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AdFreak drew my attention to a South African liqueur called Wild Africa Cream.  The advertising suggests that drinking it will “unleash your wild side.”

We have posted before about the tendency to associate black people, especially black women, with animals (see here, here, here, and here), as well as the historical roots of this discourse.  But, in this case, the advertising uses both black and white, male and female models.

I think what is interesting here is the association of Africa itself with animalism and primitiveness (an association that no doubt also colors our thinking about black people).  (Notice that the first and only Disney film to be set in Africa, The Lion King, included only animals.)  Catherine MacKinnon coined the term “anachronistic space” to refer to the idea that different parts of the globe represent different historical periods.  See other examples of representing Africa in this way here, here, here, and here.

In line with this tendency to think in this way, in this advertising it’s almost as if black Africans are meant to represent white humans’ own more primitive past (ergo the drink “unleashing your wild side,” whoever you are).

I like to point out to my students that Americans are not more modern than Africans (purposefully eliding the abstract meaning of “modern” in a way that tends to surprise them out of their easy associations).  It is 2009 there, also, and human evolution has progress no further from the “wild” in either place.

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

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.

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

The new National Review depicts Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor as a Buddha:

Many commentators have criticized the cover for using racial stereotypes.   They write as if the people at the National Review are ignorant (e.g., can’t tell the different between different races).   But it’s not an accident, it’s a purposefully racist joke.  Of all the commentary I’ve seen so far, Neil Sinhababu said it the most clearly (via):

…the joke actually depends on incongruities between the stereotypes of the nonwhite ethnicities involved. The Buddha-like pose and Asian features are tied to lofty pretensions of sagelike wisdom. And what sort of person is it who’s pretending to be some kind of sage? A Hispanic woman! As if.

The in-joke in this cover is for people who have already internalized a stereotype of Hispanic women as hotheaded and not that bright. Put one of them in the Buddha suit, and if you’ve absorbed the right racist stereotypes, the incongruity is hilarious.

I think the larger story here is not that the cover is racist, but that race-based criticism is fair game in contemporary U.S. politics.  The last election should have made this abundantly clear (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and herefor examples).

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

“Pink is for Girls” (found at Vintage Ads):

Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink. Pink.

That is all.

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.

Abby J. sent in some photos she took at Toys ‘R’ Us of a bunch of classic board games that are now marketed specifically to girls. We know they’re for girls because they’re all pink:

Of course the girls’ version of Scrabble would spell “fashion.” I assume the boys’ version spells “motorcycle” or something of the sort…though probably with fewer letters, I guess.

The Monopoly game (called the Boutique Edition) looks like a jewelry box:

I don’t know what Mystery Date is all about–I mean, I can guess, but I’m not familiar with the game, and not actually sure I’d want to encourage kids to go on mystery dates, but whatever. Both Abby and I found the pink Ouija board odd. I didn’t know they really still sold them. My grandma came across an old one when they were cleaning out my great-grandma’s stuff a couple of years back and she took it and gave it to my teen-aged cousin. My aunt took great offense and sent it back. My grandma, who is a devout Christian, took offense at my aunt taking offense (and implying that Grandma was giving her grandchildren satanic toys) and now keeps it around and lets kids play with it at her house. She also declared my aunt “no fun” and “too churchy.” If you knew my grandma, or had ever sat there and watched her call out to Jesus to help her find her missing spatula (he complied and made it appear in the drawer where she always keeps the spatulas), you would understand why I nearly choked on my food when she referred to someone else as “too churchy.” Now she’s decided that the Harry Potter movies are not, as so many people she knows had told her, satanic but are instead quite funny.

Anyway, that’s a long rambling unimportant point for a post that just illustrates how much we identify girlhood today with pink and feel the need to make gender-specific version of games where a single version seemed to work perfectly well in the past.

Reader Rachel sent in this photo she took of Legos being clearly marked as “boys’ toys”:

NEW! Sara P.-S., Liz, and Danielle F. sent us links to the new “girlz” version of the PSP (Playstation Portable) because, as Sarah says, it is apparently so “skewed towards boys that they have to specifically advertise the fact that girls [can] play with it”:

NEW (Apr. ’10)! Sunlight Snow sent in a version of Jenga aimed at girls called “Girl Talk” Jenga. Not stopping at the pinkification of the game, the producers decided to add sharing and gossip to it. Each plank now offers a question that girls are supposed to discuss. Apparently precipitous balancing and impending collapse is not fun enough, girls must add desperate crushes and dreams of becoming a veterinarian!

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

We recently critiqued Facebook’s “neutral” avatar for appearing both white and male.  Both Abby J. and Noah Brier pointed us to the fact that Rob Walker at Murketing has been collecting default avatars.  His collection is really interesting.  First, it demonstrates that the avatars don’t need to be gendered at all.

Flikr:

Hotmail:

Google:

Vimeo:

My space:

Friendfeed:

Yahoo:

Youtube:

Second, it demonstrates that the avatars don’t have to human at all:

Twitter:

Posterous:

Third, his collection also suggests that, when the avatar is human and discernibly gendered, it usually appears to be male.  There’s the Facebook avatar, as well as…

EBay:

Car Domain:

Topix:

Yammer:

The avatar tends to be male, unless the company produces a default male and a default female.

Blip FM:

Goodreads:

This collection reveals that the appearance of a company’s default avatar is by no means inevitable or accidental.  Companies must make choices and they are, indeed, making choices about what kind of person is the default person.

Check out his whole collection.  It is growing.

Jamie R. sent in a link to a video that presents a lot of attention-grabbing statistics (which may or may not be accurate). At first it appears that the avatar could be unisex, but then at about 1:18, we see the “female” avatar:

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

At no other place in the video do we see the female avatar except when the “neutral” one is presented as married…indicating, from the context of the video, that it is not unisex or neutral, but male.

MORE! You may have noticed that our revamping of the site involved putting our names up.  Lo and behold, these male avatars popped up next to our names.

So we went into the admin page to see if we had some other option, like maybe something non-human or a female avatar if necessary.  These were our options:

First, blank is really the avatar you see in the first screenshot, it’s neutral which, in reality, is male.  So there is no way to opt out of having an avatar (our tech guy, Jon, is still working on it).

Second, there is no female avatar option.

Third, though there is no female avatar, there is a Monster and a Wavatar option, whatever the hell that is.   So WordPress is allowing you to represent yourself as a Wavatar, but you’re not allowed to be a chick.

Amazing.

NEW (Apr. ’10)! Keri sent a screenshot of her WordPress menu which, she noted, represents the users with two different skin colors.  It’s a nice counterpoint to much of what we see above:

For more on how certain kinds of people get imagined as just people, while others get imagined as certain kinds of people, visit our posts on the Body Worlds exhibit, “flesh” colored products, Pixar films, gender and clothes, and Plan and Playmobile toys.

Jacob G. sent us a link to this slideshow hosted by Details magazine.  As Jacob noted, not only are the women objectified (their naked bodies serve as furniture on which to display men’s accessories), the title of the slideshow makes a joke of it.  It’s titled “Girl Not Included,” just in case viewers mistook the women for purchaseable products alongside the shoes, bags, and belts.

Not safe for work:

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Katie M. sent in a link to a post at Vast Public Indifference about gender in Pixar films, specifically how they tend to focus on male characters, with female characters in smaller or supporting roles. As Caitlin says in the original post,

The Pixar M.O. is (somewhat) subtler than the old your-stepmom-is-a-witch tropes of Disney past. Instead, Pixar’s continued failure to posit female characters as the central protagonists in their stories contributes to the idea that male is neutral and female is particular. This is not to say that Pixar does not write female characters. What I am taking issue with is the ad-nauseam repetition of female characters as helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives.

Here are some images showing main characters from a number of Pixar films. Clearly there are a lot I left out; I chose these both because they were mentioned in the original post by Caitlin, because I’ve seen them, and because they illustrate the general trend.

From “Cars,” a movie in which almost all the characters are male and female characters are mostly car-groupies who swoon over the main character (though there is a female attorney car who doesn’t fall into that category):

“Monsters, Inc.,” where the two central characters are male:

“Toy Story,” same as above:

“A Bug’s Life,” in which not only is the main character male, the actual behaviors of male and female ants have been switched to fit in with our ideas of appropriate gender roles (for another example of changing the behavior of animals to fit human gender norms, see this post on “Bee Movie”):

We do see a Pixar film with a female main character, however: the upcoming”The Bear and the Bow”:

According to Wikipedia, this is Pixar’s “first fairy tale.” So apparently though we get a female lead here, she’s of the spunky-princess type often found in fairy tales.

I have read, in discussions of gender in children’s films, that there is a general belief in the industry that everyone will watch a movie with a male lead character, but boys will be turned off by movies with a female lead. So we see the pattern Caitlin points out: males are the neutral category that are used when the movie is meant to appeal to a broad audience, while females get the lead mostly when the movie is specifically geared toward girls. The assumption here is that girls learn to look at the world through the male gaze (identifying with and liking the male lead, even though he’s male), while boys aren’t socialized to identify with female characters (or actual girls/women) in a similar manner.

I’m torn as to whether I think boys would avoid movies that had female leads. On the one hand, a big part of masculinity is rejecting all things feminine, so I can imagine boys deciding they hated any movie that seemed to be for or about girls. On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if we had more films aimed at kids that had female leads but didn’t fall into the traditional “girl’s movie” categories (such as fairy tales). If “A Bug’s Life” had a female lead but was otherwise the same type of movie–one aimed at a general audience, not specifically girls–would boys reject it? Most of the animated movies I can think of that had females as the main character were focused around romance and other topics deemed feminine (except maybe “Mulan,” where that’s not the main focus), which obscures the issue of whether boys would watch a movie with a female character if it was treated as a general-audience movie. [Note: See the comments for some other examples of movies with female leads that weren’t necessarily romantic-centered, such as “Lilo & Stitch” and “Alice in Wonderland,” as well as some non-animated ones.]

I dunno. Thoughts?

UPDATE: In the comments, Benjamin L. makes a great point:

Something to consider is that most of the people working on Pixar films are men. It’s possible that they might feel unable to successfully create and write dialog for compelling female characters. Take a look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pixar_films Out of the all the writers and directors of Pixar’s films, one is female–Rita Hsiao. Significantly, the films she has worked on, Mulan and Toy Story 2,  are unique in that they both have prominent female characters.