Search results for sex in advertising

It’s Love Your Body day!  Below is a Hall of Fame and a Hall of Shame.  The second set of posts reveal just what we’re up against, but the first set is a salve, a celebration of all of our beautifully diverse and interesting bodies.

You choose what will amp you up today,  but don’t miss this year’s SocImages Pick: Rachel Wiley offers 10 Honest Thoughts About Being Loved by a Skinny Boy.

The Hall of Fame

• American Able: Challenging Depictions of People with Disabilities
• Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance
• Is Walking Over-Rated?

• 10 Honest Thoughts About Being Loved by a Skinny B0y
• A Fashion Advice Counterfactual
• The Privilege of Assuming Its Not About You
• Louis C.K. on Assortative Mating
• The Story of My Man Boobs
• Shed Your Weight Problem
• Fat People Can Be As Healthy As Thin People
• Imaging Barbie’s Fantastic Proportions
• All Fruit is Sweet
• Glamour Uses “Plus-Sized” Models, and People Love It!
• Reclaiming the “Before” Body (NSFW)
• Rebellyon
• Defining Fat
• Kjerstin Gruys on The Colbert Report and a Year of No Mirrors
• Re-imagining Barbie: Villain or Victim?

• Men Throwing Like a Girl: Separating Nature from Nurture
• Half-Drag Portraits and the Performance of Gender
• What Makes a Body Obscene?
• Do Cartoons Have to Exaggerate Gender Difference?
• Breasts, Chests, and Double Standards
• Resistance to Objectifying Advertising
• Men’s and Women’s Ideal Female Bodies
• The Relationship Between Sex Appeal and Sexual Objectification
• How Vulvas Vary (NSFW)
• Normalizing Normal Breasts (NSFW)
• Nudes, Then and Now

• Dark Girls: Race, Beauty, and Bias
• Race and the Problem with Measuring Beauty Objectively
• Indian Americans Respond to Skin Whitening
• Kids’ Thoughts about Skin Color and Beauty

The Hall of Shame

• Jell-O Promises Decadence, Delivers Coercive Dieting
• Re-Touching the Consequences of Extreme Thinness
• Novels About Non-Thin Women Put Thin Women on their Covers
• How To Undermine a Body-Acceptance Message
• From K-Fed to K-Fat: Policing the Bodies of Male Celebrities
• The Jennifer Love Hewitt Bikini Controversy
• Conflating Fat with Unhealthy
• Zappos: Fits For Every Body Type… or Something
• The Hierarchy of Race and Size in a Dove Ad
• Shame & Pity: Headless Obesity vs. Pitiful Starvation
• New Obesity Campaign Rife with Fat Shaming
• The Marilyn Meme
• 100% of Your Body Fat Should Be In Your Boobs

• Gillette, Stymied by Beards, Heads South
• The U.S. Army Releases Racially Biased Hairstyle Regulations
• (Hairy) Ball Bashing
• Your Hairy Legs Could Be Mass Murderers Even Now
• “Normal” vs “Abnormal” Hair and Skin
• PETA Attacks Pubic Hair

• Are You Working Hard Enough to Achieve Your Natural Body?
• KY Mocks Women’s Lust and Men’s Bodies
• Wrinkle-Washed: Female Faces in Film Marketing
• On the Sexualized Insult (Not for the Faint of Heart)
• “I Hate Your Friend, so I Stuck My Dick in Her Water Bottle”
• Wrinkle-Washed: Female Faces in Film Marketing
• 1950s Beauty Pageant Judging Guidelines
• Women’s Parts as Urinals and Sinks
• Hands and the Gender Binary
• Women as Food
• How Ratings Boards are Driving Genital Cosmetic Surgery
• Dozens of Products Made to Look Like Boobs
• Keeping “It” Lady-Like: Avoiding Camel Toe
• An Entitlement to Female Beauty: Criticism of Female Body Builders
• Sexual Dimorphism and World of Warcraft
• Sexy According to Victoria’s Secret
• Your Ass: A Very Important Thing on Your Wedding Day
• Behind the Perfect Body:  Models and Body Builders (pictured)

• Media Depictions of Trans-People as Bodies Only
• How Not to Personify the Opposing Team
• Why Male Pregnancy Matters

• Heightism in Advertising
• Height Norms and Framing the Shot
• Perceptions of Tall and Short Men
• Heightist Hooters Ad
• Gender and Heightism

• Diabetes and Mental Disability on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”

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.

This ad for the 2015 Kia Soul featuring hamster people is… charming.

It’s also a very good example of advertising that just up and shrugs and admits that its target is primarily men.  The scientists and engineers are all male and the audience is intended to identify with them.  The females are sexual objects that exist to attract and revel in male attention.  They literally buy them at the pet store, for goodness’ sake.

Hello Kia Soul! Like, women are 51% of the population and we make purchasing decisions. Maybe go with advertising that’s a tad more inclusive? You know, one or two female scientists would have been totally do-able. Your weird science could have included some hunks alongside the hotties. Maybe one of your guy engineers would have liked that, too. I’m just saying. Being more inclusive would have been easy. There’s no excuse for this.

But thanks for the hamsters.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56C4kSlGkJ8[/youtube]

Thanks to @MLerner_RBS for the link!

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.

Flashback Friday.

In Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich talks about the launching of Playboy in 1953 and how it forever changed how we thought about single men.

At that time, a man who stayed single was suspected of homosexuality.  The idea of being an unmarried heterosexual adult of sound mind and body was totally foreign.  Hugh Hefner changed all of that by inventing a whole new kind of man, the playboy.  The playboy stayed single (so as to have lots of ladies), kept his money for himself and his indulgences (booze and ladies), and re-purposed the domestic sphere (enter the snazzy bachelor pad full of booze and ladies).

With this in mind, check out an attempt to attract advertising dollars from a 1969 issue (found at Vintage Ads).  It nicely demonstrates Playboy‘s marketing of a new kind of man, one who lives a free and adventurous life that is unburdened by a boring, dead-end job needed to support a wife and kids.

Text:

What sort of man reads Playboy? He’s an entertaining young guy happily living the good life. And loving every adventurous minute of it. One recipe for his upbeat life style? Fun friends and fine potables. Facts. PLAYBOY is read by one of out every three men under 50 who drink alcoholic beverages. Small wonder beverage advertisers invest more dollars in PLAYBOY issue per issue than they do in any other magazine. Need your spirit lifted? This must be the place.

Today, we commonly come across the idea that men are naturally averse to being tied down, but Hefner’s project reveals that this was an idea that was invented quite recently and promulgated for profit.

This post originally appeared in 2008.

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.

Last week the internet chuckled at the visual below.  It shows that, since Godzilla made his first movie appearance in 1954, he has tripled in size.

Kris Holt, at PolicyMic, suggests that his enlargement is in response to growing skylines. She writes:

As time has passed, buildings have grown ever taller too. If Godzilla had stayed the same height throughout its entire existence, it would be much less imposing on a modern cityscape.

This seems plausible.  Buildings have gotten taller and so, to preserve the original feel, Godzilla would have to grow too.

But rising buildings can’t be the only explanation.  According to this graphic, the tallest building at the time of Gozilla’s debut was the Empire State Building, rising to 381 meters.   The tallest building in the world today is (still) the Burj Khalifa.  At 828 meters, it’s more than twice as tall as the Empire State Building, but it’s far from three times as tall, or 1,143 meters.

Is there an alternate explanation? Here’s one hypothesis.

In 1971, the average American was exposed to about 500 advertisements per day. Today, because of the internet, they are exposed to over 5,000.  Every. Day.

Media critic Sut Jhally argues that the flood of advertising has forced marketers to shift strategies.  Specifically, he says

So overwhelming has the commercial takeover of culture become, that it has now become a problem for advertisers who now worry about clutter and noise.  That is, how do you make your ads stand out from the commercial impressions that people are exposed to.

One strategy has been to ratchet up shock value.  “You need to get eyeballs. You need to be loud,” said Kevin Kay, Spike’s programming chief.

So, to increase shock value, everything is being made more extreme. Compared to the early ’90s, before the internet was a fixture in most homes and businesses, advertising — and I’m guessing media in general — has gotten more extreme in lots of ways. Things are sexier, more violent, more gorgeous, more satirical, and weirder.

So, Godzilla because, eyeballs.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

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.

We’re previously featured great examples of resistance to sexist advertising, but this example takes it up a level.  Clownify describes itself as a “street art project to turn everyday ads into ads for clowns.” I’m not sure what political message they intend to send, but what I see is a super easy, I would even say graceful, way of knocking us into consciousness. If advertisements typically occupy our lives as a taken-for-granted source of psychological coercion, this campaign reminds us to (1) actually look at what we’re seeing and (2) remember not to take ads, their messages, or their products too seriously.

Here are four examples, but there are lots more at the site:

H/t copyranter.

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.

Our recent post collecting examples of creative resistance to sexually objectifying advertising was a big hit, which makes me think y’all are going to love this one.  The National Eating Disorder Information Center paid to put up a creative ad/trash can.  It reads “Shed your weight problem here” and encourages passers-by to dispose of their fashion magazines.

Another great example of how organizations can creatively push back against the harmful messages spread by corporations for profit.

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.

SocImages News:

A proud father shared with us a letter written by his daughter, 7 year old Charlotte, to the LEGO company.  She asked for for more female minifigs and more adventure for girls.  We put the letter out on social media this week and it’s been re-tweeted over 1,000 times and shared over 3,000 times on Facebook.  This is how social media can be used to put pressure on companies to change.  Huzzah!

Well done Charlotte and big thanks to Dad!

Reader’s Picks of the Month:

• Teachers offered personal loans to buy school supplies (9,500 shares)
• A little theory of homophobia (4,600 shares)
• Creative resistance to sexually objectifying advertising (2,800 shares)
• What’s Ikea for? Cultural differences in appropriate behavior (2,200 shares)
• More similarities than differences in a study of race and fatherhood (1,900 shares)
• 40 years since women were granted the right to credit cards (1,200 shares)
• Pssssst. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a sociology major.

Social Media:

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook,Tumblr, Google+, and Pinterest.  I’m on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston.

In other news…

Stay warm New Orleans!  I’m arriving on Monday and I expect you to be hospitable!

If you’re in the city, I’d love to get together!  I’ll be there through Mardi Gras.  Send an email to socimages@thesocietypages.org and I’ll be in touch!  

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.

We rounded out the year with 6,850,000 visits and nearly 10,000,000 page views.  We are proud and honored to enjoy over 35,000 Facebook friends and 15,000 Twitter followers, plus nearly 10,000 on Pinterest and almost 1,000 on our two-month-old Tumblr page.  A huge thank you to everyone for your enthusiasm and support!

Highlights:

• Our 6th birthday.
• A home page.
• A shiny new Tumblr.
• A 5,000th post.
• New Pinterest pages: the social construction of flavor, “women” vs. “people”, marketing feminism, the mean girls meme, and rape culture (see them all here).
• Two new syndication relationships with Business Insider and Policy Mic.
• Tweets from Piper Kerman, Shankar Vedantam, and Amanda Palmer.
• New Course Guides: sociology of work and occupations, family and society, the sociology of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and women’s history (see them all here).
• A gig writing for Salon.

Best of 2013!

Over the last week we’ve highlighted our favorite and most loved posts from 2013.  Here’s the list in case you missed it!

Reader’s Choice (plus # of Facebook likes before we re-posted)

• From the Mouths of Rapists: The Lyrics of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines (174,000)
• The Balancing Act of Being Female; Or Why We Have So Many Clothes (31,000)
• Gender and the Body Language of Power (21,000)
• Stand Your Ground Laws Increase Racial Bias in “Justifiable Homicide” Trials (20,000)
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (16,000)
• My Two Cents on Feminism and Miley Cyrus (15,000)
• Men Feel Bad around Smart, Successful Women (7,500)
• Shifting Discourses of Motherhood: The Victorian Breastfeeding Photo Fad (7,000)
• How Do Physicians and Non-Physicians Want to Die? (5,800)
• Double Standards and Blurred Lines at the VMA Awards (5,400)
• Most Women Would Rather Divorce than be a Housewife (5,100)
• Re-Touching the Consequences of Extreme Thinness (5, 100)

Editor’s Picks

• African-American Travel and Jim Crow Segregation
• Why Are People Changing Their Minds About Same-Sex Marriage
• The Marketing Tactics of Firearm Manufacturers
• Children’s Books and Segregation in the Workplace
• Men and Women Use Uptalk Differently: A Study of Jeopardy
• What are Rappers Really Saying about the Police?
• On the Sexualized Insult (Not for the Faint of Heart)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco

And this Happened…

…the fruits of my obsession with flight attendants.   If you read these, you might be obsessed too!

• The Surprisingly Racist Reason We Don’t Tip Flight Attendants
• Before the Stewardess, the Steward: When Flight Attendants Were Men
• Domestic Behavior as Both Gendered and Raced: Who Does What for Airlines?
• International Politics and the First African American Flight Attendants
• Are Flights Full? Airline Advertising vs. Real Life
• Hanging onto the Stewardess at Delta Airlines
• Surprise! Your Flight Attendants are all Strangers! (also a reader’s pick)
• The Unsung Heroes of the Crash Landing in San Francisco (also an editor’s pick)

Happy New Year everyone!  Here’s to wonderful things in 2014!

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.