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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.

Valerie A. sent along a short video by Chris Muther, at the Boston Globe.  He offers a humorous history of changing bodily ideals for both men and women.   He explains the shifts as rebellion against our parents and what they found sexy. I find this explanation uncompelling, though. You?

See also our recent post on bodily diversity among Olympic athletes and our fashion fantasy in which everyone emphasized whatever (weird) bodies they were born with.

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.

On January 30th a video was uploaded to youtube featuring among the most blatantly racist banter I have ever heard on or off screen.   The conversation occurred among the hosts of a BBC program called Top Gear: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.  They discuss a new sports car made in Mexico and the racist “hilarity” ensues.  It is pretty damn horrible… and it goes on and on… so, trigger warning.

There’s a full transcript after the jump, but here are some high points:

They say the car is like the Mexican people: “lazy, feckless, flatulent, [indecipherable] leaning against a fence asleep”

They call Mexican food “sick with cheese on it.”

Hammond says, “Just imagine waking up and remembering that you’re Mexican.” Everyone laughs. Clarkson replies, “It’d be brilliant because you could just go back to sleep again.”

Hammond is the ring leader in this example, but Clarkson appears to make a habit of racist commentary. Here’s just a sampling from Wikipedia:

In October 1998 Hyundai complained to the BBC about what they described as “bigoted and racist” comments he made at the Birmingham Motor Show, where he was reported as saying that the people working on the Hyundai stand had “eaten a dog” and that the designer of the Hyundai XG had probably eaten a spaniel for his lunch…

In April 2007 he was criticised in the Malaysian parliament for having described one of their cars, the Perodua Kelisa, as the worst in the world, built “in jungles by people who wear leaves for shoes”…

This clip reminds us that there are still people out there who will make race-based attacks and plenty of people, note the audience, who will laugh.  Many white people truly do oppose racism and they want people of color to trust them; they want the benefit of the doubt.  But occasional exposure to people like this, even if just on television, and the ongoing daily experience of prejudice, some mild, some severe, plus the hundreds of things that happen every week that may have been racism or may have been somebody having a bad day, add up.  This makes it very scary to trust white people.  Every “benefit of the doubt” has the potential to backfire.

Given the daily experience of race that most people of color must endure, blind trust is too much to ask for.

(Transcript after the jump, borrowed from Racialicious.)

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Emily J. sent us a link to a segment of “That’s Gay” from the TV show Infomania. In this piece, Bryan Safi takes a look at a number of recent commercials that ridicule men for being insufficiently hetero-masculine:

For other examples, see homophobia as gender policing, Brut lets you slap the Old Spice guy, mocking a hockey player with femininity, lite beer makes you girly, McCoys crisps give lessons on being a real man, Cosmo warns against turning your guy into a girlie man, Dockers issues guys a man-ifesto, are you manly enough to wear BVDs?, and a whole bunch of stereotypes about masculinity in advertising.

…asks Bryant Gumbel as he, Katie Couric, and an unnamed co-host try to decipher the @ symbol and figure out what “email” is in the aftermath of an earthquake in 1994.  It’s a precious and hilarious peek into a moment that changed the world forever.

Found at Buzzfeed.

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.

Benedict Anderson coined the phrase “imagined communities” to point to the way that humans believe they are meaningfully connected, by virtue of some commonality, to people they will never know, and may have very little in common with.  He applied the idea to the nation.  Why do all of the citizens of China, for example, have in common with other citizens of China?  In some cases little, other than their citizenship.  Yet, the fact that “we are all Chinese” can motivate many people to do and feel things.

In an RSA video featuring Jeremy Rifkin, sent in by Dmitriy T.M., it is argued that the human ability to imagine a community is a neurological capacity for empathy that has evolved, both neurologically and socially, throughout human existence.  First, he argues, we identified with close relatives, then with our religious community, and later with our nation-state.  Our future, then, he argues, is dependent on our ability to imagine the whole world as a community.  New technologies may very well enable this and Rifkin has his fingers crossed.

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.

In the first five minutes of the clip below, economist Jeffrey Sachs explains to Dalton Conley that ending poverty in Africa requires a demographic transition, one where we move from high fertility and high mortality to low fertility and low mortality.

How to encourage such a transition?

1. Bring down mortality with advanced medicine. Declines in childhood mortality lead families to choose to have fewer children (’cause they don’t have to).

2. Make sure girls go and stay in school; they’ll get married later, and have less babies.

3. Provide free contraceptive services and family planning education.

Also see Dr. Sachs explain why Africa ended up so poor in the first place.

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.

Yesterday, a woman I know who moved to the U.S. as an adult mentioned that she was struck by portrayals of mother-daughter relationships in the U.S.  Representations of such relationships on TV, in movies, and regular conversation indicate that especially when daughters are in their teens and 20s, we practically expect their relationships with their moms to be fraught with conflict and difficulty (and the attendant eye-rolling and yelling), and for teens to be disrespectful and to find their parents intolerable. While she had certainly known individuals in Ecuador who didn’t get along with their parents, she felt that in the U.S. we almost cultivate conflict, making it seem like a normal aspect of child-family relationships in general rather than a characteristic of some individual families and culturally sanctioning the open expression of frustration with one’s parents as acceptable, even healthy.

I thought about that when I saw a commercial sent in by Livia A. for the video game Dead Space 2. Here’s a behind-the-scenes video released as part of the ad campaign; the entire selling point is the idea that your mom will hate it:

It’s a great example of this social construction of child-parent relationships as at least somewhat antagonistic: what kids love, parents hate, and parents hating it proves it’s awesome. Telling young people “your parents will be disgusted by this” becomes an automatic selling point. And this idea of how people relate to their parents (in this case, mothers specifically) is presented as an essential, permanent fact: “A mom’s disapproval has always been an accurate barometer of what is cool.”

But of course, this isn’t an inherent property of family life across human history. It largely rests on the invention of adolescence and young adulthood as distinct life stages in which we expect individuals to act differently than children but not quite like full-fledged adults yet, and the assumption that a normal part of this is to struggle to separate from your parents as you try to establish your own identity. Parenting norms today expect parents to accept teen/young adult rebellion and continue loving (and supporting) their kid anyway; you don’t get to withhold resources and affection if you think they’ve been disrespectful. And with the increased visibility of youth culture, we expect kids will find their parents terribly uncool and will see peers, rather than family members, as the proper judges for what they should like. Together, these cultural norms both make it relatively risk-free to take open joy in horrifying your parents and trivializing their values, since there’s little chance they’ll disown or abandon you for it and make young people who do like the same things as their parents seem weird.

I suspect some of our readers may have an interesting gender analysis, as well, what with the emphasis in this video on moms from “conservative America”, while the entire behind-the-scenes crew is made up of young men. While I can imagine an ad that might say “Your dad will hate it,” I don’t think that would work as well here, given that part of the desired reaction was a disgust at the level of violence and gore, something we assume women are more uncomfortable with than men.