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This Month in Sociological Images (March 2012)

Lisa Wade, PhD on March 31, 2012

SocImages Meet Up in the Twin Cities!

On the weekend of April 2oth Gwen and I will be visiting the University of Minnesota to attend the Sociology Research Institute and humbly accept an award on behalf of SocImages.  We’d love it if you’d come and celebrate with us on Saturday, April 21st 6pm to 8pm.  Stay tuned for a location…

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Please feel free to follow SocImages on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. Gwen and I and most of the team are also on Twitter, too.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Next month I’ll be giving my talk about hook up culture at CSU Northridge (11:00am on Apr. 26th) and in September I’ll be at Indiana State University to give a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference (Sept. 17th).

A big thank you to the staff, students, and faculty at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Boston University!  I had a wonderful time sharing my research and ideas last week!  Special thanks to Harvard Sex Week for letting me debut my new talk on media stereotypes and sexual pleasure. Reviews of the talks in The Harvard Crimson and The Dartmouth are linked from my website.

And thanks, too, to Amy Schalet and the rest of the faculty at UMass-Amherst for giving me the opportunity to talk in depth about Sociological Images!  It’s such a treat to be able to talk about our little blog.

SocImages in the News:

Our post on the racially-charged Disney-themed candy raised some eyebrows. The story was covered at The Root, Business Insider, Babble, Gawker, Jezebel, The Daily Meal, The Week, and in the Phoenix New Times.

Miss Representation, the fantastic documentary featuring SocImages contributor Caroline Heldman, is getting amazing reviews!  Here’s the latest at CNN.

Reuters gave me the opportunity to weigh in on a controversy over a San Antonio mural featuring the “sleepy Mexican” stereotype.

Finally, The Frisky picked up on our post about pink in Saudi Arabia.

We’re happy to announce a new Pinterest Board:

I’m thinking about putting together one that includes subliminal and not-so-subliminal uses of sex in advertising. I’ll try to get to that in April.

Best of March:

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month. Two of our posts received over 1,000 “likes” on Facebook this month:

Other popular March posts include:

Thanks so much to all our readers!

Using Crotches To Sell Stuff

Lisa Wade, PhD on May 28, 2009

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.

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Using Butts to Sell Stuff

Gwen Sharp, PhD on May 28, 2009

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:

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Sociological Images Update (February 2009)

Lisa Wade, PhD on March 1, 2009

NEWS

Please welcome Julianne Monday, our first Sociological Images intern! 

Be our friend!  We have a facebook page.

Gwen was quoted in a San Francisco Chronicle article about the New York Post editorial cartoon scandal.  Check it out here.

Gwen would also like to say that she missed the chance to be interviewed by a reporter at the New York Times because she was at lunch when they emailed her and by the time she got back to her office they’d found someone else to be their expert commenter.   She missed a chance to be quoted in the NYT for a stupid portabello mushroom-and-poblano pepper taco plate.  She wasn’t even all that hungry. 

That said, no one called Lisa this month at all.  I’m just saying.

 

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS

Our post about racist Disney characters was updated with a comparison of an image of Goofy to a traditional “Sambo” caricature and a discussion of whether Goofy is necessarily meant to be a racial archetype.

We added some of the coverage of the policing of Jessica Simpson’s weight to our post chronicling fat scandals.

We found another example of “chaperoning,” or never letting non-white people outnumber white people in ads, and added it to this post (scroll down).

To our post on “subliminal” sex in advertising, we added a vintage lipstick ad suggestive of oral sex (scroll down).

We found another ad suggesting that men use alcohol to get sex and added it to our post on the theme here (scroll down).

We added a video by Jay Smooth from Ill Doctrine [who we are totally crushing on] to this post about the use of the phrase “no homo.”

We added the hoax site Porn for Women by Women to this post about how images of men doing housework or being thoughtful is often jokingly portrayed as women’s equivalent of porn.

In the video game My World, My Way, players take on the role of a spoiled female character who uses pout points and selfishness to win.  We added a video about it to this post about several other video games (note: the post isn’t safe for work).

We added more t-shirts to this post about portrayals of American Indians.

We added another image to our extremely popular post on the objectification of men (scroll to the “bottom”).  We just can’t figure out why it attracts so much traffic.  Hmmmm.

We have an extensive post demonstrating the sexualization of food, but they keep on comin’.  Scroll all the way down for our burger boobs and Doritos undies.

Someone thought it’d be neat to fashion a female mannequin torso into an ipod stereo.  We added a picture of the product to our post featuring furniture in the shape of female bodies.

Finally, we updated a post about “ethnic” fashion with an image of “tribal” sandals.

Sociological Images Update (January 2009)

Lisa Wade, PhD on February 1, 2009

Please peruse the posts we’ve enriched this month:

The idea of interracial and cross-national sex as cultural tourism came up at PostSecret.  We added a postcard to an earlier post on the topic.

We added a video about the video game BoneTown to this post about Miss Bimbo and Sexy Beach 3. BoneTown, supposedly the “world’s first action adventure porno video game, is exactly what you’d think it is, except with Mormons, American Indians in business suits, and a mysterious thing called Jew Magic. It’s pretty fascinating.

In a comments thread, Mordicai alerted us to “Man Glaze,” i.e., finger polish for men.  We added it to our thread on make-up for guys here.  Scroll down.

We added an o.b. tampon ad sent in by Claire T. to this post about marketing products with eco-conscious messages as evidence that “being green” (at least in theory) is becoming increasingly mainstream.

We added a commercial, also sent in by Claire T., for the EU’s “Cool Capitals” tourism campaign, to this post about imagery of cheating (polygamy?) in AirFrance advertising. The EU commercial documents the case of Francine, a fictional polygamist with husbands in five European capital cities.

In the comments thread to our post about the NOT FOR GIRLS candy bar, Trevor pointed us to the girl version.  But it is a girl version?  I couldn’t figure out the message.  Can you? We also added an image of Men’s Pocky, pointed to by Lis Riba.

Pharmacopaeia alerted us to another ad campaign on the “Thank God You’re A Man” theme.

We found another instance of pre-nazi uses of the swastika, this time the symbol was used in a warm, cozy quilt.  Thanks to Felicity who pointed us to it in the comments!

Taylor D. sent us another add for Wate-On, a product that supposedly helped women gain weight, this one targeted to African American women. We added it to this post about weight-gain supplements.

We added two more ads, sent in by Taylor D., to this post about non-subtle uses of sex in advertising.

We added another Gillette ad to this post about how body wash is marketed to men.

Finally, we added the Obama Chia Pet to a post about advertising products with Obama.

From our archives: Thanksgiving

Lisa Wade, PhD on November 23, 2017

Thanksgiving Mythology

Theorizing Thanksgiving:

Some Fun History:

Cigarette Advertising, on this Holiday:

Thanksgiving, Race, and Gender:

Just for Fun:

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.

Bill O’Reilly was paid more to leave FOX than FOX paid the women he harassed. Is this progress? Yes.

Lisa Wade, PhD on April 20, 2017

Sometimes you have to take the long view.

This week Bill O’Reilly — arguably the most powerful political commentator in America — was let go from his position at Fox News. The dismissal came grudgingly. News broke that he and Fox had paid out $13 million dollars to women claiming O’Reilly sexually harassed them; Fox didn’t budge. They renewed his contract. There was outcry and protests. The company yawned. But when advertisers started dropping The O’Reilly Factor, they caved. O’Reilly is gone.

Fox clearly didn’t care about women — not “women” in the abstract, nor the women who worked at their company — but they did care about their bottom line. And so did the companies buying advertising space, who decided that it was bad PR to prop up a known sexual harasser. Perhaps the decision-makers at those companies also thought it was the right thing to do. Who knows.

Is this progress?

Donald Trump is on record gleefully explaining that being a celebrity gives him the ability to get away with sexual battery. That’s a crime, defined as unwanted contact with an “intimate part of the body” that is done to sexually arouse, gratify, or abuse. He’s president anyway.

And O’Reilly? He walked away with $25 million in severance, twice what all of his victims together have received in hush money. Fox gaves Roger Ailes much more to go away: $40 million. Also ousted after multiple allegations of sexual harassment, his going away present was also twice what the women he had harassed received.

Man, sexism really does pay.

But they’re gone. Ailes and O’Reilly are gone. Trump is President but Billy Bush, the Today host who cackled when Trump said “grab ’em by the pussy,” was fired, too.  Bill Cosby finally had some comeuppance after decades of sexual abuse and rape. At the very least, his reputation is destroyed. Maybe these “victories” — for women, for feminists, for equality, for human decency — were driven purely by greed. And arguably, for all intents and purposes, the men are getting away with it. Trump, Ailes, O’Reilly, Bush, and Cosby are all doing fine. Nobody’s in jail; everybody’s rich beyond belief.

But we know what they did.

Until at least the 1960s, sexual harassment — along with domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, and rape — went largely unregulated, unnoticed, and unnamed. There was no language to even talk about what women experienced in the workplace. Certainly no outrage, no ruined reputations, no dismissals, and no severance packages. The phrase “sexual harassment” didn’t exist.

In 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, it became illegal to discriminate against women at work, but only because the politicians who opposed the bill thought adding sex to race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion would certainly tank it. That’s how ridiculous the idea of women’s rights was at the time. But that was then. Today almost no one thinks women shouldn’t have equal rights at work.

What has happened at Fox News, in Bill Cosby’s hotel rooms, in the Access Hollywood bus, and on election day is proof that sexism is alive and well. But it’s not as healthy as it once was. Thanks to hard work by activists, politicians, and citizens, things are getting better. Progress is usually incremental. It requires endurance. Change is slow. Excruciatingly so. And this is what it looks like.

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.

From our archives: Christmas

Lisa Wade, PhD on December 23, 2016

Movie Reviews

The History of Christmas

Christmas and Consumption

Christmas Across Cultures

The Economics of Christmas

Racializing Christmas

Christmas and Gender

Gift Guides and the Social Construction of Gender

Sexifiying Christmas

Christmas Marketing

Just for Fun

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.

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