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Tennille N. sent in this Australian commercial for NutriGrain cereal:

Transcription:

Boys need protein for growth and muscle development.
NutriGrain is one of the highest protein cereals, so as part of a balanced diet and regular exercise, NutriGrain has what it takes to help build your son into an Ironman.
Thanks Mum.
NutriGrain, Ironman food.

As Tennille noted, I guess she doesn’t need NutriGrain, since she’s a girl and, accordingly, does not need muscles, nor athletic aspirations.

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.

Shayna over at Food, Farms, and Famine posted about what the label “organic” means. The specific wording, and where on the package the statement is placed, is an indication of just how “organic” the product might be,

This video also discusses the meaning of various organic labels (put after the jump because it starts playing automatically):

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Michelle DuB. sent in some data from the Toronto Star, showing that blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped by police in every single patrol zone except for one.  The disproportion was even high in mostly white areas; they were stopped up to 17 times as often (darker red is most disproportion):

Click here for a video showing what some citizens and a bunch of Toronto police have to say.

See also our posts showing how the stopping of people on the street usually results in… nothing (other than people feeling harassed) and how racial profiling turns out to be ineffective anyway.

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.


Sanguinity and Jen B. sent in a “That’s Gay” segment discussing, humorously, the discourse around figure skater Johnny Weir’s sexual orientation and whether he should be allowed to skate the way he does:

Quoting from The Sport Journal, Jen writes:

While figure skating is rumored to have the highest proportion of homosexual men of any amateur competitive sport, it is ironically a sport in which men must exhibit the most blatantly heterosexual signs to be successful and to receive commercial endorsements… at the 2001 World Championships in Vancouver when a well-known male Canadian skater was contacted by a gay magazine about the possibility of doing a feature story on him, he was told by Skate Canada that he must decline the request. As one coach said to me, “that is not the sort of picture that Skate Canada wants to paint for the country, especially in an international forum.” Every effort is made to construct such skaters as heterosexual.

We’ve posted on Skate Canada’s get “tough” campaign here.

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.


Jay Smooth on why we should focus less on the dumb racist/sexist/asshole-y bullshit people like John Mayer say (and man, did he ever say some dumb bullshit) and more on, say, re-segregation of the public school system:

And just for fun, Jay Smooth discussing Chris Matthews’s comment that he “forgot” President Obama was black, and what that says about what we think racial equality would look like:

I get this with students a lot: they desperately want to deny ever noticing anyone’s race/ethnicity, because the discourse of color blindness states that the way to treat people equally and eradicate racism is to stop acknowledging racial categories at all. But when you simply start ignoring the role of an important socially-constructed category without actually eliminating the negative effect it has on those in certain categories, you aren’t ending racism. It’s just making it harder to talk about or address, since anyone who tries to start a conversation about racial inequality is accused of actually perpetuating inequality and/or being racist for bringing the topic up.

This ties back in with the first video–we are more comfortable with more symbolic or linguistic forms of combating racial inequality (so, say, people say they have a friend who “happens to be Black,” as though it’s something they never thought about until that very second) than the much more complicated, difficult, and long-term work of rooting out structural inequality.

In this video, sent in by Martha, Lindsay Ellis asks why it is that female characters in general-audience cartoons, if present at all, are always plot points for the male characters. Her point is clearly sound, but damn does she marshal the evidence!  She appears to have really done her homework… but I have no doubt that those of you who are experts in My Little Pony, Transformers, Scooby Do, and She-Ra will have something to add.

Here’s another video on the same topic:

For more on the phenomenon in which women are women and men are people, see our analysis of the “Human” Bodies exhibit, girls as an afterthought, dinosaurs are for boys (and girls), traffic lights with female figures, stick figures and stick figures who parent, and default avatars.

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.

Mihai L. sent in a Romanian commercial for wafers that suggests that women have been slowing down progress and re-writing history since the cavewoman days!

With subtitles:

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.

Dmitriy T.M. reminded me of this classic performance of the song “America” from a classic American musical, West Side Story (1961; it won 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture).  The song features white New Yorkers and Puerto Rican immigrants debating about the benefits of living in America.  The “streets paved with gold” mythology is articulated by the women at the same time that the white men remind them that they face racism and poverty.

Also, Rita Moreno is awesome:

UPDATE: Commenter Jesse W. says,

…as a theater nerd, I wanted to point out it’s not a debate between white New Yorkers and Puerto Ricans, I think you just get that impression from the bad casting. They’re all supposed to be Puerto Rican; it’s more of a battle of the sexes between the men who wanted to stay in the old country and the women who wanted to come to America.

And Laura says,

…the women are arguing with the men that America is great, and they prefer it to Puerto Rico, and the men are arguing that America is racist and oppressive.

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.