Search results for pink

NPR reports that Beef Products Incorporated, the company that makes “finely textured beef” (a chemically-treated paste made from non-muscle cow parts used as a filler in ground beef), will be closing three of its production plants this month.  Dozens of food manufacturers, grocery store chains, restaurants, and school districts have announced they never did or will no longer use the product.  This after just two months of media coverage and activism around the product, kicked off by an ABC News report on March 7th.

The swiftness and sureness of this victory against this product is a testament to the value of the right language and one good image.  In case you haven’t caught on yet, finely textured beef is better known as “pink slime.”  Between that nifty pejorative and images of a long coil of bright pink…substance, which you probably saw, finely textured beef never had a chance.  This is  “mechanically separated chicken” (made with a similar but not identical process); it appears to have become synonymous with pink slime, correctly or no.

This is the power of framing.  The product at issue is not “slime,” it’s cow-part paste.  Of course, it’s not “beef” either, it’s cow-part paste.  Both are discursive frames; it’s a classic “he said, she said” social movement framing battle (along the lines of “life” vs. “choice”).  The outcome of the contest depended, in part, on which language captured the public’s imagination.  And… well… we saw how that went.

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.

The splashy introduction of the new LEGO friends line earlier this year stirred up a lot of controversy. My goal with this set of posts is to provide some historical perspective for the valid concerns raised in this heated debate. 

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1989-2003: Gender Ahoy!

I discussed the introduction of LEGOs the invention of gendered minifigs, and early efforts to market separately to girls and boys in Part I of this series, covering 1932 to 1988.  The segregation of LEGO into feminine and masculine sets would escalate beginning in 1989.  That year the LEGO group introduced gender to the minifig in a big way with the new Pirates theme. The masculine figs sported copious facial hair and the lone feminine pirate had lipstick and a curved shirt that implied a busty chest.

This pioneering pirate was the first in a long line of token females in otherwise male-dominated action-centric themes. The imbalanced ratio of masculine to feminine minifigs persists today, though it has lessened over time. I have seen several different numbers for this ratio, so I decided to do my own count. I gave TLG the benefit of the doubt and counted as gender neutral any minifigs lacking definitely masculine (facial hair) or feminine (lipstick, eyelashes, cleveage) traits, even when LEGO marketing materials clearly delineate them as male or female.

The following graphs represent masculine minifigs in blue, feminine minifigs in red, and gender neutral minifigs in gray. I have also calculated the masculine to feminine ratio (m/f ratio). Ideally this should be 1, indicating that there are equal number of masculine and feminine figures. This chart shows the aggreagate across all themes for the five key years between 1989 and 1999. The m/f ratio for this data is 3.74 (which is a lot better than the initial 13.5 it starts at in 1989, but not exactly something to celebrate).

The trend to unrepresent feminine figures in the main LEGO product line is mirrored by a tendency to overrepresent them in the “girls only” lines. LEGO released four major “girls only” themes through this time period: Paradisa, Belville, Scala Dolls, and Clikits.  Here’s a quick run down of the “girls only” themes:

• Paradisa deserves props for using standard minifigs, but the building experience is simplified compared to other LEGO sets released the same year  (compare the Sand Dollar Cafe with Wolf Pack Tower). Also it represents men as active job holders (butlers, chefs, ice cream men, and life guards) while the women mostly relax, surf, and go horseback riding.

• Belville is the longest running “girls only” theme and also the pinkest and most gender stereotype reinforcing. The classic LEGO building experience is barely present; the sets favor gigantic pre-fabricated “walls” and floors, and the completed “houses” and “horse stables” don’t even look like their real-life counterparts. The figures are completely out of scale with minifgs, so while it is possible to use pieces from Belville in LEGOLAND and vice versa, it is unrealistic.

• Scala Dolls was essentially LEGO barbie. Here’s the dreamhouse. It has even less construction play than Belville.

• The Clikits jewelry line featured pieces that are barely compatible with regular LEGO bricks (some people might not even think to try.) The line also contained some Bratz-esque characters.

The message that these themes send to children about gender is clear — certain things are for girls only. Namely: fairy tales, equestrianism, the color pink, vanity, and being a homemaker. Boys shouldn’t want these things and the girls that don’t are lesser for it.

The chart below aggregates figures from the first three of those lines across all years they existed (since Clickits was a jewelry line, it didn’t really feature figures).  Beyond the inversely unbalanced the m/f ratio of 0.18 (roughly one masculine figure for every five feminine figures), it is also important to note that the percentage of neutral figs is incredibly low, so playing with these sets reinforces the either/or of gender roles:

Lest you think girls get all the special treatment, fear not, boys get their share of “boys only” themes. We’ve already discussed Trains and Technic which have long, proud, histories and exist in a blue and black anti-Belville realm (Technic even had Belville-sized masculine articulated figures for a while). In 1998 the ill-fated Znap bucked the trend of “boys only” themes being for advanced builders. It was simple to put together (like K’nex), but never caught on despite being viral. 1998 also saw the creation of a Technic subtheme with even more testosterone than usual: Competition. 2001 saw TLG try to bridge the gap between DUPLO and SYSTEM (for boys) with Jack Stone. 2001 was also the launch of TLG’s attempt to get in to the action figure market: Bionicle. This is arguably a gender-neutral theme, but considering that TLG forgot to include girl’s names for an online character creator for Bionicle’s successor, it’s clear that TLG does not think boys and girls can enjoy the same toys.

As a final note on this era, observe this graph of the m/f ratio on minifigs over time. Notice how it is on the decline (towards gender balance) before sharply increasing in the early 2000s? We’ll explore the reasons for that in the next installment.

Read Part III of A Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap.

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David Pickett is a social media marketer by day and a LEGO animator by night.  He is fanatical about LEGO and proud to be a nerd. Read more from David at Thinking Brickly.

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.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a really great interactive graphic posted by the Guardian that summarizes the degree to which a number of rights and benefits are available to gays and lesbians in the U.S., by state. Each state is represented as a segment radiating out from the center of the circle; each colored ring represents a particular right, benefit, or protection:

• Light blue = whether state has a law addressing discrimination or bullying in the school system
• Purple = state-level hate-crime laws
• Pink = protection against housing discrimination
• Green = protection against employment discrimination
• Blue = right to adopt (lighter shade indicates individuals are allowed; darker shade means gay and lesbian couples are allowed to jointly adopt)
• Yellow = right to visit partner in the hospital
• Red = marriage

The different shades indicate differences in the scope of coverage (say, full marriage rights vs. domestic partnership — and it has been updated to reflect yesterday’s passage of the bill outlawing same-sex marriage in North Carolina — or whether a law bans discrimination based on sexual orientation but not gender identity); the Guardian website explains each issue. Their post also allows you to hover over a state and get a more detailed summary. Here’s the info for Nevada, for instance:

The graphic also lets you scale states by population if you want to get a better sense of the proportion of the U.S. population living in areas that do or do not provide these protections.

Course Guide for
SOCIOLOGY OF SPORTS
(last updated 4/2012)

Developed by J.A. Carter
University of Cincinnati

 History

• Social Hygiene and the Gender of Health in 1922
• Vintage Women’s Basketball Teams: So Funny!
• Chance, Innovation, and the Evolution of Skateboarding
• Woman Wears Men’s Clothes to a Prizefight World Gasps 1910
• 1927 Wimbledon Ad Using Women’s Progress to Sell

Culture

• Sociologist Doug Hartman on Why We Love Football
• Context: How do you Play Football?
• Brit Hume: Only Christianity Can Save Tiger Woods
• Arizona’s Prayer at the Super Bowl
• What Does it Mean to Believe that a Human Characteristic is Natural?

Fans

• Jay Smooth on the Irrationality of Sports Fandom

Stadiums/Economics

• New Sports Stadiums and Economic Development
• The Economic Sociology of Triathlons

Race/Ethnicity

• Distracted by “Linsanity”: Hidden Racism and the Model Minority Stereotype
• Jeremy Lin, ESPN says, has a “Chink in the Armor”
• Racial Stereotyping and Perceptions of Competence
• Tragedy at Red River: Race, Privilege and Learning to Swim
• Racism and Jingoism Among US Soccer Fans
• When Whiteness Matters in Sport
• Media, Race, & Web 2.0
• An Indigenous Olympics
• Russian Ice Skaters Impersonate Aboriginals, Win Gold
• Orientals v. Gauchos: Who are you Rooting for?
• Dutch Soccer Club Nicknamed the Jews
• Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish Mascot
• Some Native American Sports Mascots
• Don’t Olympic Athletes have Other Things They Need to be Doing
• Olympians Making “Chinese Eyes”
• Arab Women and 2008 Olympic Athletes
• “The Angry Black Athlete”
• Race and the King Kong Motif
• Southern Hospitality?
• Corporate Plantation

Gender

• The Manly Origins of Cheerleading
• Women and Exclusion from Long Distance Running
• Policing Gender in Figure Skating
• I Wonder How Much Laundry the Average Team USA Dad will Do
• Happy Super Bowl Day!
• Barbie and GI Joe: Inscribing Gender Norms on Toys
• Which Women Play on the Center Court at Wimbledon?
• Skate Canada gets “Tough”
• Participation in High School Sports by Gender and Sport
• The Sexualization of Female Olympiads
• Breakfast and Lunch and Dinner of Olympic Champions
• “Come to the Ball”: Swiss Soccer Ad
• Valuing Dads in the WNBA
• Blaming Jessica Simpson: Women Sap Men’s Strength
• Pink Sports Team Clothing: Making a Masculine Arenas Safe for Women

Sex Differences in Sports

• Opportunity and Athletic Performance
• Male as the Neutral Default
• The Question of Caster Semenya’s Sex

Equipment differences in sports

• Female Boxers may be Required to Wear Skirts
• Ideology, Safety, and the Lingerie Football League
• The Amazing Disappearing Cheerleading Outfit
• Femininity and the Proposed Badminton Dress Code
• Two Fun Facts About Figure Skating Fashion

Masculinity

• Hegemonic Masculinity in Super Bowl Commercials
• No Man’s Land and the Alice Band
• Mocking Men with Femininity
• The Daintification of Masculinity
• Men without Sports Knowledge/Skills are Inadequate Human Beings
• Energy Drinks and Violent Masculinity
• Crossing Gender Lines: Boys Doing Double Dutch
• A Set of Ads Suggesting that Men must Eschew Femininity or Else
• Social Construction and Hegemonic Masculinity

Sexuality/Homophobia

• Pushing Back Against Homophobia in Sports
• “Powder Blue Faggots”: More Sporting Homophobic Taunts
• Yankee Fans Verbally Assault Teenage Red Sox Fans with Homophobic Taunts
• What Does a “Prehomosexual” Look Like?
• Johnny Weir: That’s Gay
• Pulled Homophobic Nike Ads
• “Homosexual” vs. “Gay”: Discourse in the Culture Wars
• You’re a Quarterback for SC?  That’s So Gay!

Bodies

• Tim Tebow and the Religious Body (Politic)
• Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance
• World Champion Olympic Medalist Reduced to Woman on a Diet
• Objectification of Women = Go Team!
• Idealizing Shawn Johnson
• Re-Framing Menstruation
• Ski Jumping’s Weight Problem
• An Entitlement to the Right to Define and Consume Female Beauty
• Nude Calendar Images of German Paralympic Athletes
• Release the Thin Athletic Body Trapped Inside your Big Fat One
• The Male Gaze Does Not Allow for Boy Nipples
• Men’s Bodies are Allowed to Grow Up

Media

• What’s Important About Female Athletes?
• “Come for the Ladies, Stay for the Legends”
• Serena Williams’ Patriarchal Bargain
• Female Athletes Support the Guys
• His and Hers Sports Illustrated Covers
• SportsCenter, the Predictable Gender Trend
• Cheerleader Dreams at Mattress World
• ESPN Introduces Website for Women
• Women Talk, Eat at Baseball Game; Earth Stands Still
• Welcome, Women to your Special Section
• It’s the Ironman, Not the Ironwoman, so Shut your Cereal Hole
• A Breakdown of Televised Football Broadcasts
• Feminizing Women’s Sports Teams
• It’s so Boring to Wait While your Wife shops for you
• Serena Williams on the Cover of ESPN
• Another Collection of Gender-and-Tech-Related Images
• Female Athletes: Be Pretty, but Not Sexy or Pregnant
• Bringing People Together with Coke
• Marketing Sports Supplement to Men and Women
• Media Portrayals of Female Athletes
• Connecting Golf and Sex
• Score Big at Sports Bar

Violence

• Reception of Rape Victims: Silsbee, TX Edition
• Glorifying Violence in American Football

College Athletics

• In Defiance of Title IX Colleges Report Male Athletes as Women
• College Athletics and Graduate Rates
• College Athletes and their Majors
• Where Sports Scholarships Go

Cross-posted at Work That Matters.

Barbie is running for President of The United States of America… again.  She even has a campaign Tumblr. But what is her platform?

Okay, so she’s not taking any strong stands on the GOP’s War on Women’s reproductive rights. But she did come up with a totally awesome nickname for her campaign (“Glam-paign”).

Apparently, however, candidate Barbie will do something no other candidate can: she will bridge the racial divide in America by morphing herself into four different ethnicities!
Yes, I get that this is a toy. And the Miss-America-style platitudes are to be expected from a company that wants to sell to both sides of the political divide. But it’s a shame that girls don’t get a chance to see that women really can change the world.

This week, Malawi swore in Southern Africa’s first female head of state. She wasn’t elected as such, but as Vice President took the position after President Bingu wa Mutharika died in office. (A scenario that could have happened with Sarah Palin, had John McCain won the Presidency.)

Other women currently heading countries are:

• Ellen Johnson Sirleaf: President of Liberia
• Doris Leuthard, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, Simonetta Sommaruga: Members of the Swiss Federal Council, Switzerland
• Pratibha Patil: President of India
• Cristina Fernández de Kirchner: President of Argentina
• Dalia Grybauskaitė: President of Lithuania
• Laura Chinchilla: President of Costa Rica
• Dilma Rousseff: President of Brazil
• Atifete Jahjaga: President of Kosovo
• Monique Ohsan Bellepeau: Acting President of Mauritius
• Slavica Đukić Dejanović: Acting President of Serbia
• Angela Merkel – Chancellor of Germany
• Julia Gillard – PM of Australia
• Yingluck Shinawatra – PM of Thailand
• Helle Thorning-Schmidt – PM of Denmark
• Portia Simpson-Miller – PM of Jamaica
• Kamla Persad-Bissessar – PM of Trinidad and Tobago
• Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir – PM of Iceland (Appointed)
• Hasina Wazed – PM of Bangladesh

The United States has yet to elect a woman to the position. And while Canada has had two appointed female Vice-Regents, we have yet to elect a woman to the Prime Minister’s Office. (Kim Campbell was nominated for the position directly by her party.)

So perhaps it’s time for Barbie, who has been in every federal election since 1992, to campaign a little harder. Or for North American countries to catch up with the rest of the world and nominate and elect a woman of substance who isn’t seen as just “another Barbie.”

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Tom Megginson is a Creative Director at Acart Communications, a Social Issues Marketing agency based in Ottawa, Canada.  Tom writes regularly about creative advertising and marketing ethics for the international social advertising blog, Osocio, as well as on his own, Work That Matters.

SocImages Meet Up in the Twin Cities!

On the weekend of April 2oth Gwen and I will be visiting the University of Minnesota to attend the Sociology Research Institute and humbly accept an award on behalf of SocImages.  We’d love it if you’d come and celebrate with us on Saturday, April 21st 6pm to 8pm.  Stay tuned for a location…

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Please feel free to follow SocImages on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. Gwen and I and most of the team are also on Twitter, too.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Next month I’ll be giving my talk about hook up culture at CSU Northridge (11:00am on Apr. 26^th) and in September I’ll be at Indiana State University to give a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference (Sept. 17^th).

A big thank you to the staff, students, and faculty at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Boston University!  I had a wonderful time sharing my research and ideas last week!  Special thanks to Harvard Sex Week for letting me debut my new talk on media stereotypes and sexual pleasure. Reviews of the talks in The Harvard Crimson and The Dartmouth are linked from my website.

And thanks, too, to Amy Schalet and the rest of the faculty at UMass-Amherst for giving me the opportunity to talk in depth about Sociological Images!  It’s such a treat to be able to talk about our little blog.

SocImages in the News:

Our post on the racially-charged Disney-themed candy raised some eyebrows. The story was covered at The Root, Business Insider, Babble, Gawker, Jezebel, The Daily Meal, The Week, and in the Phoenix New Times.

Miss Representation, the fantastic documentary featuring SocImages contributor Caroline Heldman, is getting amazing reviews!  Here’s the latest at CNN.

Reuters gave me the opportunity to weigh in on a controversy over a San Antonio mural featuring the “sleepy Mexican” stereotype.

Finally, The Frisky picked up on our post about pink in Saudi Arabia.

We’re happy to announce a new Pinterest Board:

• The Tyranny of Pink and Blue

I’m thinking about putting together one that includes subliminal and not-so-subliminal uses of sex in advertising. I’ll try to get to that in April.

Best of March:

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month. Two of our posts received over 1,000 “likes” on Facebook this month:

• Distrust for Atheists and the New Relevance of Faith
• The Manly Origins of Cheerleading

Other popular March posts include:

• Exotic Dancers in 1890 and the Plump Body Ideal
• Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and Whiteness in the U.S.
• Women’s Parts as Urinals and Sinks
• Boys Want Success, Girls Want Boys
• Gingerism: Prejudice Against Redheads
• Bad Romance: Woman’s Suffrage, a Gaga Re-Make
• Gender and ESPN’s Coverage of March Madness
• Head Covering as a Common Practice
• The First Black Disney Princess Loves Watermelon

Thanks so much to all our readers!

A little over a month ago I posted a map of the legal status of same-sex marriage throughout the U.S. It was soon made obsolete by the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state of Washington. In addition, several readers pointed out that the map hid important differences within categories.

Ned Flaherty, Project Manager of Marriage Equality USA, sent in a link to an updated and more comprehensive map at their site. Green states have fully legalized same-sex marriage; yellow states recognize domestic partnerships or civil unions; and pink states do not allow either. The lettered codes provide more information on exactly what the status is in each state:

Click on the map or go to their website to look at the much larger version; they also have a round-up of pending or possible legislation and court cases in various states.

We’ve had a number of submissions of examples of gendering food, so I thought I’d post a few that illustrate connections between food and masculinity. Edd T. saw this commercial from New Zealand that presents wine as an insufficiently manly drink which all men should reject as a matter of course:

Even beer isn’t without risk, though; a man must choose carefully. Roger B. sent in several Miller Lite commercials that connect masculinity to drinking the right beer. Men in these ads are ridiculed for wearing tight jeans and singing the wrong songs at karaoke:

As Roger points out, “the female bartender is implied to have a masculinity that the man in the commercial doesn’t possess (due to her knowledge of beer and, presumably, her policing of masculinity), and…this is treated as part of the joke (as if a woman possessing more masculine traits were inherently absurd).”

So what can men eat and drink? Well, apparently fried chicken is so masculine it can even compensate for a pink sweater, according to this Australian KFC ad sent in by Katrin:

And anything that includes lots and lots and lots of food is inherently for men. Tyler R. saw a notice for a buffet on a BC Ferries vessel that travels between Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. Women apparently need to know about the ingredients and dishes. Men just need to know food is available, in unlimited quantities:

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