LeBron James got his turn as King Kong on a magazine cover. Now (an illustration of) David Stern, Commissioner of the NBA, strikes the pose on Sports Northwest Magazine.

From the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications 2007 report on the Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops.

Julie C. sent us this clip from a 1987 interview between Barbara Walters and Sean Connery:

In case you think that this is out-of-date, check out the comments.  Here is the first page of comments, in their entirety:

what a ho, sean should’ve given her a demonstration

Big up Sean, he’s from a time when men were still men. Speak the truth.

AGREED

you’ve just been schlapped by sean connery woman!

maby a slap is to far but i believe you need to stand your ground and not let your women have too much power..

Fuck that… no time for half measures. Slap the bitch.

He’s right of course. ‘ a woman a dog and a walnut tree, the more you beat them the better they be’ :)

i love connery but i’d beat the shit outta him if he hit me.

Thanks Julie!

In order to reduce redundancy and not overload your inboxes, we’re now occasionally adding to previous posts instead of creating new ones. But never fear, once a month we’ll let you know where we’ve added content so that you won’t miss a thing! Here’s this month’s enriched posts:

Molly M. sent us a link to a feel ‘er up mousepad. We added it to our post on products shaped like female bodies (scroll down to the bottom). Thanks Molly!

We added another ad capitalizing on the fetishization of black women’s behinds.

We added a new image, found over at Copyranter, to our post on subliminal and not-so-subliminal sex in the media.

We also stole from Copyranter a 1968 American Airlines ad encouraging travellers to think of the stewardess as their mother (their sexy mother, of course). We added the incestuous ad to our post (here) featuring a 1965 American Airlines that suggests that the travellers are constantly kidnapping and marrying their stewardesses.

We added another example of a company trivializing women’s power to sell product. This time it’s Special K urging women to claim “Victory” over their fat bodies.

To our post about Bugs Bunny in Blackface, we added an advertisement from a 1942 cartoon called “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs.”

Finally, we added a Hillary Clinton toilet brush to our Hillary Clinton nutcracker.

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The U.S. population is becoming less and less overwhelmingly white. Projections suggest that, by 2050, whites will compromise less than half of the population. This trend, according to the New York Times today, is being driven by our kids. Below, a map shows the percentage of non-white children in each state of the Union.

Among other things interesting to me about this discussion is the tendency to compare the proportion of the population that is “white” with the proportion of the population that is “not white.” This reinforces the notion that white is somehow pure and important, and everything else is just… something else. While some say that we will no longer be a “white nation” (for better or worse) when whites are outnumbered by non-whites, whites will still be the majority insofar as the non-white group is comprised of an incredibly diverse group of people by race, ethnicity, and immigration-status.

Here at Sociological Images, we’re interested in how our standards of beauty are based on a European (that is, light-skinned and straight-haired) ideal. See here and here for examples. A reader pointed out that Syesha Mercado, a contestant on American Idol, has been progressively de-ethnicized.

Here is a photo of Syesha from early in the competition:

Here is a photo of her from this week (end of April):

Am I the only one who thinks she looked prettier before?

However, the stylists have thus far let the white kid keep his dreads:

Thanks for pointing this out, pj!

Andrea G. in Switzerland snapped these pictures of an ad campaign for TerraSuisse natural agriculture. Their tagline translates as “TerraSuisse guarantees natural Swiss agriculture.” They might be useful for a discussion of doing gender (West and colleagues) or gender as performativity (Butler). As Andrea S. noted, it’s obvious instantly that the bird is supposed to be female and the chipmunk male by their pose alone.

Posed like a chick:

Posed like a dude:

They might, also, be a nice contrast to this one for which a gender is not immediately apparent (to me…but who knows in Switzerland):

Thanks Andrea!

Miguel E. sent us these interesting images and text. They may help illustrate the notion of polysemy and the importance of how our interpretation of images is influenced by copy.