Search results for pink

One of my former students, Kim D., brought my attention to the old and new versions of Strawberry Shortcake (found here):

Her hair has gotten longer and sexier and she’s more “human” looking. Her clothes are also more form-fitting, and her face is thinner.

Here is a close-up on their faces, from this series of images focusing on her “makeover”:

Notice her lips are fuller and pinker and her eyes are larger. She also has fewer freckles.

The New York Times discussed her makeover:

Strawberry Shortcake was having an identity crisis. The “it” doll and cartoon star of the 1980s was just not connecting with modern girls. Too candy-obsessed. Too ditzy. Too fond of wearing bloomers.So her owner, American Greetings Properties, worked for a year on what it calls a “fruit-forward” makeover. Strawberry Shortcake, part of a line of scented dolls, now prefers fresh fruit to gumdrops, appears to wear just a dab of lipstick (but no rouge), and spends her time chatting on a cellphone instead of brushing her calico cat, Custard.

I don’t remember Strawberry Shortcake being “ditzy,” but maybe my memory is bad. And do kids really like cell phones better than pets these days? They probably do, I’m just out of touch.

Here is the original Holly Hobbie from the 1970s (found here):

The new, sassier version, from USA Today:

There’s a Holly Hobbie website where you can read her journal and watch videos.

When I started looking at these, I was puzzled; if the originals are so unappealing to today’s kids, why are they being re-released? Why not just come up with new products? I found some interesting commentary on Jezebel.com:

As part of a growing toy-industry trend (Care Bears are getting slimmed down; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be more pumped, less aggro), vintage brands are being reworked to appeal to the kids, while still playing on young parents’ nostalgia…What I find bizarre about all this is the implicit assumption that kids can’t relate to a character who’s not exactly like themselves. Strawberry Shortcake wasn’t popular twenty years ago because we all wore bloomers and lolled around in a berry patch; it was cute and fun and the dolls smelled good. This kind of formulaic thinking presupposes a narcissism that, ironically, agendas like these seem to create.

I think she may be on to something there: the appeal is to parents, not the kids themselves. To a little kid, Strawberry Shortcake and Holly Hobbie have no history and aren’t particularly different from other toys available at the store. It’s their parents who have an attachment to the toys. But since the prevailing wisdom is that kids are more “sophisticated” and grown-up at earlier ages, the toys are tarted up a bit to look more sexified teen or pre-teen girls.

I think these images are good for showing the trend toward making girls’ toys, even those for young girls, increasingly sexy, with an emphasis on more human (as opposed to obviously toy-like) features, make-up, and flirty eyelashes and lips. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not meaning to romanticize the earlier versions as some perfect type of toy for girls or that there’s some idyllic past when childhood was sweet and innocent. Personally, I thought Holly Hobbie was boring when I was a kid, though I adored Strawberry Shortcake (or, more specifically, Blueberry Muffin and Lime Chiffon; all I really cared about was the way they smelled and the pets they came with–I was a farm kid, so animal toys were always of great interest to me). But I do think there’s something disturbing about the ways that so many of the toys we give girls today constantly reinforce the message that sexiness and being flirty are desirable attributes, even for young girls.

That might lead to a larger discussion: why are we seeing this trend? What’s going on there? What might be the cultural impetus behind the choices to design, manufacture, market, and purchase toys that incorporate these messages about femininity?

Thanks, Kim!

CBS Sunday Morning had a segment on the new-ish phenomenon of “Maid Cafés.” I gathered from the report that they are most popular in areas of Japan where there are a lot of (male) “geeks.” Here’s a description from a Boston.com article on these restaurants:

“Welcome home, Master,” says the maid as she bows deeply, hands clasped in front of a starched pinafore worn over a short pink dress.

This maid serves not some aristocrat but a string of pop-culture-mad customers at a “Maid Cafe” in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, long known as a Mecca for electronics buffs but now also the center of the capital’s “nerd culture.”

“When they address you as ‘Master’, the feeling you get is like a high,” says Koji Abei, a 20-year-old student having coffee with a friend at the Royal Milk Cafe and Aromacare.

Here’s a wikipedia description— discussing how these cafés pull various cultural practices– Japanese manga, anime, Japanese geishas, and French (or English) maids. Apparently, there are now Maid Cafés in Canada and Hong Kong (the one in Hong Kong is called the “Master-and-maid café”). Here are some videos as well– from the U.S. news, and from Japanese news (sorry it isn’t translated). These might make for an interesting discussion on culture, globalization, and gender.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjNGX-jQS94[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0JmfyP4KPs[/youtube]

I saw these tee shirts on display at Walgreens today and did a double-take. And then I drove all the way home to get my camera. They’re for children– very tiny children (labeled 2T, 3T etc.). And they’re on sale for the bargain price of $7.99 each, marked down from the original $15!!

Let’s see what these tee shirts say:

“Lock up your daughters” on a black tee, which I assume is for boys. Think about what that means for a moment.

“Does this diaper make my butt look big?” on a pink tee, for girls.

“My dad rocks” on a red tee (for boys, I think). This doesn’t make much of a statement until you compare it with the accompanying tees about mothers…

“My mom’s hotter than your mom” on a white tee (again, I think for boys).

“My mom is hot” on a blue tee (boys).

and the clever “I cry when ugly people hold me” on black (for boys?).

While these aren’t quite as terrible as the ones I dug up on the internets a while ago, I’m shocked to see them on sale at Walgreens. I guess I expect to find creepy, sexist stuff online more often than at my friendly neighborhood drugstore.

These images are of a beer marketed specifically to women in 1953, Storzette by Storz.

From the website:

“In 1953 Storz tried to market a new product for women, ‘Storzette.’ Designed to be a beer for the ladies it was supposedly not too bitter and was calorie controlled. it also came in a smaller can, 8 ounces, which Storz called “Queen sized” and it came in four can packs called “Princess Packs.” The brewery noted that market studies showed that many women felt that the standard 12 oz can provided too large a serving. The beer inside was also different, made to be less bitter than standard beers. The can even had a pink orchid pictured on it to help it appeal to women. It’s initial test market results in San Diego seemed positive, but in the end the effort was not successful and Storzette did not last long on the market. As a result, the little can with the orchid is very scarce. Storz also used a slogan on its regular cans for awhile in the 1950s, “the Orchid of Beer” which has to be one of the more unusual beer advertising slogans.”

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.

Jessica Simpson wore a pink Tony Romo (Dallas Cowboys quarterback) jersey at a recent game. In case you didn’t know, they are dating. This was the first time she went to one of his games and actively acknowledged their relationship.

The Cowboys lost. And here’s the fascinating thing: She was immediately blamed for the loss. This photo, where she looks sort of pouty and upset, has popped up everywhere, though there are photos available where she looks happy and is cheering. Here is a Dallas Morning News column addressing the blame put on Jessica Simpson.

These two Jessica masks are available here; the idea is that fans of the teams the Cowboys are playing should take them to games to throw Romo off so the Cowboys will lose (another mask is available at RuinRomo).

This whole story of Jessica causing the Cowboys to lose was a big enough deal that yesterday, while sitting in a restaurant, I saw ESPN announce that she will not attend the upcoming Cowboys game against the New York Giants. FOX News added the story to their website. This is news! In this article, Romo insists he is focused on the game, not Jessica.

This fits in with a long line of women being seen as a threat to men’s performance in male-dominated arenas (sports, the military, and police forces in particular). When I taught Sociology of Sport we discussed how in the early 1900s single women who attended baseball games would be harassed, spit at, and sometimes removed from the game by other fans who felt they were going to distract the players and make them lose. There’s also the long-standing belief that men shouldn’t have sex before a game. Women sap men’s strength (think Sampson and Delilah in the Old Testament), and men who become romantically/sexually involved with women risk becoming weak (i.e., feminine) and failing in the masculine world.

This story might be a good addition to the pictures of pink athletic team jerseys.

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

This is a nice compliment to our post of the t-shirt with pictures of safety pins on it (an example of the co-optation of punk culture):

When you’re so tough that you are compelled to hang a razor blade around your neck, but not so tough that you want an ouchie.

This one is a nice example, also, of the way in which we “play” with gender by collapsing traditionally distinct ideas (masculine toughness symbolized by the razor blade and sweet femininity symbolized by the heart) (see also sparkly camouflage, trucker hats with the word “princess” written across them, and pink sports jerseys).

Buy the fake razor blade jewelry here (or don’t).

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.

Text:

YOUR DAD WAS NOT A METROSEXUAL. H didn’t do pilates. Moisturize. Or drink pink cocktails. Your Dad drank whisky cocktails. Made with Canadian Club. Served in a rocks glass. They tasted good. They were effortless. DAMN RIGHT YOUR DAD DRANK IT.

Toph sent in another Canadian Club ad that makes it clear that it’s awesome if your dad was a player:

Text:

Your Mom wasn’t your Dad’s first.  He went out.  He got two numbers in the same night.  He drank cocktails.  but they were whisky cocktails.  Made with Canadian Club.  Served in a rocks glass.  They tasted good.  They were effortless.

I’m going to use this to talk about the sexual double standard–try to imagine the same ad, but saying “Your dad wasn’t your mom’s first” with pictures of her with several different men. I don’t think the impression would be the same.

Thanks, Toph!

NEW: Outdoor version of “Your Dad had a van for a reason.”