Cate M. emailed us about the promo for the movie “The Killer Inside Me,” saying,

The level of violence is at NSFW levels and quite possibly one of the most ‘trigger warning’ vids I’ve ever seen used to promote a non-horror film.

We get a lot of submissions about sexualized violence toward women, so I thought, “well, ok, we’ll see.” And then I watched it, and at 1:15 in had to pause because I was already horrified. Here’s the whole 5:42 promo. It’s Not At All Safe for Work, and you won’t want to watch it if scenes of sexualized brutality toward women would be a trigger for you. And also, I guess, Spoiler Alert, if that’s your main concern.

UPDATE: The promo keeps being taken down; here’s a link that works for now, but I don’t know for how long.

Clearly, Casey Affleck’s character is a sadistic asshole (the cigar on the guy’s hand), but in the promo, at least, the graphic, sexualized violence is reserved for women…who also appear to like it, at least for a while. Jessica Alba gives in to him, and apparently starts a relationship with him, after he pulls her pants down and whips her. Perhaps that’s because she’s a prostitute; of course she’d like a dominant man who plays rough, right?

The thing is, you could make this movie and tell the same story without actually showing all the violence in such a graphic way. Movies imply things all the time. It’s a choice to show this type of violence toward women as a form of entertainment…and to show the women liking it.

See our posts on increases in violence toward women on primetime TV, sexualized violence on TV crime procedurals, and the movie “DeadGirl.”

Kay, a student at a University in Munich, sent along an invitation for a Corps Isaria fraternity, or or “Burschenschafts,” party. The cover for the invitation reads “Isarias Gute Kinderstube” which, she explains, “translates literally to good nursery and means something like being well raised, knowing how to behave.”

When you open the invitation you see a naked woman, covered only by a teddy bear, alongside baby-related items (a Snuffalufagus, a rocking Zebra, and a crib) and party-related items (a disco ball, a stag’s head, and high heeled shoes):

Kay explains that the copy, “Das Corps Isaria gibt sich die Ehre und laedt zur eskaloesesten Pyjamaparty der Stadt” translates into something like “The Corps Isaria is honored to host the most risque sleepover in town.”

The invitation is another example of the infantilization of women. Or, as Kay put it, a “mixture of the male gaze and child porn fetishism.”

For more infantilization of women, see here, here, here, here, and 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.

Ilari Sani sent in this vintage ad encouraging Americans to eat vegetables and “Toughen Up.”  Today salad is definitely considered “girl food,” and there are plenty of vintage examples in which meat was connected with strength and toughness (and, more generally, masculinity; see below).  This ad tries to contest that idea.  I wonder if the effort was successful in its day, or if it fell flat alongside the meat = real food narrative.

For vintage examples of meat being connected to masculinity, see here and here.  For contemporary examples, see here and here.

Found at Vintage Ads.

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

Parents Television Council just released their new data comparing the incidence of violence against women and girls by CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX during prime time sweeps in 2004 and 2009 (report here).  They found a 120% increase in depictions of violence against women and girls amidst a steady rate of overall frequency of violence.

They write:

Cumulatively, across all study periods and all networks, the most frequent type of violence was beating (29%), followed by credible threats of violence (18%), shooting (11%), rape (8%), stabbing (6%), and torture (2%).  Violence against women resulted in death 19% of the time.

Violence towards women or the graphic consequences of violence tends overwhelmingly to be depicted (92%) rather than implied (5%) or described (3%).

So those’re the numbers, how about some examples of the normalization of violence against women: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two, and forty-three.

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

Farrah F. sent us a link to an article on the website for Forward, a newspaper aimed at the American Jewish community. The article looks at the gender gap in pay at Jewish community organizations. According to the article,

…a Forward survey of 75 major American Jewish communal organizations found that fewer than one in six are run by women, and those women are paid 61 cents to every dollar earned by male leaders.

Incomes of leaders of the organizations they surveyed (data is from 2008 unless otherwise specified, and women are highlighted in blue):

The Forward’s survey was drawn from the most recent public records or, if that information wasn’t available, from the organization itself. The median salary for men was $287,702, while the median for women was $175,211, amounting to a ratio of 61 cents to one dollar.

More from the article:

Women comprise about 75% of those employed by federations, advocacy and social service organizations, and religious and educational institutions, but occupy only 14.3% of the top positions. Of the 11 female leaders identified in this survey, three are in interim roles.

In another article, Forward discusses family leave policies at Jewish organizations, finding that relatively few offer paid leave:

UPDATE: A few people have asked why I chose to post about these particular organizations. The short answer is: because that’s what I had. My interest here wasn’t in the religious aspect, but in the gender disparities in volunteer/community organizations; I suspect these same trends occur in a lot of similar organizations, not just Jewish ones. I wish I had info on a more general set, but I so far haven’t been able to find a study like this one, but for a wider array of organizations. If anyone knows of one, I’d love to post it.

Hat tip to x-ray delta one, via Copyranter.

NEW! (Dec. ’09): Larry (of The Daily Mirror) found two images of Earhart from 1937 in the L.A. Times photo archives. In both Earhart was asked to pose in flirty or cutesy ways that it’s hard to imagine a famous male pilot being posed in:

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

How much of the earth can humans now access?  Some images developed by the New Scientist (via ChartPorn) give us some great visuals showing just how thoroughly we’ve colonized the (non-ocean) planet.

A map of all roads:

A map of all railroads:

A map of all navigable rivers:

Considering all of these modes of transportation and the type of terrain, the New Scientist calculated how long it would take, from everywhere on the planet, to get to a city of 50,000 people or more:

They estimate that less than 10% of the world is more than two days from the nearest city. The most remote place, they calculate, is the Tibetan plateau.

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

Victoria S. observed that, when 20-year-old Morgan Harrington went missing, the Nancy Grace show didn’ t do a story about missing Morgan Harrington, they did a story about the missing “co-ed beauty”:

As Victoria said, if any of us go missing, let’s hope we’re lucky enough to be beautiful with lots of photos of us posing with our pretty girlfriends and glamour shots in our sunglasses.

See a previous post arguing that missing children that get a lot of media coverage tend to be blond and attractive.

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