Kristie C. sent in a Hardee’s commercial for their turkey burger that is an example of something we’ve talked about before: the conflation of women with food products to be consumed and the sexualization of both women and food in ads. But watch closely! It’s very subtle, so you might miss it the first time.
Search results for gendering
Elisabeth R., Rebecca H., and Kalani R. all sent in a Volkswagen commercial produced for SuperBowl weekend that they found striking, both for the commercial itself and reactions to it. In the commercial, a child dressed up as Darth Vader tries using The Force on various items around the house. What struck all three of the submitters is the ambiguous gendering of the ad:
At no point is the child’s gender made clear. If we just went with the information in the ad, we might conclude the child is a girl, based on scene in the stereotypically super-pink bedroom. But given the usual clear gendering of toys, Elisabeth, Rebecca, and Kalani all enjoyed seeing an ad in which this didn’t occur.
But the possibility that a girl might dress up as Darth Vader seems difficult for a lot of people to grasp. In the pages and pages of comments on the commercial on YouTube, the child is repeatedly referred to as “he” or “the boy.” In one comment thread, when someone brings up the possibility the child is a girl due to the pink bedroom, someone else says no, it was a boy in his sister’s room.
There’s no particular reason to assume this child is a boy except that we associate Star Wars with boys (and generally see males as the default if gender isn’t otherwise specified). I think the reactions to the video are a good example of the power of gendering: because viewers have pre-existing ideas about gender, kids, and what they’d be interested in, they’re likely to apply those assumptions even in the face of potentially contradictory information and to come up with explanations that leave the pre-existing ideas intact.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention when I was writing the post that none of the commenters who saw the child as a boy seemed to think the pink room was his — I read several different comment threads and when it was brought up, people assume it’s a sister’s room. Also, reader Angie thinks the stuff in the pink room looks too old for the child, since the toys look like the type an older kid would collect. I am clueless about that, which is why I struggle to buy gifts for kids: I no longer have a clear sense of what types of things kids are playing with at what age.
UPDATE 2: This is separate from what the gender of the role of the child in the commercial, but VW has confirmed that the actor who played the child is a boy.
On another note, the fact that VW is using Star Wars nostalgia in its ads as a way to appeal to adult customers makes me feel very old for some reason.
I’m trying to catch up on some of our email, so you’re getting another round-up of similar-themed items, this time on the gendering of food. Laura L. sent in an advertisement for Muscle Milk, a product generally marketed to men, that she saw on the BART (San Francisco’s public transportation system). The ad presents the product as a means to become more attractive by building muscle — a body type usually encouraged for men but not women — and thus gain sexual access to your friends:
It’s interesting because it’s a gendered product that uses a tactic common in products that market to women: you’re body isn’t good enough, but our product will fix it. It’s not the first time the company has used tactics more often seen in products aimed at women.
In another example of the association of meat-eating with men, Tom Megginson, who blogs at Work that Matters, sent us a link to a story at AdFreak about KFC’s inventive promotional campaign for their Double-Down sandwich, which, if you didn’t know, consists of bacon and cheese between two chicken breast patties (fried or grilled). The promotions, which started in Louisville, KY, involve undergrads wearing sweats with “Double Down” across the butt and giving out free stuff:
The KFC announcement of the program makes it clear that only women are wanted as “brand ambassadors” to help them meet their “key target of young men.”
While men are encouraged to eat high-fat/sodium/calorie monster/mega/ultra/double meat-based items, women, of course, get to eat yogurt. Brianna L. found this Australian commercial for Yoplait Formé, in which women are shown eating foods that are clearly meant to appear unappetizing and illustrate they are sacrificing flavor for their diet, as well as policing one another’s food choices:
Notice at 12 seconds in they all wave away the plate of cookies, but then, just for a second, one of the women shows weakness and starts to reach for one. The woman next to her, however, quickly reins her in with a disapproving look and gesture. As Brianna points out,
Even the tag line “feel fuller for longer” shows eating is not about sustenance, or taking pleasure in food. Being in perpetual hunger – that’s the status quo, at least until a magic yogurt comes along to save you.
Now for a palate cleanser, watch Sarah Haskins’s take on yogurt commercials.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
NEWS:
Happy fall semester everyone!
For me, classes begin today and just yesterday the doc gave me the a-okay to walk without the “boot.” So “hello” to students and “goodbye” to the summer-of-a-broken-leg!
You may have noticed that our parent site has changed to The Society Pages. This is a name change only and we’re still thrilled to be under the stewardship of Doug, Chris, Jon, Letta and the wonderful folks at the University of Minnesota. Word on the street is that SocImages crashed their servers so many times that they had to reconfigure them! We’re so grateful to have their support and patience!
Gwen and I are proud to announce a new SocImages essay, What is Indian Art?, published in Contexts magazine (based on our original post). If you’d like a pdf of the essay, send a note to socimages@thesocietypages.org and we’ll send it along. You can see a list of our teaching essays here. They’re all super short and great for in class exercises.
Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook (where we update with featured posts everyday).
NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Aug ’10):
Women clean because they love it, don’tcha know!
Facebook has added a generic female avatar.
Another example of boys are kids and girls are girls.
More pinkification of manly items for the ladies.
We added a 38th example of food items conflated with sexy women.
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.
NEWS:
This month Gwen and I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who have submitted ideas for posts. Our inbox is alive with ideas and it makes our job exceedingly fun! We absolutely could not do it without all of your eyes. So thank you for your submissions! Also, if you’ve submitted an idea and it was never posted, please don’t be discouraged. We get far more ideas than we could possibly use. And, even if yours was a submission that we decided against using, be assured that we read it, thought about it, and sometimes talked about it together before setting it aside. We appreciate all of your help, even if it doesn’t make the front page.
In other news, we’ve entered a new partial syndication agreement with BlogHer and we’re super excited to add that partnership to our one with Jezebel. Our first syndicated post was our recent discussion of the Vaseline skin-lightening Facebook application.
Finally, please do remember that you can follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook. Soon we’ll be launching a MySpace page as well.
NEW PUBLICATIONS:
(If you don’t have the subscriptions required to access either paper, we’re happy to send you a copy, Just send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.)
Gwen and my most recent essay in the print-magazine Contexts, Flesh-Toned, is now online. It draws on the long conversation we’ve been having here about the way that the use of the terms “flesh,” “nude,” and “skin” to refer to light beige colors makes darker-skinned people invisible.
Also, a paper I wrote with Caroline Heldman is now available at Sexuality Research and Social Policy. How and why hook-up culture came to characterize U.S. colleges remains a mystery. In our paper, Hook-Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda, we argue that the emergence of hook-up culture on college campuses is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how sexual cultures change. We review the literature, offer some hypotheses to explore, and discuss methodological requirements.
NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! July ’10):
This month we added new material to some older gender- and race-related posts. Thanks almost exclusively to Gwen for doing the hard work of updating! And thanks to those of who sent the images along!
Race
When a racially diverse group of people is included in ads or other materials, darker-skinned people are typically behind or below the lighter-skinned. We updated our post on how people of color are subordinated in advertising with a new example of a church welcome banner.
Another ’70s book on useful Spanish phrases for talking to your maid.
Givenchy has some rather light “nude”-colored dresses, but Esquire responded to complaints about ignoring Black men by following up a story with a segment that acknowledged that African Americans might require or prefer different hair maintenance techniques and styles than other groups.
Black dolls sell for less than White dolls at Target.
A second example of vintage soap advertising suggesting that African Americans are dirty.
Gender/Sex
Haven’t found quite the right string bikini for your infant girl? We added another example to our post about bikinis for babies to help you out.
Two more examples in which men are people and women are women.
Another example of large clothes on small models.
More parking spaces just for women.
Using the PETA demonstration model in Jordan.
More gendering of language.
Rosie the Riveter was “maid to clean.”
More gendering of boys’ and girls’ (coloring) books.
eBay continues to gender gift suggestions…while simultaneously degendering them.
Only dudes use technology. Didn’t you know?
Don’t smoke. It makes you ugly.
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.
Anna M., Naomi B., Amanda C., Ben Z., and SpeZek sent in a new PETA ad campaign, the latest in a twisted story of objectification metaphor.
Feminists in the ’70s protested the objectification of women by metaphorically linking meat and female bodies (e.g., “we should not be treating women like pieces of meat”). Meat is meat, so the argument went, but women are human beings and should be treated as such.
In mocking response, in 1978 Larry Flynt put a woman being chewed up by a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine. We will treat women like meat if we want, was the message. And we did, and we do, seemingly endlessly.
Forty years later, Pamela Anderson submits to being symbolically carved up for butchering by PETA in order to metaphorically link meat and female bodies again. But this time, in an ironic reversal, it’s designed to condemn the way we treat animals, not the way we treat women.
And, forty years later, feminists are still saying “Please, can we not do the women/meat thing?”
So Canada denies PETA a permit for the launching of this new ad campaign. An official explains: “…it goes against all principles public organizations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women” (source). What a nice thing to say, feminists think.
But Anderson fights feminism with feminism:
How sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest over the suffering of cows and chickens… In some parts of the world, women are forced to cover their whole bodies with burqas—is that next?
Yes, Pamela, I’m sure that’s next.
But I digress.
So PETA and Anderson must think that Canadians super-super-respect women like totally and never-never-objectify them to the degree that saying that animals are like women will suddenly inspire horror at the prospect of using animals for food? Or is it that they think men will see the image and be like “oooh I’d really like to rub up against that rump” and then suddenly find cows too sexy to eat? Or they don’t give a shit about women and are willing to use whatever attention-getting tactic they can to save animals from going under the knife (including using the body of a woman that has, um, gone under the knife)?
I submit this for discussion because I just don’t know.
More from PETA: women packaged like meat, and in cages, women who love animals get naked (men wear clothes), the banned superbowl ad, and a collection of various PETA advertising using (mostly women’s) nudity. See also my post on leftist balkanization, or the way that leftist social movements tend to undermine each other.
If you’re interested further, you may want to read Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat.
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 S. sent in this photo of the toy options for kids meals available from Burger King as part of their tie-in with the Marmaduke movie. The dogs are helpfully divided, as in most kids’ meals at fast-food chains, into those for girls and boys:
Notice the gendering of the dogs. Both girls and boys have the option of a Marmaduke figurine, though they are posed in different ways: the girl version is lying down, while the boy version seems posed to run or jump. The other girls’ options are passive in their poses, the descriptive words in their names (cuddly, loungin’, comb ‘n’ style), and what they do:
- Comb ‘n’ Style Jezebel: you can comb her hair
- Bone Catchin’ Marmaduke: his tail wags when you move the bone
- Loungin’ Giuseppe: he just sits on the tassled cushion
- Cuddly Raisin: he’s soft
On the other hand, the boys’ options are given active descriptive names and different types of actions:
- Pouncin’ Marmaduke: leaps in the air
- Darting Lightning: you wind him up and he moves
- Stick ‘n’ Move Bosco: you attach his leash and he walks
- Turn ‘n’ roll Mazie: you wind up her tail and she rolls over
So the boys get the option of a doberman (or maybe a Rottweiler?) and what looks like an Australian shepherd, while the girls get a toy dog (a papillon, I think) and a collie, which is also a herding dog but here is presented as something to groom.
Obviously, the breeds and names (Bosco, Giuseppe, etc.) come from the movie, so Burger King didn’t create that part. But in creating the tie-in toys, different dogs from the movie were defined as girls’ or boys’ toys, and were designed accordingly.
It’s a great example of the feminine = passive, masculine = active gender dichotomy and the way children are socialized into it. Toys aimed at girls emphasize posing and appearance/grooming, while boys’ toys are usually more active and rarely involve grooming or dressing up (unless you count changing out the weapons G.I. Joe dolls action figures carry).
Of course, this doesn’t mean that kids and their parents will request the gender-intended toy. My sisters and I didn’t get kids’ meals often, but when we did, my mom almost always requested boys’ toys because they were usually more fun and did something, whereas the girls’ toys often just sat there. I’ve heard similar stories from lots of women. Given that men are discouraged from crossing gender lines more than women are, though, I wonder if parents are as willing to get their sons the girls’ toys if the son asks for it. And if we found the girls’ toys boring and wanted the boys’ versions, it seems likely that boys would generally reject them too.
One example of the pervasive sexualization of beer is the ubiquitous personification of “blond” ales as blond women. Tom Megginson at Change Marketing made this observation and collected a number of examples of this particular example of the gendering and sexualizing of food:
See more at Megginson’s post. See also our other posts on gender and beer here, here, and here.
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Elisabeth R., Rebecca H., and Kalani R. all sent in a Volkswagen commercial produced for SuperBowl weekend that they found striking, both for the commercial itself and reactions to it. In the commercial, a child dressed up as Darth Vader tries using The Force on various items around the house. What struck all three of the submitters is the ambiguous gendering of the ad:
At no point is the child’s gender made clear. If we just went with the information in the ad, we might conclude the child is a girl, based on scene in the stereotypically super-pink bedroom. But given the usual clear gendering of toys, Elisabeth, Rebecca, and Kalani all enjoyed seeing an ad in which this didn’t occur.
But the possibility that a girl might dress up as Darth Vader seems difficult for a lot of people to grasp. In the pages and pages of comments on the commercial on YouTube, the child is repeatedly referred to as “he” or “the boy.” In one comment thread, when someone brings up the possibility the child is a girl due to the pink bedroom, someone else says no, it was a boy in his sister’s room.
There’s no particular reason to assume this child is a boy except that we associate Star Wars with boys (and generally see males as the default if gender isn’t otherwise specified). I think the reactions to the video are a good example of the power of gendering: because viewers have pre-existing ideas about gender, kids, and what they’d be interested in, they’re likely to apply those assumptions even in the face of potentially contradictory information and to come up with explanations that leave the pre-existing ideas intact.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention when I was writing the post that none of the commenters who saw the child as a boy seemed to think the pink room was his — I read several different comment threads and when it was brought up, people assume it’s a sister’s room. Also, reader Angie thinks the stuff in the pink room looks too old for the child, since the toys look like the type an older kid would collect. I am clueless about that, which is why I struggle to buy gifts for kids: I no longer have a clear sense of what types of things kids are playing with at what age.
UPDATE 2: This is separate from what the gender of the role of the child in the commercial, but VW has confirmed that the actor who played the child is a boy.
On another note, the fact that VW is using Star Wars nostalgia in its ads as a way to appeal to adult customers makes me feel very old for some reason.
I’m trying to catch up on some of our email, so you’re getting another round-up of similar-themed items, this time on the gendering of food. Laura L. sent in an advertisement for Muscle Milk, a product generally marketed to men, that she saw on the BART (San Francisco’s public transportation system). The ad presents the product as a means to become more attractive by building muscle — a body type usually encouraged for men but not women — and thus gain sexual access to your friends:
It’s interesting because it’s a gendered product that uses a tactic common in products that market to women: you’re body isn’t good enough, but our product will fix it. It’s not the first time the company has used tactics more often seen in products aimed at women.
In another example of the association of meat-eating with men, Tom Megginson, who blogs at Work that Matters, sent us a link to a story at AdFreak about KFC’s inventive promotional campaign for their Double-Down sandwich, which, if you didn’t know, consists of bacon and cheese between two chicken breast patties (fried or grilled). The promotions, which started in Louisville, KY, involve undergrads wearing sweats with “Double Down” across the butt and giving out free stuff:
The KFC announcement of the program makes it clear that only women are wanted as “brand ambassadors” to help them meet their “key target of young men.”
While men are encouraged to eat high-fat/sodium/calorie monster/mega/ultra/double meat-based items, women, of course, get to eat yogurt. Brianna L. found this Australian commercial for Yoplait Formé, in which women are shown eating foods that are clearly meant to appear unappetizing and illustrate they are sacrificing flavor for their diet, as well as policing one another’s food choices:
Notice at 12 seconds in they all wave away the plate of cookies, but then, just for a second, one of the women shows weakness and starts to reach for one. The woman next to her, however, quickly reins her in with a disapproving look and gesture. As Brianna points out,
Even the tag line “feel fuller for longer” shows eating is not about sustenance, or taking pleasure in food. Being in perpetual hunger – that’s the status quo, at least until a magic yogurt comes along to save you.
Now for a palate cleanser, watch Sarah Haskins’s take on yogurt commercials.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
NEWS:
Happy fall semester everyone!
For me, classes begin today and just yesterday the doc gave me the a-okay to walk without the “boot.” So “hello” to students and “goodbye” to the summer-of-a-broken-leg!
You may have noticed that our parent site has changed to The Society Pages. This is a name change only and we’re still thrilled to be under the stewardship of Doug, Chris, Jon, Letta and the wonderful folks at the University of Minnesota. Word on the street is that SocImages crashed their servers so many times that they had to reconfigure them! We’re so grateful to have their support and patience!
Gwen and I are proud to announce a new SocImages essay, What is Indian Art?, published in Contexts magazine (based on our original post). If you’d like a pdf of the essay, send a note to socimages@thesocietypages.org and we’ll send it along. You can see a list of our teaching essays here. They’re all super short and great for in class exercises.
Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook (where we update with featured posts everyday).
NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Aug ’10):
Women clean because they love it, don’tcha know!
Facebook has added a generic female avatar.
Another example of boys are kids and girls are girls.
More pinkification of manly items for the ladies.
We added a 38th example of food items conflated with sexy women.
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.
NEWS:
This month Gwen and I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who have submitted ideas for posts. Our inbox is alive with ideas and it makes our job exceedingly fun! We absolutely could not do it without all of your eyes. So thank you for your submissions! Also, if you’ve submitted an idea and it was never posted, please don’t be discouraged. We get far more ideas than we could possibly use. And, even if yours was a submission that we decided against using, be assured that we read it, thought about it, and sometimes talked about it together before setting it aside. We appreciate all of your help, even if it doesn’t make the front page.
In other news, we’ve entered a new partial syndication agreement with BlogHer and we’re super excited to add that partnership to our one with Jezebel. Our first syndicated post was our recent discussion of the Vaseline skin-lightening Facebook application.
Finally, please do remember that you can follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook. Soon we’ll be launching a MySpace page as well.
NEW PUBLICATIONS:
(If you don’t have the subscriptions required to access either paper, we’re happy to send you a copy, Just send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.)
Gwen and my most recent essay in the print-magazine Contexts, Flesh-Toned, is now online. It draws on the long conversation we’ve been having here about the way that the use of the terms “flesh,” “nude,” and “skin” to refer to light beige colors makes darker-skinned people invisible.
Also, a paper I wrote with Caroline Heldman is now available at Sexuality Research and Social Policy. How and why hook-up culture came to characterize U.S. colleges remains a mystery. In our paper, Hook-Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda, we argue that the emergence of hook-up culture on college campuses is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how sexual cultures change. We review the literature, offer some hypotheses to explore, and discuss methodological requirements.
NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! July ’10):
This month we added new material to some older gender- and race-related posts. Thanks almost exclusively to Gwen for doing the hard work of updating! And thanks to those of who sent the images along!
Race
When a racially diverse group of people is included in ads or other materials, darker-skinned people are typically behind or below the lighter-skinned. We updated our post on how people of color are subordinated in advertising with a new example of a church welcome banner.
Another ’70s book on useful Spanish phrases for talking to your maid.
Givenchy has some rather light “nude”-colored dresses, but Esquire responded to complaints about ignoring Black men by following up a story with a segment that acknowledged that African Americans might require or prefer different hair maintenance techniques and styles than other groups.
Black dolls sell for less than White dolls at Target.
A second example of vintage soap advertising suggesting that African Americans are dirty.
Gender/Sex
Haven’t found quite the right string bikini for your infant girl? We added another example to our post about bikinis for babies to help you out.
Two more examples in which men are people and women are women.
Another example of large clothes on small models.
More parking spaces just for women.
Using the PETA demonstration model in Jordan.
More gendering of language.
Rosie the Riveter was “maid to clean.”
More gendering of boys’ and girls’ (coloring) books.
eBay continues to gender gift suggestions…while simultaneously degendering them.
Only dudes use technology. Didn’t you know?
Don’t smoke. It makes you ugly.
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.
Anna M., Naomi B., Amanda C., Ben Z., and SpeZek sent in a new PETA ad campaign, the latest in a twisted story of objectification metaphor.
Feminists in the ’70s protested the objectification of women by metaphorically linking meat and female bodies (e.g., “we should not be treating women like pieces of meat”). Meat is meat, so the argument went, but women are human beings and should be treated as such.
In mocking response, in 1978 Larry Flynt put a woman being chewed up by a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine. We will treat women like meat if we want, was the message. And we did, and we do, seemingly endlessly.
Forty years later, Pamela Anderson submits to being symbolically carved up for butchering by PETA in order to metaphorically link meat and female bodies again. But this time, in an ironic reversal, it’s designed to condemn the way we treat animals, not the way we treat women.
And, forty years later, feminists are still saying “Please, can we not do the women/meat thing?”
So Canada denies PETA a permit for the launching of this new ad campaign. An official explains: “…it goes against all principles public organizations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women” (source). What a nice thing to say, feminists think.
But Anderson fights feminism with feminism:
How sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest over the suffering of cows and chickens… In some parts of the world, women are forced to cover their whole bodies with burqas—is that next?
Yes, Pamela, I’m sure that’s next.
But I digress.
So PETA and Anderson must think that Canadians super-super-respect women like totally and never-never-objectify them to the degree that saying that animals are like women will suddenly inspire horror at the prospect of using animals for food? Or is it that they think men will see the image and be like “oooh I’d really like to rub up against that rump” and then suddenly find cows too sexy to eat? Or they don’t give a shit about women and are willing to use whatever attention-getting tactic they can to save animals from going under the knife (including using the body of a woman that has, um, gone under the knife)?
I submit this for discussion because I just don’t know.
More from PETA: women packaged like meat, and in cages, women who love animals get naked (men wear clothes), the banned superbowl ad, and a collection of various PETA advertising using (mostly women’s) nudity. See also my post on leftist balkanization, or the way that leftist social movements tend to undermine each other.
If you’re interested further, you may want to read Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat.
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 S. sent in this photo of the toy options for kids meals available from Burger King as part of their tie-in with the Marmaduke movie. The dogs are helpfully divided, as in most kids’ meals at fast-food chains, into those for girls and boys:
Notice the gendering of the dogs. Both girls and boys have the option of a Marmaduke figurine, though they are posed in different ways: the girl version is lying down, while the boy version seems posed to run or jump. The other girls’ options are passive in their poses, the descriptive words in their names (cuddly, loungin’, comb ‘n’ style), and what they do:
- Comb ‘n’ Style Jezebel: you can comb her hair
- Bone Catchin’ Marmaduke: his tail wags when you move the bone
- Loungin’ Giuseppe: he just sits on the tassled cushion
- Cuddly Raisin: he’s soft
On the other hand, the boys’ options are given active descriptive names and different types of actions:
- Pouncin’ Marmaduke: leaps in the air
- Darting Lightning: you wind him up and he moves
- Stick ‘n’ Move Bosco: you attach his leash and he walks
- Turn ‘n’ roll Mazie: you wind up her tail and she rolls over
So the boys get the option of a doberman (or maybe a Rottweiler?) and what looks like an Australian shepherd, while the girls get a toy dog (a papillon, I think) and a collie, which is also a herding dog but here is presented as something to groom.
Obviously, the breeds and names (Bosco, Giuseppe, etc.) come from the movie, so Burger King didn’t create that part. But in creating the tie-in toys, different dogs from the movie were defined as girls’ or boys’ toys, and were designed accordingly.
It’s a great example of the feminine = passive, masculine = active gender dichotomy and the way children are socialized into it. Toys aimed at girls emphasize posing and appearance/grooming, while boys’ toys are usually more active and rarely involve grooming or dressing up (unless you count changing out the weapons G.I. Joe dolls action figures carry).
Of course, this doesn’t mean that kids and their parents will request the gender-intended toy. My sisters and I didn’t get kids’ meals often, but when we did, my mom almost always requested boys’ toys because they were usually more fun and did something, whereas the girls’ toys often just sat there. I’ve heard similar stories from lots of women. Given that men are discouraged from crossing gender lines more than women are, though, I wonder if parents are as willing to get their sons the girls’ toys if the son asks for it. And if we found the girls’ toys boring and wanted the boys’ versions, it seems likely that boys would generally reject them too.
One example of the pervasive sexualization of beer is the ubiquitous personification of “blond” ales as blond women. Tom Megginson at Change Marketing made this observation and collected a number of examples of this particular example of the gendering and sexualizing of food:
See more at Megginson’s post. See also our other posts on gender and beer here, here, and here.
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.