of them I’ll be adding to other posts, but I thought these deserved their own post.

This one, for Love’s Baby Soft, is so creepy I can hardly stand to look at it:

The shape of the bottles, the sexualization of young girls…ick. A teddy bear? Really? The text below the bottles:

Love’s Baby Soft is that irresistible, clean-baby smell, grown-up enough to be sexy. It’s soft-smelling. Pure and innocent. It may well be the sexist fragrance around.

Notice it’s not grown up…it’s grown up enough. Jean Kilbourne uses this, or a similar Love’s Baby Soft, ad in her documentary Killing Us Softly 3 when she discusses how young girls are sexualized and adult women are encouraged to infantilize themselves.

Here’s an ad for Kellogg’s PEP vitamins:

I know I always look super cute when I’m scrubbing the kitchen.

Finally, this Trix ad seems sort of creepy to me, and I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the way the girl is staring at the camera, or that her pupils seem fixed and dilated:

The text isn’t exceptionally interesting, but it does use the word “gay” in the original sense of “happy,” something a company would certainly not do today.

Thanks, Marc!

Xavier M. sent us a link to this print ad, which he saw in a Belgian men’s magazine, that uses sex to encourage organ donation (found here).

Text: “Becoming a donor is probably your only chance to get inside her.”

There are some interesting implications here about why we engage in altruism and who is deserving of that altruism.

See also similar posts on PETA (see here and here) and human rights violations in Burma.

At AdFreak, I discovered that Sea Monkeys are being used to sell sex. Sure enough:

NEW (Mar. ’10)! Christina W. sent in this ad campaign for French cheeses using a pin-up calendar:

The video is a backstage look at a sexy calendar photo shoot for…cheese:

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/113146614[/vimeo]

NEW (Jun. ’10)! Stephanie DeH. sent in this lovely CPR instructional video (which also got its own post):

ALSO NEW (Jun. ’10)! Lindsey Dale, at Nobody, collected the following ads selling, with sex, archery, a laser detector, tea, and coffee:

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.

Gillian sent us a series of overtly sexist Polish commercials for MOBILKING.  Gillian says:

MOBILKING is a newest Polish cell phone operator. It is advertised as a telephon [company] for “real men only”, implying that it’s not for “girly chit-chats”, but rather for “serious bussines talks” (meaning talking about breasts, cars and beer).

Gillian tells us that, after complaints, the commercials were pulled, but after the negative publicity they went viral and gave the cell company more publicity than ever. 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2LBaJB5RT4[/youtube]

Two more of the commercials show a hyper-sexualized woman putting on football gear and a mechanics uniform and asking “But can she play like a man?” and “But can she fix anything like a man?” respectively.  The answer is, of course, “no.”

This graph shows the total number of people allowed into the U.S. under refugee status since 1983, by region of the world:

Here is the key to the numbers on the graph (found here):

*Refers to fiscal years with the exception of 2004, for which data ends in June.
1. Large Cuban and Indochinese waves of refugees, prior to 1983
2a. Cold War period, Glastnost/Perestroika, 1985-1991
2b. Soviet Union dismantled, December 1991
3a. Balkans period: Break-up of Yugoslavia, 1992
3b. Balkans period: Expulsions of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, 1998
4. Civil conflict period: Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Ethiopia, late 1990s-present
5. Terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001
Authors’ tabulation of ORR data.

This Australian commercial for Toyota Corolla (found here) includes a homogenous, racialized out-group.  More after the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckb-wUHj9WU[/youtube]

The term “out-group homogeneity” refers to the way in which members of an in-group tend to overestimate the extent to which members of an out-group are all alike.  I suppose we don’t know what good kitty’s friends look like (do they all look exactly like him?), but we certainly have the presentation of an out-group that is both categorically different from good kitty and homogeneously so.

I would also like to suggest that that out-group is racialized.  They didn’t use just any kind of cat to represent bad kitties, but a dark-colored cat.   (If I know my cats, the bad “guys” in this video are Russian Blues.)

Update: The confusion in the comments brought to my attention that I embedded the wrong commercial.  See!  I’m not crazy!  Just incompetent.

Enjoy the corrected post:

At least that’s the message I’m taking from this Utah Tourism advertisement featuring anthropomorphized snowflakes (found here):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78RZ-UgIMrM[/youtube]

Blanca M. sent in this clip by Penn and Teller, in which a woman gets people at a World Fest rally (which appears to be an environmental event of some sort) to sign a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide…commonly known as water:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw[/youtube]

You might use it in a discussion of social psychology and the way that people tend to go along with what they see other people doing and to do what they are asked or instructed to do without asking many questions (that is, if someone asks you to sign a petition, very often you will, whether or not you really know what it’s about). You could also use it to talk about perceptions of environmental risk, and how bad we are at evaluating it: if something has a chemical-sounding name, we tend to assume it’s bad (but if it sounds “natural,” we think it must be safe).

I think it would be a good clip for talking about political participation and the limitations of passive forms of participation such as these: the require very little of people, so while they might be quick to sign, they’re unlikely to know much about the issue or to follow up. My guess is that politicians keep this in mind, too. Burk M. was a Senate campaign consultant for a while and says that though written petitions are generally taken seriously by elected officials (particularly if signed by constituents and delivered personally in the presence of a media outlet), email petitions are completely ignored (I knew it!) because there’s no real concern that the people who signed it will ever check back in to see what happened (assuming they’re real people to start with). Government agencies, such as the EPA, may not show as much concern for even printed petitions, since they are not made up of elected officials who fear their constituents might be watching what they do. Thus, these forms of minimal-involvement political participation may make people feel like they’re doing something about an issue, when in fact there is little impact (particularly in the case of email petitions).

Thanks, Blanca!

Michael T. sent in an observation about the Yes on Proposition 8 website, which (successfully) aimed at amending the California constitution to disallow gay marriage.  Along the top of the screen, the four different images below accompanied the slogan “Restoring Marriage & Protecting California Children.”  These marriages, Michael surmises, must be the ones that need protecting.   In addition to reproducing heteronormativity and childbearing, notice that the images are self-consciously diverse, but represent all marriages as within race.

Thanks Michael!