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Kristin W. sent in this image of a Bed, Bath, & Beyond catalog cover, which concisely captures the way in which we are often encouraged to indulge by eating lots of high-calorie, high-fat foods, but also get cultural messages (often from the same source) that we shouldn’t gain weight:

Notice how the scale tells you “Uh-oh” to let you know you’ve eaten too many treats. So this company provides us with the means to indulge, and to literally warn us when we’ve done so. How helpful.

For other examples, see here.

Thanks, Kristin W.!

This Halloween, in Maryland, sex offenders who had been released from prison were required to put this sticker in a front window (news story here).

I can’t say it better than Gwen, so I quote her from this post:

I find the intense stigmatization of child sexual abuse, compared to other crimes, fascinating. With other crimes, once you finish the terms of probation, you’re pretty much done with the criminal justice system. Only with sex crimes (and generally only if they were against children) is there a requirement that the ex-felon register with law enforcement every time s/he moves even once probation is over, sometimes for a certain number of years, sometimes forever, depending on the state. I mean, you don’t have to do this if you murder someone, or even lots of people (or even if the victims were kids). Our culture currently defines child sexual abusers as unique, particularly horrific criminal who can never really be rehabilitated or reintegrated into society.

I wonder, though, to what degree this law makes children safer. It seems like a false sense of security–if you just know who the convicted sex abusers in your neighborhood are, you can protect your kids. Yet most child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child and his/her family, not a stranger who just moved in to the neighborhood, and very often they have no criminal record, so these types of programs would be useless.

Marc sent in a link to some sexist vintage ads found at Blog of Hilarity [note: I had an actual link to Blog of Hilarity, but commenter LillyB pointed out that when she clicked on it, she got warnings from her AntiVirus about the site; I just had the same thing happen, so I decided for safety’s sake to remove the link]. Some of them I’ll be adding to other posts, but I thought these deserved their own post.

This one, for Love’s Baby Soft, is so creepy I can hardly stand to look at it:

The shape of the bottles, the sexualization of young girls…ick. A teddy bear? Really? The text below the bottles:

Love’s Baby Soft is that irresistible, clean-baby smell, grown-up enough to be sexy. It’s soft-smelling. Pure and innocent. It may well be the sexist fragrance around.

Notice it’s not grown up…it’s grown up enough. Jean Kilbourne uses this, or a similar Love’s Baby Soft, ad in her documentary Killing Us Softly 3 when she discusses how young girls are sexualized and adult women are encouraged to infantilize themselves.

Here’s an ad for Kellogg’s PEP vitamins:

I know I always look super cute when I’m scrubbing the kitchen.

Finally, this Trix ad seems sort of creepy to me, and I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the way the girl is staring at the camera, or that her pupils seem fixed and dilated:

The text isn’t exceptionally interesting, but it does use the word “gay” in the original sense of “happy,” something a company would certainly not do today.

Thanks, Marc!

Gillian sent us a series of overtly sexist Polish commercials for MOBILKING.  Gillian says:

MOBILKING is a newest Polish cell phone operator. It is advertised as a telephon [company] for “real men only”, implying that it’s not for “girly chit-chats”, but rather for “serious bussines talks” (meaning talking about breasts, cars and beer).

Gillian tells us that, after complaints, the commercials were pulled, but after the negative publicity they went viral and gave the cell company more publicity than ever. 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2LBaJB5RT4[/youtube]

Two more of the commercials show a hyper-sexualized woman putting on football gear and a mechanics uniform and asking “But can she play like a man?” and “But can she fix anything like a man?” respectively.  The answer is, of course, “no.”

This Australian commercial for Toyota Corolla (found here) includes a homogenous, racialized out-group.  More after the video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckb-wUHj9WU[/youtube]

The term “out-group homogeneity” refers to the way in which members of an in-group tend to overestimate the extent to which members of an out-group are all alike.  I suppose we don’t know what good kitty’s friends look like (do they all look exactly like him?), but we certainly have the presentation of an out-group that is both categorically different from good kitty and homogeneously so.

I would also like to suggest that that out-group is racialized.  They didn’t use just any kind of cat to represent bad kitties, but a dark-colored cat.   (If I know my cats, the bad “guys” in this video are Russian Blues.)

Blanca M. sent in this clip by Penn and Teller, in which a woman gets people at a World Fest rally (which appears to be an environmental event of some sort) to sign a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide…commonly known as water:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw[/youtube]

You might use it in a discussion of social psychology and the way that people tend to go along with what they see other people doing and to do what they are asked or instructed to do without asking many questions (that is, if someone asks you to sign a petition, very often you will, whether or not you really know what it’s about). You could also use it to talk about perceptions of environmental risk, and how bad we are at evaluating it: if something has a chemical-sounding name, we tend to assume it’s bad (but if it sounds “natural,” we think it must be safe).

I think it would be a good clip for talking about political participation and the limitations of passive forms of participation such as these: the require very little of people, so while they might be quick to sign, they’re unlikely to know much about the issue or to follow up. My guess is that politicians keep this in mind, too. Burk M. was a Senate campaign consultant for a while and says that though written petitions are generally taken seriously by elected officials (particularly if signed by constituents and delivered personally in the presence of a media outlet), email petitions are completely ignored (I knew it!) because there’s no real concern that the people who signed it will ever check back in to see what happened (assuming they’re real people to start with). Government agencies, such as the EPA, may not show as much concern for even printed petitions, since they are not made up of elected officials who fear their constituents might be watching what they do. Thus, these forms of minimal-involvement political participation may make people feel like they’re doing something about an issue, when in fact there is little impact (particularly in the case of email petitions).

Thanks, Blanca!

Michael T. sent in an observation about the Yes on Proposition 8 website, which (successfully) aimed at amending the California constitution to disallow gay marriage.  Along the top of the screen, the four different images below accompanied the slogan “Restoring Marriage & Protecting California Children.”  These marriages, Michael surmises, must be the ones that need protecting.   In addition to reproducing heteronormativity and childbearing, notice that the images are self-consciously diverse, but represent all marriages as within race.

Thanks Michael!

Recently I saw this wood sign for sale in a catalog (available here, if you really want one):

Looking around online I found this t-shirt here, which combines the “My Indian name is” element with a twist on “kicks like a girl”:

I have seen things like this before, and they always irritate me (and I blame the movie “Dances with Wolves” for the whole “Indian names always follow the pattern ‘Present-Tense Singular Verb + With + Noun'” idea). There’s an element of othering here–the idea that American Indian names are funny or weird. Part of what I think is considered funny is that the names are presumably tied to actual activities or things (for example, Mankiller or Redbird). Of course, many European surnames originated the same way (for instance, “Smith” was a surname often used to indicate the person was a blacksmith, silversmith, etc.), but they now hold the status of “normal” surnames that are unremarkable (although Smith has become somewhat remarkable as a symbol of White non-ethnic normality, such that it is often used in movies and TV shows as an alias by spies and others wishing to avoid attention).

That website led me to this one, where there were lots of “Native American” t-shirts. As far as I can tell, it’s not a Native-owned company, it’s just a bunch of shirts with Native people or themes on them. Some, like these, associate American Indians with animals:

Whereas the t-shirts with men on them tend to show them in battle or hunting, those with women generally have romanticized, sometimes vaguely sexualized images. I noticed several have a common element: the upturned face, often with closed eyes, as well as stereotypically “Caucasian” features, except with darker skin and hair. This one is called “Purity”:

You might use these in a discussion of representations of Native Americans, particularly how they continue to be worn as symbols by other groups. The things associated with American Indians–wildlife (particularly wolves), nature, and the warrior tradition–tend to romanticize their connection to the natural environment and even portray them as part of nature themselves, able to communicate with the other “wild things.”

It’s a weird double bind: on the one hand, presumably American Indians are more “noble” than other groups–surely they wouldn’t have driven wolves, bald eagles, and bison to the verge of extinction, given their close connection to nature. But at the same time, they are depicted as relics of the past, brave fighters from the glory days. American Indians who drive cars and wear t-shirts and blue jeans (and have last names like Smith and Thomas) don’t have a place in our romanticized images of Native groups.

NEW! D. Cho sent in three more t-shirts that draw on Native American icons or images. Here is Spirit Happy Fox:

Chief Many Feathers:

How the West Was Fun: