Search results for sex in advertising

As a sociologist who happens to DJ — or is that the other way around? — I’m always curious to see how DJing is depicted in popular culture and advertising. Ever since the 1970s, when the disco craze helped push the prominence of DJs into the public realm, disc jockeys have become iconic symbols of nightlife culture. Within the milieu of the dance floor, DJs serve as what Sarah Thornton once described as “orchestrators of a ‘living’ communal experience.”

As such, the image of the DJ standing behind a pair of turntables has become ripe for appropriation by liquor and cigarette companies in particular. For them, especially in print ads, the DJ serves as a visual shorthand for any number of values they want their product associated with: culturally hip/cool, entertainment/musical mavens, the source of good times, etc. However, when it comes to that shorthand, this Smirnoff ad from last summer may have come up just a little too short.

At first glance, this image of a DJ working the turntables, with a cleavage-baring admirer looking on, seems uncomplicated: Smirnoff promises a fun, sexy time. However, a closer examination of the mise en scéne yields some instant problems.

  • There are no records on the turntables.
  • There’s not a mat on the turntables. Especially in a nightclub setting, DJs always use felt mats that sit between the platter and record. This not only protects the vinyl surface from the platter but by reducing friction between the record and platter, the DJ can “slip” a record into play at just the right moment. Hence, felt mats are called “slip mats.” In short, it’s very strange to see a turntable without a slip mat.
  • There’s no needle on the turntable arm. Therefore, even if they had bothered to put records on the turntables, Mr. Hip DJ wouldn’t have been able to actually play them.
  • There’s no visible DJ mixer. The mixer is absolutely crucial, allowing the DJ to switch between two audio sources, i.e. what makes “disc jockeying” possible to begin with. Normally, the mixer would sit between the two turntables so its absence in the image is conspicuous.
  • The gesture — hands posed over both turntables — doesn’t make sense; it’s not a pose that any DJ would ever employ. Normally, you would have one hand on a turntable, the other hand working the mixer but no nightclub DJ would  be manipulating both turntables, simultaneously. He looks like he’s trying to play bongos. (A scratch DJ, aka turntablist, may work both turntables for certain techniques but scratch DJs aren’t typically nightclub DJs – hard to dance to someone scratching).

When this ad made its rounds on social media, theories were bandied about to explain just what went wrong in this ad. The most plausible explanation is that the Smirnoff campaign selected a stock image hastily but that still opens up the question of how no one, from the original photographer, to the people in the image, to the people working on the Smirnoff ad itself, seemed to realize just how ridiculous this image was. It’d be akin to a car ad where someone is pretending to drive a car… from the backseat. With the wheels missing. And facing the wrong direction.

Of course, the vast majority of people know what driving a car is supposed to look like. One conclusion one might draw from the Smirnoff ad is that while the basic image of a DJ has some resonance in the public imagination, as a practice/craft, DJing isn’t actually well-understood at all.

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Dr. Oliver Wang is an associate professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach. He contributes regularly on music and culture for NPR’s All Things Considered, KPCC’s Take Two, the LA Times, and KCET’s ArtBound. He also writes the audioblog Soul-Sides.com.

SocImages News:

In betwixt the holidays, we’ve been keeping busy.  I booked an additional talk for the Spring; I’ll be visiting Queen’s University of Kingston to talk about the relationship between hook up culture and sexual assault (see upcoming lectures for details).  I always try to squeeze in a Meet Up when I travel so, if you’re in the area, keep your eyes peeled for an announcement!

Speaking of college kids gone wild, I was tickled to get the last word in this Bloomberg article by Chris Staiti on bad behavior in the Ivy League.  I concurred that there were some pretty gnarly things going on at the Ivies, but closed out the piece with this comment:

Colleges are a microcosm of American society. It’s a story of hormone-driven kids packed into dorms like sardines. And what we see when we look there — the glamorization of casual sex; the binge-drinking; the crude, insensitive humor; the homophobia; the racism — is a story about us.

So, that was a treat!

Since many people have had kids and toys on the brain this past month, you might be interested in listening to my appearance as a guest expert on At Issue with Ben Merens for Wisconsin Public Radio.  I talked with the host and guests about the history, politics, and economics of gender-segregated toys, plus gave a little advice to parents (download).

SocImages was also cross-posted at Jezebel (How Infant and Toddler Girls Learn to Beautify) and Ms. (The Truth About Pink and Blue Brains) and enjoyed links from French SlateMarginal RevolutionThe IndependentThe FriskyBitchAfroSpear, and GigaOm.

All in all, a great month!  Oh, and we reached 21,000 Facebook followers and are SO CLOSE to 10,000 on Twitter! Hopefully that’ll be part of our news for January.

Upcoming Lectures:

  • Western Political Science Association (Hollywood, CA, Mar. 28-30): panels on “Public Intellectualism” and the “Twenty-First Century Sex Wars”
  • Harvard University (Women’s Week, Mar. 8-14): “A Feminist Defense of Friendship”
  • University of Akron (Apr. 19): “Anatomy of an Outrage: Female Genital Cutting and the Politics of Acculturation”
  • Queen’s University of Kingston (Feb. 26): “‘The Night Overall Wasn’t Bad’: What College Students Really Think About Hooking Up”

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on TwitterFacebookGoogle+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade@gwensharpnv@familyunequal@carolineheldman@jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other News…

Both Gwen and I will be in South America for the beginning of January, so hopefully we’ll have some fabulous photos to share next month!

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.

Christmas Across Cultures

The Economics of Christmas

Racializing Christmas

Christmas and Gender

Gift Guides and the Social Construction of Gender

Sexifiying Christmas

Christmas Marketing

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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The Hall of Shame

Body Types
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Elisabeth R. sent in a commercial that, I admit, I kinda like.   As the ad progresses, a Mustang driven through urban streets gets a new paint job as a diverse group of people project their personalities onto the car.  At the very end a little girl holding the hand of her father, wearing a pink ballerina get-up, spies the car.  The car turns pink and then goes black.  As it drives by her, she’s reflected in the mirror as a bad-ass black angel pictured above.

What I like about the commercial isn’t the fact that they portray the girl as resisting girliness.  Suggesting that girls who are less girly are better than those who aren’t is just another form of sexism, one that demeans femininity.  Likewise, the characters are diverse, but that’s par for the course these days, especially when an item is being marketed as urban and modern.

What I like, instead, is just the fact that the ad has an ounce of creativity, that it ends with a twist.  Advertising is so stereotypical today and relies so strongly on tropes, that I find it exhausting to watch.  So, while the twist wasn’t totally subversive, I was relieved that the marketing team for Mustang did something interesting.  Really, at this point my standards for not-horrible are pretty low.

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.

Tip: This may look like a boring update post, but you really, really, really want to scroll down to the bottom.

SocImages News

Resources for Instructors (and Other Curious Types)

If you haven’t yet, please visit our For Instructors page.  Here are some highlights:

Course Guides

As you begin the Fall semester, don’t forget about our amazing Course Guides!  These organize SocImages posts in a way that follows standard syllabi for frequently-taught sociology courses.  We currently feature the following:

For those of you that already use them.  Thank you so much!  Our guides have been visited, collectively, 43,000 times.  We’re thrilled.

Have a Guide you might like to put together?  We’re looking for volunteers — sociology professors or graduate students — who are willing to browse our archives, pull out the most compelling posts, and arrange them in ways other instructors would find familiar and convenient.  The Guides can cover entire courses or be designed to help illustrate a theory, article, or book.  (We’re even happy to have duplicate Guides, since every instructor is different.)  Send us an email at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

Pinterest Pages

Our Pinterest pages are fun for everyone, but they’re useful for professors looking for just the right image to illustrate an idea.  We currently have one page with all SocImages material (over 9,000 pins!) and 17 pages on specific topics.  Please feel free to browse!

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Lisa has started booking talks and lectures for the fall.  Her first talk will be at Indiana State University (Sept. 17th-19th) where she’ll be giving a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on TwitterFacebookGoogle+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade@gwensharpnv@familyunequal@carolineheldman@jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other News…

We totally went to an aerobics class taught by Richard Simmons! It was every bit as wacky and amazing as you would think it would be. He even took a  photo with us. If you’re in L.A., you can take a class with him for only $12, and we highly recommend it. Here we are with Richard in all our post-workout glory:

Rebecca sent in an ad she saw in an Australian women’s magazine that explicitly reinforces the idea that women are in perpetual competition with one another. The ad declares an anti-aging product a weapon to be used “in the war against other women,” reminding women that we should consider ourselves to be in a battle with one another over who is most physically attractive — and thus, presumably, most likely to win the ultimate prize of remaining sexually attractive to men:

Check out our earlier posts on the discourse of women-as-competitors, how objectification divides women, the “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” advertising trope, and an Israeli Bacardi ad campaign that told women to get an ugly friend to make themselves look better.