I came upon this series of ads in a local Las Vegas magazine (although I’ve forgotten which one; sorry). The first two images were at the front of the magazine.

I turned to page 13 to see what this super-skinny, barely-dressed woman was being used to sell.

Of course! Houses!

Note the very passive positioning of the model–she looks like she’s about to faint, or maybe is in the act of fainting. And the background on the other two images appears to be gold satin–evoking satin sheets, perhaps?

Here is an ad, from Metropolitan Home magazine, from a home decorating magazine that uses a woman’s body to sell blinds:

Scott W. sent us this website selling condominiums in northern Boston.  Here are a couple screenshots of the completely gratuitous use of  a sexy woman and implicit sex:

NEW! Sharon G. sent us a photo of a billboard in Tel Aviv with the copy “Go all the way.”  It’s selling kitchen remodeling (see the website here):

See more posts using sex (with women) to sell homes, see here.

Click here for a “world clock” (by http://www.poodwaddle.com/) that constantly updates the total number of, well, lots of stuff: births, abortions, deaths of different types, prisoners, marriages, divorces, extinct species, gallons of oil pumped, and computers, cars, and bicycles built. You can choose to display it by how much has happened in the last year, month, day, or even from a moment, like right… now.

Thanks, Mom!

Ad for men’s slacks. Thanks to Dorotha for finding it here.

Here’s the text:

“Though she was a tiger lady, our hero didn’t have to fire a shot to floor her. After one look at his Mr. Leggs slacks, she was ready to have him walk all over her. That noble styling sure soothes the savage heart! If you’d like your own doll-to-doll carpeting, hunt up a pair of these he-man Mr. Leggs slacks. Such as our new automatic wash wear blend of 65% “Dacron” and 35% rayon—incomparably wrinkle-resistant. About $12.95 at plush-carpeted stores.”

Here is a link to a book called I Love It When You Talk Clean to Me: Porn for Women, published by the Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative.

Text: “Ooh look, the NFL playoffs are today. I bet we’ll have no trouble parking at the crafts fair.”

Text: “As soon as I finish the laundry, I’ll do the grocery shopping. And I’ll take the kids with me so you can relax.”

Text: “Why don’t I get a minivan, love, so you can drive something fun.”

Thanks, Jessica C.!

NEW! In a similar vein, the hoax website Porn for Girls by Girls, sent in by Giorgos S., implies that what women really want isn’t sexual material but images of men cleaning, wedding dresses, and jewelry:

Thanks, Giorgos!

Above are photos of Jennifer Love Hewitt that have been showing up everywhere since they were taken in December. They were used as evidence that she has gotten fat.

Jennifer Love Hewitt responded to the criticism:

I’ve sat by in silence for a long time now about the way women’s bodies are constantly scrutinized…To set the record straight, I’m not upset for me, but for all of the girls out there that are struggling with their body image…A size 2 is not fat! Nor will it ever be. And being a size 0 doesn’t make you beautiful. … To all girls with butts, boobs, hips and a waist, put on a bikini – put it on and stay strong.

Janice Dickenson, a former model, went on The Today Show and defended Jennifer Love Hewitt…by calling Tyra Banks fat: “You want to see someone who’s fat, I’m sorry, Tyra, Tyra Banks is fat.”

There’s an interesting discourse here. Jennifer Love Hewitt responded by saying “A size 2 is not fat!” Janice Dickinson defends her by comparing her to a woman who supposedly is fat. So the ultimate message isn’t necessarily that women shouldn’t have to be thin, but that this particular woman isn’t fat. That could lead to a useful discussion on empowerment–what’s the difference between empowering an individual woman (“I’m not fat!”) and empowering women as a group (“We need to fight against this idea that only one body shape is acceptable”)? Is the discourse we find here really liberating to women in general, or just to those who are a size 2 or smaller?

Most female celebrities, when photographed in an unflattering manner, disappear for a month and then reappear in transformed bodies that have been starved and exercised until they are worthy of display; they are then welcomed back with open arms and their transformation is praised. It might also be interesting to use Hewitt’s responses in a discussion of how difficult it is to try to resist hegemonic ideals of beauty–how do you defend yourself and respond to mainstream ideals when you’re one of very few people even trying to do it?

NEW! (Oct. ’09) Kristina V. let us know about a recent issue of Shape that features a significantly slimmer Jennifer Love Hewitt along with information on how she lost weight:

The website also has images of other celebrities (including 2 men out of 13 photos) who have lost weight:

Don’t misunderstand me: I am not surprised that Jennifer Love Hewitt eventually felt the pressure to slim down. Is it somewhat hypocritical? Yes. But it doesn’t seem surprising that someone who faces such intense scrutiny might find it difficult to individually try to resist beauty standards that are so widely held in her social world and might eventually choose to try to conform rather than resist.

But it’s disheartening to see another female celebrity lose this battle, even if it’s unsurprising.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

These images, via NPR, are of 86-year-old Zhou Guizhen. We were hesitant about posting them when they were first forwarded to us (without information of where they came from) because of concerns about how the pictures were taken–were they taken by a tourist, who was viewing this woman as a freak to laugh at? We were also concerned that presenting these pictures would objectify her, turning her into evidence that non-Western societies are barbaric and backward (and, therefore, that those of us in the West should pat ourselves on the back for how enlightened we are). This would be similar to how Muslim women who wear veils are used in discourses about how oppressive and barbaric Muslim societies are, with no allowance for the many meanings a veil can have and the fact that women are actors in their societies and may not all view the veil as automatically or unequivocally oppressive.

Ultimately we decided to post them when we were able to ascertain that they are publicly available. Also, the very fact that we ourselves struggled with what to make of them and how to present them, seemed to indicate that they are very powerful images that bring up complicated ideas about women, bodies, objectification, and how these are connected to judgments of the modernity or backwardness of cultures.

We post these pictures with the intention that we view this woman as a human being who embodies a complicated tradition. This means that we refrain from calling her, her body, or her culture any names that we would not want to be called ourselves (names like “grotesque,” “ignorant,” or “barbaric”). We hope that, as we view these images, we are mindful of the ways that bodies are altered across the globe and throughout history… not only in places that we do not understand, but in places that we understand only too well.

Click here to read about Silo and Roy, gay penguins. They were together for six years before they broke up. One of them paired up with a female.

A children’s book, written about Silo and Roy, was apparently removed from the children’s fiction section at two bookstores because it promoted homosexuality.

A same-sex penguin couple, on the right in the picture below, were segregated from the rest of the penguins because they kept stealing eggs.  Sneakily, they would replace the egg with a rock and take the real egg for themselves.  The zoo keepers eventually decided to give them the eggs of another penguin pair who had a poor record of parenting and, the story says, they are among the best parents at the zoo (via Alas).

NEW!  Another pair of male penguins, this time at a zoo in Bremerhaven, Germany, have become adoptive parents (via). Z and Vielpunkt:

These two male storks, living in a Dutch zoo, are raising a chick together. The zookeepers don’t know how they came across their egg, but somehow they did, and now they’re parents! Click here for the story and a video.

About 20 percent of all black swan couples are male/male according to this study:

Carlos and Fernando just celebrated their fifth anniversary (see here):

A museum in Oslo has gained some attention for their exhibit, Against Nature?, featuring homosexual behavior among animals. Check it out.

And here is a link to a story about same-sex pairs (1/3rd of all pairs!) among wild Albatross.

NEW (Apr. ’10)!  Speaking of the Albatross: they mate for life (if they’re lucky, 60-70 years) and this is a female pair nesting in Kaena Point, Hawaii.

Biologist Lindsay Young, who studies this colony, concurs that about 1/3rd of the couples are same-sex.  They also rear chicks.

The New York Times article, from which I borrowed this images, explains that:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.

…

Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as “mock” or “pseudo” courtship — or just “practice.” Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as “a nuisance” that “goes on and on.” One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report “the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses” which are “all too often packed” into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly.” To think, he wrote, “of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ — Oh, God!”

…

Different ideas are emerging about how these behaviors could fit within that traditional Darwinian framework, including seeing them as conferring reproductive advantages in roundabout ways. Male dung flies, for example, appear to mount other males to tire them out, knocking them out of competition for available females. Researchers speculate that young male bottlenose dolphins mount one another simply to establish trust and form bonds — but those bonds actually turn out to be critical to reproduction, since when males mature, they work in groups to cooperatively gain access to females.

Stereotype threat: The difference in performance measured when the belief that people like you (blacks, women, etc) are worse at a particular task than the comparison group (whites, men, etc) is made salient.

The left side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on a task (on which whites are stereotypically believed to be superior) when stereotype threat is activated (blacks and whites are reminded of the stereotype in some way). The right side of the bar graph is the performance of blacks and whites on the same task when the stereotype remains unactivated. Note the remarkable difference. This demonstrates the ways in which stereotypes, when made salient, affect our performances on “objective” tests.

From: The Effects of Stereotype Threat on the Standardized Test Performance of College Students by J Aronson, CM Steelel, MF Salinas, MJ Lustina. In Readings About the Social Animal, 8th edition, edited by E. Aronson. Stolen from Wikipedia.