Search results for privilege

Yes, but it was a weird thing you see.

The Nazis were waging war and exterminating Jews.  Meanwhile, Christmas was about celebrating peace and the birth of Jesus, a Jew.

Said the Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937:

We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem.  It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion.

But Germans were largely Christian, so getting rid of Christmas was going to be tricky.  So Hitler turned it into a celebration of the Third Reich.  According to John Brownlee, they re-wrote Christmas carols to extol the virtues of National Socialism.  Mentions of Jesus were replaced with “Savior Führer.”  Since they well understood that Santa wasn’t white, they re-cast the character; he was played by the pagan god Odin.   And they changed the ornaments and placed swastikas atop Christmas trees.

Here are links to a Hitler ornament and Nazi tree topper, swastika cookie cutter, and swastika ornaments:

The last Nazi Christmas was in 1944.  Post-war Germany quickly “did with Hitler’s Christmas what they did with every other idea the Nazis had come up with: denounced it…”

Photo by Monado flickr creative commons.

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.

The History of Christmas

• Militarizing Santa: Then and Now (pictured)
• A Short History of Santa Claus
• Politics and the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
• The Pagan Roots of Christianity

Christmas Across Cultures

• Befana, the Christmas Witch
• Christmas Cultures
• Santa’s Evil Side Kick
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Protestantizing Christmas Gift Giving: The ChristKind
• Snegurochka: Santa’s Granddaughter
• Global Christmas
• Culture and Coordinating Human Action
• Jewish Christmas — The Chinese Connection

The Economics of Christmas

• Disguising the Gift of Money
• International Comparison of Christmas Spending
• Christmas has an Economy
• The Christmas Tree Industry
• 1/3rd of People Say Commercialism is the Worst Part of Christmas

Racializing Christmas

• Racism and Xenophobia in “War on Christmas” Rhetoric
• White Privilege and the Snow White Santa
• New York Times Gift Guide for People of Color
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Holiday in the Hood
• The Hazards of Historical Amnesia

Christmas and Gender

• Gender-Swapping Christmas
• Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”: 1994 versus 2011
• 12 “Mums” Makes the Workload Light
• Christmas is Women’s Work
• Tis the Season for Reinforcing Gender Differences
• Holidays: A Time for Men to Buy Themselves Stuff
• Christmas at the White House: A Role for the First Lady

Gift Guides and the Social Construction of Gender

• The Heterosexual Gift Giving Imperative
• Gender, Technology, and Toys ‘R Us
• Gender in Toy Catalogs
• Body Messages in Christmas-Themed Ads
• Gift Giving with Gender Stereotypes
• More Gender Gift Giving and Advertising
• Another Gendered Gift Guide
• And more Gendered Gift Guides
• And more Gendered Gift Guides!
• Or, you could just buy her a clothesline

Sexifiying Christmas

• Sexy Women as Toys
• Move Over Halloween, Here Comes Christmas
• O-O-Oh Santa!

Christmas Marketing

• Support the Troops. Shop Walmart?
• Fun with the 2009 Target Catalog
• Guns for Christmas
• A Shorty History of Santa Claus
• 1930s Ad Touting Razor Technology
• Gap Thinks Girls are Vapid

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.

A New York Times article broke the story that a preference for boy children is leading to an unlikely preponderance of boy babies among Chinese-Americans and, to a lesser but still notable extent, Korean- and Indian-Americans.

Explaining the trend, Roberts writes:

In those families, if the first child was a girl, it was more likely that a second child would be a boy, according to recent studies of census data. If the first two children were girls, it was even more likely that a third child would be male.

Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion.

The article explains the preference for boy children as cultural, as if Chinese, Indian, and Korean cultures, alone, expressed a desire to have at least one boy child.  Since white and black American births do not show an unlikely disproportion of boy children, the implication is that a preference for boys is not a cultural trait of the U.S.

Actually, it is.

In 1997 a Gallup poll found that 35% of people preferred a boy and 23% preferred a girl (the remainder had no preference). In 2007 another Gallup poll found that 37% of people preferred a boy, while 28% preferred a girl.

I bring up this data not to trivialize the preference for boys that we see in the U.S. and around the world, but to call into question the easy assumption that the data presented by the New York Times represents something uniquely “Asian.”

Instead of emphasizing the difference between “them” and “us,” it might be interesting to try to think why, given our similarities, we only see such a striking disproportionality in some groups.

Some of the explanation for this might be cultural (e.g., it might be more socially acceptable to take measures to ensure a boy-child among some groups), but some might also be institutional. Only economically privileged groups have the money to take advantage of sex selection technology (or even abortion, as that can be costly, too). Sex selection, the article explains, costs upwards of $15,000 or more. Perhaps not coincidentally, Chinese, Korean, and Indian Asians are among the more economically privileged minority groups in the U.S.

Instead of demonizing Asian people, and without suggesting that all groups have the same level of preference for boys, I propose a more interesting conversation: What enables some groups to act on a preference for boys, and not others?

Originally posted in 2009.

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 her article “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh talks about a number of types of white privilege, including using the phrases “flesh tone” or “nude” to describe light skin and featuring mostly white people in tv, movies, and advertising.

When I’ve had students read this article, they often argue that it just makes sense to do that, since the majority of people in the U.S. are white. They also question what other color could be used as a “neutral” or “normal” one.  In fact, this is exactly what was argued in the comments to this post about the “white” Facebook avatar.

But English Russia points out that in Russia, it’s not uncommon for people in cartoons to be black; not Black racially, but literally black. Below are examples of these cartoons, introduced with English Russia‘s translations.

“My pussy could have Whiskas instead of whiskey.”

“Sir, don’t throw away the empty bottle, I would take it to the recycle point for spare money.”

“Tourist: ‘Is it true that the Earth is round?’ Men: ‘We don’t know son, we’re not locals.'”

Despite the fact that many people in Russia would be classified in the U.S. as white, these cartoons obviously use the color black as a neutral color — the people in the cartoons aren’t Black in any racial sense, it’s just the standard color the artist has used for everyone. You might contrast these with things in the U.S. that are labeled “flesh” or “nude” to counter the idea that there are no other options but a sort of light peach color to be the fallback color when you aren’t specifically representing a racial minority.

Thanks to Miguel at El Forastero for the link! Originally posted in 2009.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

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.

SocImages news:

• We rarely snark on SocImages but, when we do, we get quoted at New York Magazine.
• Our list of professors’ pet peeves really resonated, attracting 9,400+ likes and nearly 500 shares on Facebook.  Sociologist D’Lane Compton offered a thoughtful response, asking whether this type of list is more social bonding than useful pedagogy.

New Pinterest board!

Someone put panties on peaches and then we had to start a new Pinterest board called Sexy What!?  It’s a collection of totally random stuff being made weirdly and unnecessarily sexual by marketers. My favorites are the ads for organ donation, hearing aids, CPR, and sea monkeys.  Enjoy!

You like!  Here are our most appreciated posts this month:

• In employers’ eyes, for-profit colleges are equivalent to high school (3,600+ likes)
• “Black and white twins” and the social construction of race (1,600+ likes)
• Statistically significant others (1,200+ likes)
• Academic writing MadLib (1,200+ likes)
• #iftheygunnedmedown attacks portrayals of black men killed by police (1,100+ likes)
• The best thesis defense is a good offense (800+ likes)
• Julie Chen explains why she underwent “Westernizing” surgery (700+ likes)
• Wealth or good parenting? Framing the privileges of the rich (600+ likes)

Thanks everybody!

Editor’s pick:

• That’s fishy: From scent to suspicion and back

Top post on Tumblr this month:

• Now THIS is a bold lingerie ad! (87,000+ likes and shares)

Don’t forget our course guides!

Classes are starting and if you’re teaching you might find our Course Guides useful.  These collect strong SocImages posts organized in a way that follows standard syllabi for frequently-taught sociology courses.  Please use and share freely!

• Introduction to Sociology
• Sociology of Gender
• Family and Society
• Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
• Sociology of Sport
• Sociology of Work
• Sexuality and Society
• Sociological Research Methods
• Women and History

We’d love more! If you are a sociology professor or graduate student who would like to make one.  Please get in touch!

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, 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.

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.

Earlier this year, Barbie posed for Sports Illustrated, triggering a round of eye-rolling and exasperation among those who care about the self-esteem and overall mental health of girls and women.

Barbie replied with the hashtag #unapologetic, arguing in an — I’m gonna guess, ghostwritten — essay that posing in the notoriously sexist swimsuit issue was her way of proving that girls could do anything they wanted to do.  It was a bizarre appropriation of feminist logic alongside a skewering of a feminist strawwoman that went something along the lines of “don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful.”

Barbie is so often condemned as the problem and Mattel, perhaps tired of playing her endless defender, finally just went with: “How dare you judge her.”  It was a bold and bizarre marketing move.  The company had her embrace her villain persona, while simultaneously shaming the feminists who judged her.  It gave us all a little bit of whiplash and I thought it quite obnoxious.

But then I came across Tiffany Gholar’s new illustrated book, The Doll Project.  Gholar’s work suggests that perhaps we’ve been too quick to portray Barbie as simply a source of young women’s self-esteem issues and disordered eating.  We imagine, after all, that she gleefully flaunts her physical perfection in the face of us lesser women.  In this way, Mattel may be onto something; it isn’t just her appearance, but her seemingly endless confidence and, yes, failure to apologize, that sets us off.

But, maybe we’re wrong about Barbie?

What if Barbie is just as insecure as the rest of us?  This is the possibility explored in The Doll Project.  Using a mini diet book and scale actually sold by Mattel in the 1960s, Gholar re-imagines fashion dolls as victims of the media imperative to be thin.  What if  Barbie is a victim, too?

Excerpted with permission:

Forgive me for joining Mattel and Gholar in personifying this doll, but I enjoyed thinking through this reimagining of Barbie. It reminded me that even those among us who are privileged to be able to conform to conventions of attractiveness are often suffering.  Sometimes even the most “perfect” of us look in the mirror and see nothing but imperfection.  We’re all in this together.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard and Adios Barbie.

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.

Apparently universities are issuing guidelines to help professors consider adding “trigger warnings” to syllabi for “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” and to remove triggering material when it doesn’t “directly contribute to learning goals.” One example given is Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” for its colonialism trigger. This from New Republic this week.

I have no desire to enter the fray of online discussions on trigger warnings and sensitivity. I have used trigger warnings. Most recently, I made a personal decision to not retweet Dylan Farrow’s piece in the New York Times detailing Woody Allen’s sexual abuse. I was uncomfortable shoving a very powerful description at people without some kind of warning. I couldn’t read past the first three sentences. I couldn’t imagine how it read for others. So, I referenced the article with a trigger warning and kept it moving.

But, I’m not sure that’s at all the kind of deliberation universities are doing with their trigger warning policies. Call me cynical, but the “student-customer” movement is the soft power arm of the neo-liberal corporatization of higher education. The message is that no one should ever be uncomfortable because students do not pay to feel things like confusion or anger. That sounds very rational until we consider how the student-customer model doesn’t silence power so much as it stifles any discourse about how power acts on people.

I’ve talked before about how the student-customer model becomes a tool to rationalize away the critical canon of race, sex, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and capitalism.

The trigger warned syllabus feels like it is in this tradition. And I will tell you why.

In the last three weeks alone: a college student has had structural violence of normative harassment foisted on her for daring to have sex (for money), black college students at Harvard have taken to social media to catalog the casual racism of their colleagues, and black male students at UCLA made a video documenting their erasure.

It would seem that the most significant “issue” for a trigger warning is actual racism, sexism, ableism, and systems of oppression. Cause I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had my crystal stair dead end at the floor of racism and sexism and I’ve read “Things Fall Apart.” The trigger warning scale of each in no way compares.

Yet, no one is arguing for trigger warnings in the routine spaces where symbolic and structural violence are acted on students at the margins. No one, to my knowledge, is affixing trigger warnings to department meetings that WASP-y normative expectations may require you to code switch yourself into oblivion to participate as a full member of the group. Instead, trigger warnings are being encouraged for sites of resistance, not mechanisms of oppression.

At for-profit colleges, strict curriculum control and enrollment contracts effectively restrict all critical literature and pedagogy. We elites balk at such barbarism. What’s a trigger warning but the prestige university version? A normative exclusion as opposed to a regulatory one?

Trigger warnings make sense on platforms where troubling information can be foisted upon you without prior knowledge, as in the case of retweets. Those platforms are in the business of messaging and amplification.

That is an odd business for higher education to be in… unless the business of higher education is now officially business.

In which case, we may as well give up on the tenuous appeal we have to public good and citizenry-building because we don’t have a kickstand to lean on.

If universities are not in the business of being uncomfortable places for silent acts of power and privilege then the trigger warning we need is: higher education is dead but credential production lives on; enter at your own risk.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.  Her doctoral research is a comparative study of the expansion of for-profit colleges.  You can follow her on twitter and at her blog, where this post originally appeared.