In response to Gwen’s post on butts, I offer you crotches. We’re being super highbrow today.
The following not-safe-for-work ads place a product (or copy) at a woman’s crotch. Are they promising sexual access? Just trying to draw attention? Using shock tactics? I don’t know.
Taylor D. (of Thanks for Participating) sent in a link to The Assimilated Negro’s post of ads that use women’s ass-cracks prominently. Not safe for work, so after the jump:
“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.
Thomas Sander at the Social Capital Blog writes: “Obviously the $1,000,000 question is whether these behavioral changes are likely to continue beyond the Obama candidacy.” I think the answer to this, at least as far as racial composition goes, is yes. What we see here is a two decade long trend, not a blip inspired by Obama.
Data compiled by the the Pew Research Center, via Thick Culture.
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.
Michael G., Sarahjane C., and Marlow sent us this commercial, designed for a small market, advertising a furniture store called The Red House. It was produced by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. It is a real commercial, though it was designed to self-consciously spoof the many poorly-produced and weirdly-sloganed commercials that we’ve all seen advertising local small businesses on late night television. Word on the street is that the commercial has been maligned as racist. What do you think?
McLaughlin and Neal felt obliged to respond to the accusations of racism in another video. In it, they make a distinction between “racist” and “racial” and suggest that the video only seems racist if any and all talk that acknowledges race is considered bad.
This is an example of how the internet operates as a public sphere and can facilitate discussion about difficult topics. Without youtube, attention to this commercial would have remained local and/or restricted to a two minute discussion on the nightly news. Instead, the commercial has been viewed over 1.2 millions times and the response has been viewed over 50,000 times (as of today). Blogs all over the internet have picked up on the controversy and people are chiming in. I wouldn’t say that the discussion is all that sophisticated, but it is really interesting to see so many Americans discussing racism at all.
Then again, maybe the commercial has gotten so much attention because most people conclude that it is not racist. That is, are race and racism more likely to be widely discussed when the collective conclusion is “not racism”? Do we see such wide discussion of clearly racist material?
What do you think? Is this an example of the revolutionary power of the internet? Or just business as usual?
American workers have lost power relative to their employers since the heyday of unionization during the industrial era. One way in which employees gained was through the extension of benefits to full-time workers: salary, relative job security, health insurance, sick pay, paid vacation, parental leave, etc. Full-time jobs, however, are being replaced by part-time jobs, and with them have gone much of the power and most of the benefits that workers were able to gain through unionization.
You would think, though, that jobs that require a high level of education and training might be immune from these trends. Perhaps not.
The American Federation of Teachers released a report that included data on the percentage of employees at U.S. colleges and universities that are full-time tenure-track professors, full-time non-tenure track, adjunct (part-time) professors, and graduate students. As you can see, the percentage of full-time tenure-track professors is decreasing and we are being replaced by other types of employees who cost the institution much less (graphs borrowed from MontClair SocioBlog).
This is a problem from a labor perspective in that it strips power away from employees, putting it squarely back into the hands of employers. It may also be a problem in terms of the quality of education. Adjunct professors are often terrific, but anyone who is overworked and underpaid is likely to invest less in their product. I wonder, too, if this impacts the rate of scientific research (fewer full-time tenure- track professors= less research). Any other thoughts on this trend?
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.
I’m not from a military family so Memorial Day has mostly been about a three day weekend, grilling, and maybe giving a tiny bit of thought to members of the military who have fought in various U.S. wars. But, in the last couple of years, Memorial Day has taken on so much more significance for me, and it seems rather fitting that this weekend I’m working on my dissertation– writing about the mothers of current U.S. service members who have been deployed in the U.S. war on terrorism.
Mothers, and all members of a service person’s family, often refer to themselves as “the silent ranks.” And they are a key part of the “ranks” of the military in many ways. Next to the troops, family members shoulder the majority of this particular war. Unlike previous U.S. wars (WWI and WWII), the public has not been asked to do much– we are not planting victory gardens, living with rations, working in factories, or collecting scrap metal and even lard for the manufacturing of weapons and supplies.
The military knows how important the families of service members are– for both recruitment and deployment support. You may have noticed the Army recruitment commercials specifically target parents. The Army knows they need parental support to enlist new Soldiers. Often these commercials focus on Army service as an opportunity for training, for an education, for a career, while also telling parents how strong their children will become when they join. Thus the motto “You made them strong: We’ll make them Army Strong.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8MBbaz61kU[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TUbnGXqI1s[/youtube]
Despite the fact that the military is changing, and more women are joining, homefront support remains largely gendered. The video below “Army Families = Army Strong” is one that the Army put together as a tribute to the work these silent ranks do during wartime.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5RIHo5rh3c[/youtube]
What is striking (but not surprising) to me about this video tribute is how gendered the home front is. With a few exceptions (a few female Soldiers), this video mostly depicts wives left at home taking care of young children. These families (women and children) need to be strong to deal with the stress and anxiety of having a loved one deployed, and to carry on their day to day lives. The military also needs them to be strong– to hold down the home front, send supportive packages and emails to deployed Soldiers, and to be there for Soldiers to come home to. As the voice over says “they wear a different uniform… theirs is a uniform of strength… the strength of courage, integrity, and sacrifice.” Even if they aren’t deployed to a war zone, families are enlisted to military service along with the Soldiers.
For my dissertation I interviewed 60+ mothers of service members (and hundreds more in online support groups) who also describe themselves as part of these “silent ranks.” I would love to be able to share their incredible stories here, but I only have their permission to write about the for research purposes. So instead I’ll write about what I’ve learned from them about how complicated home front war support is for mothers.
Like other military family members, the mothers of service members also see themselves as members of the military– even when they are more removed from receiving the kinds of benefits a military wife (or husband) would receive. Here are some of the slogans mothers use to identify themselves as a strong, tough, part of the military:
Usually when we think about the mothers of service members, the most publicly active (and anti-war) ones come to mind. Like Cindy Sheehan:
While many mothers of service members take the same war stance as Cindy Sheehan, most have widely different, and often contradictory relationships to war (just as other military family members do, I imagine). My research is about these contradictions. Some mothers disagree with the war, but publicly support their child’s mission– and want the war to succeed. Others disagree with the war but would never say so publicly for fear of being seen as unpatriotic. Some just want the troops to come home safely. Others support the war fully, and some who support the war fully see anti-war mothers like Cindy Sheehan as degrading to the job their children are doing.
Mothers of service members may have opposing ideas about war, but they all feel unbelievable anxiety for their deployed child. They cry in the grocery store when they see their son’s favorite food. They panic every time an unknown car pulls into the driveway, fearing that dress uniforms will show up at their door. And they all feel a duty to their deployed child (to send care packages, buy their child supplies etc.), and feel a sense duty to all the troops and military families– taking part in efforts to make sure the troops and their families feel supported.
Here are some images of different mothers supporting the troops in different ways (these images are all public domain, and none are mothers in my study):
Finally, take a few minutes to watch this video interview with Vicki Castro, whose son was killed in Iraq (“life as you know it stops…”). I can’t embed the video here, but it is worth clicking on and watching.
Since I’m visiting my family in rural Oklahoma, I decided to post some pictures of dust storms during the 1930s. Almost everyone has seen some of the Dust Bowl-era photos of poor families, of houses covered in blown dirt, and so on, but fewer people have seen photos of actual storms blowing in. All of these are available from Kansas State University’s Wind Erosion Research Unit.
This one is from a storm that was widely considered the worst of all; April 14th, 1935 was referred to as “Black Sunday”:
Most people associate the Dust Bowl with Okies and The Grapes of Wrath. The Joads weren’t Dust Bowl refugees; most Okies were from eastern Oklahoma and lost their farms because they couldn’t pay the mortgages. Only a small part of the Dust Bowl was in Oklahoma, though my great-grandparents and their many children had the good luck to be living in it.
While a bad multi-year drought certainly set the stage for the Dust Bowl, it was really a social disaster, not a natural one. Semi-arid regions had been over-plowed, and no windbreaks were planted to help hold soil in place. And once the dust storms began, many farmers did about the worst thing they could have done: they went and plowed during it. My great-grandpa and his sons would go out with the horses and start plowing as a dust storm came in, hoping they could turn up moister soil from underneath that would be too heavy to blow away. But because of the drought there wasn’t any moist soil to turn up, so all they were doing was breaking up dry dirt, making it even more likely to blow away…and presumably so were thousands of other people. My great-grandma always told me the big joke was that if you had a bucket you could hold it up outside and catch yourself a farm.
Anyway, no huge sociological insight here, just some fascinating and creepy photos and a reminder that things we often refer to as “natural” disasters are either caused by human activity or greatly exacerbated by it.
And I have to drive 30 miles each way to get to the internet, so I’m not able to read comments or add commenter’s interesting links as much as I usually try to do, so be patient for the next couple of weeks.
