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Last month I wrote about gender differences in notions of health in a 1922 public health campaign designed to teach American teens about sex.

Today, we might not recognize that any of these recommendations had anything to do with sex. But in fact, they many of them were about masturbation.  At this time, fewer physicians thought that it would cause madness, epilepsy, homosexuality, or gout, but they still believed that it would encourage depravity and a lack of self-discipline.

To encourage a healthy sexuality, they advised lots of exercise. Exercise was believed to teach self-control. It was also considered a good outlet for “energy,” leaving one to worn out to masturbate.

TEXT:

Can you walk 20 miles in a day? Can you work an 8-hour day in the field? Can you “chin yourself” 8 times? Can you run 100 yards in 12 seconds?

They promoted a healthy diet.  Too much meat and too much spice were thought to encourage masturbation.

TEXT:

1. Eat fresh vegetables, cereals, bread and butter, eggs, fruit and a little meat or fish. 2. Eat slowly and thoroughly masticate (chew) your food. 3. Use judgment in amount and choice of foods. 4. Drink 6 to 10 glasses of water a day. Do not drink much water after supper. 5. Use your tooth brush at least twice a day — in the morning and at night.

People were also advised to sleep in well-ventilated rooms and to wear loose clothes that did not cause any friction:

TEXT:

Sleep with the windows open. “Turn in” at regular hours. Get 8 to 9 hours sleep every night.

Interestingly, only the boys’ posters actually discuss masturbation directly (self-abuse).

TITLE: Outdoor Life (avoid self-abuse)

TEXT:

1. Athletics. 2. Abundant outdoor life. 3. Wholesome companions. 4. Lots of good fun. 5. Constant employment. 6. Will power will help a boy break the habit called “self-abuse” (in case he has acquired the habit) and recover from any harm it may have done. This habit does not produce the terrible effects some ignorant people say it does. Most boys who have abused themselves stop before any great harm is done. Self-abuse may, however, seriously hinder a boy’s progress toward vigorous manhood. It is a selfish, childish, stupid habit. The strong boy will “cut it out.”

The posters are held at the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota Libraries.

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Christina Barmon is a doctoral student at Georgia State University studying sociology and gerontology.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Societies are permeated with visual images. This means that images dominate our lives. However, no other images confront us so frequently as advertising images. They belong to the moment. We see them as we turn a magazine page, as we drive past a billboard, and as we visit a website.  However fleeting, they are powerful agents of socialization.

Sociologist Erving Goffman described and exhibited subtle features of gender displays in his book Gender Advertisements. One significant feature that he noted was the ritualization of subordination in which women are portrayed in clowning and costume-like characters. This still rears its ugly head in today’s advertisements.

According to Goffman, “the use of entire body as a playful gesticulative device, a sort of body clowning” is commonly used in advertisements to indicate lack of seriousness struck by a childlike pose (p. 50).

Images reproduced in Gender Advertisements (Goffman, 1979, p.50)

Advertisement found in a file-hosting web site:

The clownish poses represent in these images clearly remind us some photos of female hysterics taken by Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893) who was not only a neurologist but also an artist.

Charcot was the inventor/discoverer of the female psychic affliction of “hysteria” at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris that confined four thousand incurable or mad women. For delving into the nature of hysteria, Charcot armed himself with photography. He extensively photographed the different stages and forms of hysteria and calibrated them into a general type called “the great hysterical attack.” Charcot believed that this attack proceeds in four phases, the second of which is called clownism or so-called illogical movements.

Image taken by Charcot and reproduced in Invention of Hysteria (Didi-Huberman, 2003, p.147)

Charcot used the clowning to delegitimate so-called hysterical women, and Goffman saw such representations for what they are, a way to portray women as inferior, emotionally childlike, unserious.  Over 100 years later, images of clowning women are still used to reinforce gender discrimination and position females as inferior.

References:

Didi-Huberman, G. (2003). Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Goffman, E. (1979). Gender advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Zahra Kordjazi earned her M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, with a special interest in social semiotics, gender, visual literacy, and sociolinguistics. This post is based on her thesis, Images Matter: Gender Positioning in Contemporary English-Learning Software Applications, a semiological content analysis of gender positioning.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a New York Times slideshow of the contents of “MREs” from different countries.   MREs stands for “Meals Ready to Eat”; they are combat rations for soldiers. The rations are each some combination of comfort food, nutrition, and necessity.  And the different contents across countries reveal some interesting similarities and differences.

All MREs include some sort of meat, but the type and form of the meat vary, from meatballs to paté.  Meanwhile, almost all of the MREs include candy; it’s probably cheap, in the big scheme of things, to throw a few skittles, m&ms, or squares of chocolate, but what a treat it must be.  Likewise, the fruit-flavored beverages and tea must be a taste of home.  As for practicality, countries vary in whether they provide moist towelettes, toothpicks, tooth brushes.   Most offer matches; the U.S. includes toilet paper.

That said, the content of rations are also strikingly consistent.  I’ve love to see a flow chart tracing the development of MREs.  Were the logics for these rations developed in isolation?  Or were some countries influential over others?

These are my uneducated observations.  Feel free to offer more informed thoughts in the comments.

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.

Comedians exercise a curious privilege, which allows them to peddle controversial conclusions and uncomfortable insights without suffering the usual scorn and admonishment that comes with challenging systems of power or bringing indelicate knowledge about the world to the surface. For instance, the suggestion that Americans are deeply divided by race and class usually causes people to fidget, yet Chris Rock was greeted with laughter and applause when he unabashedly criticized the racialized wealth gap in the United States. Similarly, Louis C.K. received a rousing applause when he discussed his privilege as a white male, and Hari Kondabolu made an entire room burst into laughter by exposing the nonsensical logic underlying stereotypes aimed at Mexican immigrants.

But comedy is just as likely to reinforce stereotypes as it is to criticize them. Consider Jeff Dunham’s act featuring his popular dummy, “Achmed the Dead Terrorist.” In the clip below, from a 2007 performance, Dunham draws upon a number of stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, many of which have been around since well before the attacks on September 11th, 2001:

Dunham is not deploying social criticism, but is instead uncritically drawing on racist representations for laughs. Arabs and Muslims, like the Achmed character, are typically portrayed as religious fanatics. They are often depicted as irrationally angry, even as self-proclaimed terrorists. But if they are dangerous, they are dangerous buffoons and are often too incompetent to pull off their own deadly plots.

Comedians can be understood as articulators of knowledge about the world. They contribute to the persistence of stereotypes at times, but can also articulate convincing arguments against them. This holds for other types of comedic performance as well. Political cartoons, comedy sketches, and even situation comedies all peddle indelicate knowledge about the racialized Other. For instance, in “Ali-Baba Bound,” a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1940, Porky Pig runs up against Ali-Baba and his “Dirty Sleeves.” The humor is constructed around a basic scaffolding of the Arab as dirty and sneaky. They are too primitive to competently use rockets and must strap explosives to their heads:

The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor the following year ignited a discursive explosion surrounding the Japanese, those living in America and abroad; for a time Arabs and Muslims occupied a relatively small sliver of American concern. It is striking how eerily similar representations of Japanese persons were to those of Arabs and Muslims. However, fed by photographic evidence of the destruction of Pearl Harbor and the tangible realities associated with the American war machine, dominant representations of the treacherous Japanese Other went further and faster. Each representation of the “Jap” became more and more fanciful, each illustration seemingly emboldened by the last to push the caricature even further.

Celebrated children’s author Dr. Seuss published a cartoon only weeks before the United States would forcibly relocate 120,000 ethnic Japanese persons living in the United States to internment camps. The cartoon depicts a buck-toothed, fifth column of Japanese Americans lining up from Washington to California for their very own box of TNT. A man scales the rooftop of the explosives depot “waiting for the signal from home.”

Or consider a Looney Tunes cartoon from the period, “Tokio Jokio,” which similarly presents Japanese people with buck teeth and buffoonish behavior:

Whereas the Seuss cartoon presents extant fears about a treacherous Japanese enemy living among us, the Looney Tunes cartoon lampoons them as bumbling idiots. In the Seuss cartoon, their tribal-like loyalties to the Emperor mean they are capable of doing just about anything, but in the Looney Tunes cartoon they are too incompetent to prevent their own Fire Prevention Headquarters from burning to the ground. Such seemingly contradictory representations permeated the American imagination of the time, alternately stoking anxieties while assuring Americans of their national and even racial superiority.

These racist representations aimed at the Japanese were not buried by the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japanese cities; they have proven to be free-floating and transferable to our emergent enemies. Today, Arabs and Muslims are routinely depicted in comedy as incompetent. They are again the bumbling idiots, simultaneously too stupid to successfully perpetrate an attack and just stupid enough to commit truly heinous crimes. The imagined fifth column has become the terrorist sleeper cell. In 1942 we feared Japanese Americans were blindly loyal to “their” Emperor. Today we are bombarded with ideas about the tribal loyalties of American Muslims. So powerful are these loyalties, it is often suggested, Muslims would happily kill themselves to bring about the demise of Western civilization. The fanatical Middle Eastern suicide bomber is the new banzai charger and Japanese Kamikazi pilot.

A joke making the rounds of the internet goes something like this: “A friend of mine has started a new business. He’s manufacturing land mines that look like prayer mats. It’s doing well. He says prophets are going through the roof.” This joke, Dunham’s comedy sketch, and the Looney Tunes cartoons all mark historical moments when the racialized Other became so thoroughly demonized and devalued in the public consciousness, our undifferentiated “enemies” became so feared for their treachery and immorality, that it became possible to make light of hypothetical and real violence perpetrated against them. One might speculate that it is strangely intoxicating to spot the boogieman tripping on his shoelaces, embarrassing himself, or dying by his own venom. The Achmed character’s tired threat, “I kill you!” is funny, perhaps, because his voice cracks like a thirteen-year-old boy, and we are entertained by the irony that someone so evil could appear so weak.

This comedy, which uncritically trades in the negative stereotypes aimed at Arabs and Muslims and is able to make an audience laugh at references to suicide bombing, is only possible because Arabs and Muslims have been successfully demonized and devalued. Comedians write jokes to get laughs, but they also operate from a space which grants them temporary license to openly discuss controversial ideas. Comedians contribute to the discourse, just as readily they respond to it, and their sets are just as capable of exposing hidden discrimination as reinforcing it.

Lester Andrist is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in the role of social capital and personal networks in finding jobs in India and Taiwan and cultural representations of groups in indefinite detention. He is a co-editor of the website The Sociological Cinema, where a longer version of this post first appeared.

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

In the 1940s and ’50s dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a synthetic pesticide better known as DDT, was used to kill bugs that spread malaria and typhus in several parts of the world.  DDT was argued to be toxic to humans and the environment in the famous environmental opus, Silent Spring.  It was banned by the U.S. government in 1972.

Before all that, though, it was sprayed in American neighborhoods to suppress insect populations. The new movie Tree of Life has a great scene re-enacting the way that children would frolick in the spray as the DDT trucks went by. Here are two screen shots from the trailer:

Searching around, I also found some vintage footage (the person who uploaded the clip doesn’t specify the documentary):

The scene reminded me of an old post we’d written, below, featuring advertisements for the pesticide, one with the ironic slogan “DDT is good for Me-e-e!”

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DDT was a pesticide marketed to housewives (and many others). We later discovered it to be an environmental toxin. Below are three of the advertisements (via Mindfully and KnowDrama and noticed thanks to John L.):

DDT-laced wallpaper, from Copyranter:

(text for this final ad after the jump)

more...

Celebrate Father’s Day this year with the weird American habit of gendering food!

(source)

Let us not forget that steak = manfood.  Like catfood and dogfood, manfood must be carefully produced so as to cater to man’s natural diet.  His ancestors hunted the wild baked potato, the shy ale, and the feisty tenderloin.  Today, Manfood Inc. scientifically calibrates each and every Father’s Day dinner to man’s instinctual stomach, so you can treat your man to the best.  We call it a MENu.

For more, see this vintage Campbell’s ad marketing meat for men, the gendered menu at Brick House, this ad campaign warning of sissified dogs, and this extensive collection of gendered and sexualized food.  See also this counter-example: a vintage ad arguing that vegetables make you tough and strong.

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.

Please enjoy these posts from Father’s Days past:

Stereotyping Men on Dad’s Day

• Feed Them Meat!
• Buy Them Non-Emasculating Cooking Supplies!

Also…

• Are You Coming on to me Daughter?
• Including Daughters in Father’s Day

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.

“Hey! Come on! Eating meat is without any ethical ramifications! See, Mr. Greenjeans? The animals aren’t complaining! So what’s your problem?”

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.