Lisa G. sent in a photo she took of side-by-side stories in Metro, a free newspaper in Toronto, that ran back in May. The headlines alone reinforce common expectations about gender, housework, and leisure time, and I submit them to you without further comment:

I love a newborn elephant as much as the next person, probably quite significantly more, but must we get all stupid and say that she likes pink? Must we, Zooborns? Really? Sigh.

Sent in by Chloe Angyal at Feministing. Thanks Chloe!

Pink, by the way, has only been associated with female humans for the last 60 years or so, and only in parts of the world.  See, for example, our posts on a vintage Father’s Birthday card and advice for mothers. (And, while we’re at it, this art project is pretty stunning.)  I’m pretty sure elephants, even girl ones, are indifferent.

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.

Attention upper-middle class white women: help save poor Indian women from a life of forced prostitution, all from the comfort of your hammock! Simply purchase some comfy, trendy pants.

(Image from International Princess Project, the organization behind Punjammies)

Aliyah C. wrote to us about a series of photos on a website for a product called Punjammies. The images offer a stark illustration of the racial, classed, and gendered nature of many “development” initiatives.

According to their website, Punjammies claims to offer Indian women who have escaped forced prostitution a chance to rebuild their lives by providing them with the marketable skill of manufacturing clothing.

Images in the Punjammies catalogue make it clear who the target market is: They feature exclusively white women, luxuriously lounging about in Punjammies attire.

Meanwhile, images on the “About” page depict the women purportedly empowered by this operation, conducting manual labour to produce Punjammies products.

Consumerism-driven development initiatives like Punjammies fail to challenge the inherent inequalities at play in a situation where wealthy, white women in the developed world are seen as benevolent and charitable for making a purchase, while women in developing countries manufacturing the products are portrayed as beneficiaries. Furthermore, as Barbara Heron might argue, Punjammies is a prime example of how development initiatives often play into notions of white female subjectivity as compassionate and caring, dependent upon the Othering of women of colour in the south.  In fact, since colonialism, the advantages that accrue to those of us in developed countries have been linked to the disadvantages faced by the rest of the world. Our economies are not separate entities, they are intimately linked.

Reflecting upon images like these should remind us to remain critical of the ways in which “development” is marketed to us, and how it can perpetuate rather than challenge inequalities.

Reference: Heron, B. (2007). Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender and the Helping Imperative. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press.

Hayley Price has a background in sociology, international development studies, and education. She recently completed her Masters degree in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

In honor of the American Sociological Association’s annual conference kicking off at Caesar’s Palace today — and because of my tweet about a Baudrillard-inspired drinking game — I am reposting this hilarious mistake on the part of the U.S. Postal Service.

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A few years ago, my friend Brady introduced me to postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard’s arguments about hyperreality. Without getting into the details of semiotics or postmodernism, hyperreality refers to a situation where the signs (particularly media images) used to represent reality become more real to us than the original reality they were supposed to represent.

Soon after that, I was waiting to cross the street on the Strip here in Vegas and overheard a young woman remark to a friend that after visiting the New York-New York casino, she felt just like she’d actually been to New York. Her friend enthused, “I know! I don’t know why we’d ever even need to go there now! I feel like we’ve already seen it.”

I don’t know if Baudrillard discussed Las Vegas — Disneyland and L.A. were his favorite examples, from what I can tell — but you could certainly teach an entire class on hyperreality using Vegas as your case study.

Baudrillard came to mind when we read a BoingBoing article about a mistake from the U.S. Postal Service. The USPS recently released this stamp:

So, a stamp feature the Statue of Liberty. Nothing shocking there. Except…it turns out the image on the stamp isn’t based on the actual Statue of Liberty. A perceptive stamp collector realized that the image is actually of the replica of the Statue of Liberty that stands outside the New York-New York casino:

Close-ups reveal distinct differences between the original and the replica: the facial features are more defined on the replica, and the hair, the proportions of the arm, and folds of the clothing are different.

The U.S. Postal Service produced the stamp and released it along with information about the history of the actual Statue of Liberty. And thus we have a representation (the stamp) of a representation (the photo that served as the model for the stamp) of a representation (the replica statue in Las Vegas) of the original thing the Postal Service intended to portray…and no one there caught the slippage between the intended reality and the representation at any point in the production process.

I think Baudrillard would get a kick out of this.

For more on hyperreality, see Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation. Also, for more on Vegas and simulation, you might check out Norman Denzin’s article “Rain Man in Las Vegas,” in Symbolic Interaction v. 16, p. 65-78 (1993).

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

Every once in a while we here at SocImages pick a fight and a couple of years ago we sunk our teeth into satire and didn’t let go. Satirical humor is often used to expose prejudice and bigotry and it can be damn effective, as many viewers of The Colbert Report will testify.  But it’s also a risky strategy.  It makes fun of by doing; so, for example, it exposes racism by being extremely, over-the-top, no-one-will-ever-believe-we’re-serious racist. Except for… someone might think you’re being serious.  In fact, a significant proportion of political conservatives viewing The Colbert Report believe that he is conservative like them. They recognize that he’s trying to be funny, but they don’t think he’s joking.

In our effort to think more critically about satire, we covered Amy Sedaris’ hipster racism, Ellen DeGeneres’ CoverGirl commercial, a New Yorker cover depicting Obama as a Muslim, covers of the National Review featuring Bill Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor, and board games.  We also featured Jay Smooth’s commentary on Asher Roth using the phrase “nappy headed hos.”

Now Anita Sarkeesian, of Feminist Frequency, offers another illustration of how satire doesn’t always work the way progressives would like it to.  She takes on TV commercials, arguing that ironic racism and sexism is still racism and sexism. Ironic advertising, she argues, allows marketers to “…use all the racist, sexist, misogynist imagery they want, and simultaneously distance themselves from it with a little wink and a nod.”  You be the judge:

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 vintage clipping below is a political advertisement from 1915 opposing women’s suffrage in Massachusetts. It claims that most women in the state do not want the vote, so if voting men gave women suffrage, they would be doing so against their will.  This, they claim, would be undemocratic.   This sounds ironic, but it makes sense in a world where men were suppose to be women’s political representatives.

The ad then goes on to try to demonize those women who do want the right to vote by associating them with other groups widely stigmatized at that time: feminists, of course, but also socialists, Mormons, and members of the I.W.W. The acronym stands for Industrial Workers of the World, an organization founded in 1905 as an alternative to the American Federation of Labor, reportedly consisting of anarchists, socialists, and union members (wiki).

Women in Massachusetts would be granted the right to vote on this day, August 18th, five years later, not by the residents of the state, but by Federal decree.

Via BoingBoing.

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.

Katrin let us know about this great clip from PBS News Hour (and posted at Boing Boing) about inequality and Americans’ perceptions about how wealth is distributed in the U.S. It’s a great clip:

PBS posted the pie charts used in the video as well.

Erg. Ugh. Just…[cringe]. That is my reaction upon seeing a clip (first posted at Jezebel), sent in by Dmitriy T.M., of a segment from a recent episode of the reality show Bachelor Pad. The show is a spinoff of the popular shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, consisting initially of 20 former contestants from those two shows, one of whom is voted off by the rest of the cast each week. This week, the contestants indicated their votes for who should leave by getting to anonymously throw paint-filled “eggs” at others’ backs. But in case that wasn’t sufficiently humiliating, the host also had contestants throw eggs in response to the question “Who are you least attracted to?” Here’s the segment with the women:

It’s a depressing illustration of the current TV obsession with public humiliation and bullying as entertainment. It’s hard not to feel for Erica as she stands there feeling each successive hit, being publicly held up as the least desirable woman there. But her response is also revealing; it exemplifies the way women are encouraged to think of themselves as being in competition. At 2:54 Erica talks about the experience and the difficulty of having a body that, while appearing incredibly thin to me, in that environment qualifies as notably curvaceous.

But in her ability to defend herself and push back against the judgments of others, she falls back on a common strategy: not questioning the standards of beauty themselves, but simply trying to refocus them, in this case (at about 3:05) pointing to another woman who is “way bigger” and not “that pretty.” The result is to reaffirm both the idea that body size is an objective and essential measure of attractiveness (so being bigger automatically should make you less attractive than a smaller woman) and that women’s self-esteem and resistance to negative judgments of their own attractiveness must come at the expense of other women, with whom them are always, and inevitably, in competition.