Search results for pink

NEWS:

Remember, if you’re so inclined, we’re on Facebook and Twitter!

We’d like to draw your attention to the comments thread on an old post, Marketing Asian Women to Anti-Feminist Men.  While, to be frank, I don’t think the post was very strong in itself, it attracted the attention of the very men to whom I argued Asian women were being marketed.  Their comments are a really fascinating insight into the logics of white men who prefer Asian women.  It’s a pretty amazing read.

If anyone without access to journal databases would like a copy of my most recent publication, “Defining Gendered Oppression in U.S. Newspapers: The Strategic Value of ‘Female Genital Mutilation’” (Gender & Society, 2009), I’d be happy to email you a copy.  Just send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

One year ago in September, we dissected a news story about “black and white twins.” The story reveals a great deal about how Americans think about race and so we decided to revive it for today.

Two years ago in September, when we were but a wee blog, we posted our first PostSecret about the pressure one man feels to perform masculinity.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW!):

Race

We found more examples of black models (Naomi Campbell again, Iman, and Grace Jones) being posed with or as animals and added them to our post on the topic (not safe for work).  Bri A. also sent in some photos of Bratz Nighty Night dolls; only the dark-skinned doll is in leopard print pajamas.

We added an image that questions why we accept American Indian sports mascots when we’d surely express outrage if other minorities were used as mascots to our post on Native American mascots.

Discourse

Man poisons wife; Reuters says it was an act of love.  Screenshot here (scroll down).

Gender and Symbols

I snapped two pictures at the Dublin airport of warning signs for moving sidewalks that, like an earlier example, mark stick figures as female as soon as a child is involved.  Also new to the same post, Emanuelle sent us an example of a sign showing a stick figure with a child… and the figure isn’t clearly marked as female.

We also added a photograph to our collection of traffic signals that feature a female instead of a male figure.  This one, from New Zealand, was spotted by Pharmacopaeia.

Sarah D. sent in another example of the feminization of sugar.

Socialization and Gendered Products

We added commercials for two more toys that socialize girls into cooking and other housework to our post about the Hasbro Rose Petal cottage.

The trailer for the movie Teenage Doll, another old movie about teens going crazy with lust, made a nice addition to our post with other examples on the same theme.

As we often do, we have more examples of gendered kids’ products: boys’ and girls’ versions of a book on “how to be the best at everything.” They make a nice pair with the girls’ and boys’ doodle books we posted here.

More pointlessly gendered products! Now sunscreen comes in a version just for girls (scroll all the way to the bottom of the post).

Objectification of Women

Giorgos sent us another fantastic PETA ad, this one implying that you might get to see “explicit footage” of Pamela Anderson. We added it to our post on how PETA objectifies women.

How many boob-focused ads for the video game Evony can there be? At least three more.  Thanks to D.R.S., Alex B., Wtfcats, and Kim H. for sending them in!

World War II was, among other things, an engine for the development of new technologies.  After the war, however, companies needed new markets for their products that would allow them to continue to reap profits.  We’ve posted below on this effort as related to food.  The 1948 ad below, for a scent-reducing and slimming camisole, is a great example of this in that the text makes it explicit (via):

Text:

During the war, The Springs Cotton Mills was called upon to develop a special fabric for camouflage.  It was used in the Pacific to conceal ammunition dumps and gun emplacements, but the Japanese learned to detect it because of its lack of jungle smells.  To overcome this, when the fabric was dyed, it was also impregnated with a permanent odor of hibiscus, hydrangea, and old rubber boots.  The deception was so effective that when Tokyo fell, the victorious invaders hung a piece of this fabric on a Japanese flagpole.

This process is top secret, and the fabric is now available to the false bottom and bust bucket business as SPRINGMAID PERKER made of combed yarns… the white with gardenia, the pink with camelia, the blush with jasmine, and the nude dusty.

If you want to avoid dancers’ diaphoresis* and the steatopygic stance, kill two birds with one stone by getting a camouflaged camisole with the SPRINGMAID label on the bottom of your trademark.

* Commonly known as Rhumba Aroma.

And also, a quick google search shows, “ballerina bouquet” and “skater’s steam.”

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Robin L. sent us this great visual, from Flare (via), that uses U.S. census data to show how work type has changed over time.  The image below displays the percentage of men (blue) and women (pink) in each job between 1850 and 2000:

If you go to the interactive, you can see what percentage of all workers were of any given type, by sex, for each year.

You can also look at work by gender.  Look at how women’s participation in paid work has increased over time (but watch out for the shortened y axis):

The trend for men is down and I can’t think of a good reason for why (you?), though the source explains that some modern jobs are left out because they use occupational categories from 1950.

You can also look at each job individually.  This is the image for farm laborers (again, with a short y axis):

This data is great for comparative purposes, but leaves a bit to be desired in terms of capturing the whole picture because of the missing occupations.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

…there’s Kleenex for men:

In case you don’t know that brown, black, and gray = men, it says so right on the box!

Apparently these are on sale in the U.K.  I haven’t seen them in the U.S.

In looking this up, I discovered that gendered Kleenex marketing is nothing new.  This ad, from Life magazine, is from December 1964:

Images found here, here, here, and here.

Also in gendered products: tv dinners, uniforms, candy bars, ear plugs ‘n stuff, deodorant, Pepsi, and mosquito repellent.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

NEWS

Find us on facebook and twitter, if you like.

Germany! I’ll be in Munich for the month of September!  If there are any Sociological Images fans in the area, I’d love to have a cocktail hour!  Email me at socimages@thesocietypages.org and we’ll set it up.

Our New Look:  We’d like to thank Jon Smajda, our IT and all-around tech fix-it guy, for the great redesign of the site. As you may have noticed, it’s now easier to search for posts, comments are threaded, and the page looks less cluttered overall. Jon, your work is greatly appreciated!

Better Searchage! We updated some of our tags to make it easier to search for posts. There were two major changes:

(1) While we still have a generic “race/ethnicity” tag, we also created tags for the major racial/ethnic groups recognized in the U.S.  You can now search for “race/ethnicity: Asians/Pacific Islanders” and so on. In some cases we struggled with how to define groups or which labels to use. We settled on terms that are generally recognizable and that were short enough to fit in our tags box.  Most posts that are labeled with the “race/ethnicity” tag are now also assigned to at least one specific racial/ethnic tag.

(2) Previously we had individual countries listed alphabetically in the tags list. We decided it would be better to have them all listed as “nation: [specific country]” so they show up together as a group rather than scattered throughout the tags list. So, for instance, Egypt is now listed as “nation: Egypt.”

Changes to Comment Moderation Policy: We have always taken a hands-off approach to reader comments so as to not stifle discussion.  First, while we try to read every comment, we prefer to focus on putting up new content and we found that readers did a pretty good job of responding to each other.  Second, we often found even hateful and mean-spirited comments useful for illustrating some of the points we were trying to make, particularly how groups who fear loss of privilege will lash out and attempt to invalidate any critiques of their social position.  Finally, we have pretty thick skins and don’t really get too worked up about people insulting us.

However, as we posted about earlier in the month, we had an incident in which readers of an anti-feminist website left extremely hateful and threatening comments targeting a specific reader, including posting personal information (such as location) and encouraging physical violence against her and her dog. As a result we rethought our attitude toward comments. We’re not adopting a formal policy, but we decided some moderation is necessary. In general, comments that are hateful or threatening toward other commenters, or that are mean-spirited toward particular social groups (i.e., “I hate Black people”) and do not in any way contribute to a discussion of the issue will be deleted. We will undoubtedly miss some comments or not notice them immediately. We certainly won’t delete comments just because they disagree with us or are rather snarky, and we of course can’t protect readers from any comment they might find unpleasant or offensive–the comments section would have to be shut down completely. Basically, our policy toward comments is: Don’t be an ass, and if you are, we’ll delete your comments when we have time.

We also decided not to provide direct links to racist or misogynistic sites. We’ll provide the web address in posts about such sites so readers know where images came from but won’t have a link; this prevents their administrators from tracking back to our site and posting a barrage of threatening or overtly offensive comments.

We know these changes in how we handle comments won’t please everyone, or maybe anyone–some will want us to moderate more and others would prefer that we don’t moderate at all. But it seemed like the best compromise for preserving the ability for readers to discuss–and criticize–posts while not allowing some commenters to intimidate other readers to the point that they fear commenting.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: AUGUSTS

In light of the recent scandal over Caster Semenya’s sex, we thought we’d resurrect a post from August 2008 about the sexualization of female Olympic athletes.

And, to mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we’d love for you to visit our post from August 2007 about racist interpretations of survival strategies in the aftermath of the storm.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW!)

You might have noticed that when we revamped the website (thanks Jon!), our names appeared in the right-hand column alongside neutral avatars which, as we’ve discussed many times, are actually male avatars (there is some delicious irony here).  It turns out that WordPress not only has the male as default, but there is no female option at all.  You can, however, choose to be a monster.  We eventually went with no avatar at all.  We documented the saga, including all of the options offered by WordPress, in our post on default avatars. Scroll down. [Gwen notes: I kinda want to be the monster.]

Sex

Sea Monkeys!  We added new ads for sea monkeys to our post on heteronormativity and a new collection we’re starting on ads that use sex to sell the most unlikely things.

Speaking of, remember our post full of ads that place the product or tagline in front of a woman’s crotch?  We thought so.  We added an ad for London Fog, sent in by Dmitriy T. M.

Oh geez. We added more examples to our ejaculation imagery ad. We’re sorry, but there was no getting around it. The new material includes images from a campaign for The IceCreamists and an ad for a water gun called the Oozinator (you’ve got to see it).

We also added another image to our recent post on using women’s bodies to symbolize HIV infection.

Race

We found a rodent control ad comparing the Chinese to rats and added it to our long list of anti-Chinese propaganda circa 1900.  We also added an image of lemon ice cream marketed with a caricatured Asian image to a prior post about Italian candies in a blackface-reminiscent wrapper.

Jason K. sent us another example of Obama depicted as a pre-modern and/or savage African, this time a poster showing Obama as a “witch doctor,” so we added it to our post of him presented as a Barbarian and a cannibal.

To our post discussing how people of color are often included in ads as symbols of flavor, color, or spice, we added a comparison of two McDonald’s french fry containers sent in by Joshua B.

Kids

Emily M. sent us another laxative ad in which a small child finally gets the loving mother she deserves because of the wonderful powers of laxatives, which we added to our earlier post on the topic.

You can also check out the vintage ad for Lane Bryant girls’ clothing that we added to our post on fashion for “chubby” girls.

Gender

We added more gendered products–masculinized ear plugs, ahem, “ear screws,” feminized tape “Just for girls!” and boys’ and girls’ sandwich bags–to our post on pointlessly gendered products.

Relatedly, both Danielle F. and Sara S.-P. sent us a link to the new Playstation Portable for omg! girlz!  We added it to our post on girlified games (like the Ouija Board).

Moving on to creepily gendered products, we added a photo of the storefront of Sweet Taters Cafe, sent in by Dmitiry T.M., featuring a “hot” potato, if you get my drift, to our post on sexualized food.

Evony has released more cleavage-fixated ads so we updated our post on the evolution, and increasing boob-centricness, of their recent ad campaign.

Kyle M. alerted us to the advertising campaign for the sci-fi show Surrogates. We added it to our post looking at how gender intersects with (real and fictional) robotics.

Ronni S. found a “Thank God you’re a man commercial” in which a woman becomes hysterical and men drink beer.  We added it to our post featuring ads that suggest that being a woman sucks.

And also in overtly sexist, we found another commercial that portrays women as batshit insane, this time for shoes.  It’s delightful.

Thanks for reading everyone!

PARTY!

Please join us for the first ever Sociological Images party! We’d love to see all of you–sociologists and non-sociologists alike–in San Francisco on Sunday, August 9th at 6pm at Johnny Foley’s Irish House.   We want to meet you and we think it’d be super cool for you to meet each other, too.

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Sociological Images was born in July of 2007.  In honor of our birthday, we point you to our very first post ever:  Faith Hill re-touched for the cover of Redbook.

One year later, we published a fascinating example of the white man’s burden.  This time, however, it’s a white woman’s burden in the form of a Pampers commercial.  It’s something; you should check it out.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW!):

We added a third PostSecret postcard where someone confesses thoughts about race, while explaining that they are not racist.  Ponder them here.

Our post about an Icelandic cartoon that portrayed Barack Obama as a cannibal now includes an image of the comic book graphic novel Barack the Barbarian, thanks to sender-inner Lindsay.

Phil Howard had some updated graphs on concentration of organic brands, so we updated our post on who sells organics.

To our post featuring ads that portray men as animals, we added an advertising campaign by Jim Beam that suggests men are “stags” (has there ever been a word with more meanings?).

In another food-related update, Amanda C. and Dmitriy T.M. both sent us material that we added to our post about sexualizing food.

Natalie sent us links to some images of kids’ t-shirts with sexual slogans, which we added to our existing post on the topic.

At the suggestion of Glenn R., we added ads for Caramba Tequila to our not-so-subliminal sex and ejaculation imagery posts.  We also added an image to the latter post sent in by Jeff G. and a commercial for Creme d’Or ice cream Jay L. brought to our attention. The commercial is a doozy.

We added some very scandalous ads for hearing aids to our “sex sells” post.

Rachel McC. J., from Deeply Problematic, sent us another example of efforts to protect women by telling women to protect themselves instead of targeting badly behaving men.  We added it to our previous post telling women to stop men from sexually harassing them in the subway.

Tricia V. sent us another example of resistance to advertising that objectifies women.  In this one, from Haiti, someone scrawled “Women’s bodies are not merchandise” across a full-sized billboard.

The Huffington Post featured a slide show of billboards in New York called “Sex in the Sky.”  Kiera S. thought it would make a good addition to our “What Warrants a Slide Show” post.  We agreed.

We added a Volkswagen ad to our post on vintage advertising suggesting that women are horrible (horrible!) drivers.  See it here.

We added a vintage ad marketing Zippo lighters to “modern mothers” to our post featuring ads in which babies tell their moms to smoke Marlboros.

Before the “obesity epidemic,” kids were just chubby.  We added two additional material to our post featuring vintage ads selling clothes for “chubby” kids, one of them sent in by Holly M.

Women LOVE to clean!  We added a vintage ad to a previous post about the joy of women’s work.

We recently posted about a business called the Occasional Wife.  A blogger at The Grand Narrative pointed us to several companies along the theme of Hire-A-Hubby.  We added them to our original post on the social construction of “wife.”

We updated a post on gendered marketing of products with images of pink and blue scooters for the mobility impaired and a cordless screwdriver marketed to women by including a manicure set. Turns out it wasn’t very popular.

I love this 1981 Lego ad, sent in by Nora R. (found at Flikr):

This is what I looked like as a kid. Except that I have naturally curly hair that my mom couldn’t control, so add a halo of frizz sticking out everywhere. And it’s been a while since I’ve seen an ad that shows a girl like this–wearing clothes and playing with a toy that aren’t meant to be specifically “feminine” in our current version of that. She’s playing with regular Legos–not some special version for girls that makes a shopping mall or purse or tube of lipstick! And she’s beautiful!

I’ve seen other ads from the ’70s and ’80s, particularly for Tonka trucks, that show girls like this–in clothes that look like they’re actually made for playing instead of making a fashion statement, and playing with toys in the same way boys would, even if it means getting dirty (gasp!). When we see ads that always show girls in pink, playing with “girl” versions of toys, or engaged in passive activities, that’s a particular marketing choice, not some inevitable, obvious way girls need to be depicted to sell products.

[Note: In the comments, we’re getting a lot of love for the Legos. That’s fine and all, but I must speak up for Lincoln Logs, which were way more awesome if you wanted to build corrals to hold your Breyer horses.]

[Note 2: Holy crap! Someone remade the “Thriller” video with Lego people! I have to admit, Legos probably work better for this purpose than Lincoln Logs would.]

NEW! Nov ’09 I found three more examples of ads that seem devoid of gender differentiation (here, here, and here):

Andrea G. alerted us to a Fisher-Price toy, called My Pretty Learning Purse, for children aged 6 to 36 months. Behold:

The purse comes with a dollar bill, a bracelet, a mirror, and a set of keys.  It also sings songs about purple and pink.

Andrea writes:

With these props, a one year old can properly play “woman.”  I felt this is an example of how we do gender and teach it to children, as young as a year old.

At least they’re admitting that femininity must be “learn[ed]?”

UPDATE: Jane, in the comments, linked to a Fisher Price product for boys that is very similar:

Get it!  It’s a tool box and it includes keys, a screwdriver, a hammer, and a saw.

The play involved in each product is essentially identical (e.g., music, putting things in and taking them out), but the theme of the play is gendered.  Do you think this is to please the parents or the kids?

NEW (Dec. ’09)! Monica C. sent along this page from a Target catalog featuring a girl playing with a kitchen and a boy playing with a tool set:

Also in teaching young children femininity and masculinity, see our posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.