We haven’t had up any blatant phallic ad imagery in a while, so I thought I’d share with you this Skyy Vodka ad, sent in by Dmitriy T.M. (found at AdRants):
From the AdRants post:
Defending the ad, Skyy Marketing Director Maura McGinn…said, “It’s about the content of our product. We’re an adult product consumed mostly in the evening and in flirtatious situations.”
Of course, it doesn’t actually show the product ejaculating, so it’s pretty tame, really.
Jezebel recently posted this Australian PSA about the dangers of fast food:
It made me think of this British PSA from 1967 that addressed childhood obesity. Our ideas of what you should be eating may have changed in the past 40 years, but the tendency to rely on individualistic explanations and to blame moms for not providing children better food, as though the food they choose for their kids exists outside of any larger social context, seems to have quite the shelf life.
Dmitriy T.M. let us know that Matthew Yglesias posted an interesting graph that compares the actual distribution of wealth in the U.S. compared to what different groups estimate the distribution to be:
As Yglesias says, it’s striking not just that we underestimate how much wealth the top 20% control, but how little the poorest Americans do. Americans imagine the poor to have many, many more financial resources than they actually do.
I’m trying to catch up on some of our email, so you’re getting another round-up of similar-themed items, this time on the gendering of food. Laura L. sent in an advertisement for Muscle Milk, a product generally marketed to men, that she saw on the BART (San Francisco’s public transportation system). The ad presents the product as a means to become more attractive by building muscle — a body type usually encouraged for men but not women — and thus gain sexual access to your friends:
It’s interesting because it’s a gendered product that uses a tactic common in products that market to women: you’re body isn’t good enough, but our product will fix it. It’s not the first time the company has used tactics more often seen in products aimed at women.
In another example of the association of meat-eating with men, Tom Megginson, who blogs at Work that Matters, sent us a link to a story at AdFreak about KFC’s inventive promotional campaign for their Double-Down sandwich, which, if you didn’t know, consists of bacon and cheese between two chicken breast patties (fried or grilled). The promotions, which started in Louisville, KY, involve undergrads wearing sweats with “Double Down” across the butt and giving out free stuff:
The KFC announcement of the program makes it clear that only women are wanted as “brand ambassadors” to help them meet their “key target of young men.”
While men are encouraged to eat high-fat/sodium/calorie monster/mega/ultra/double meat-based items, women, of course, get to eat yogurt. Brianna L. found this Australian commercial for Yoplait Formé, in which women are shown eating foods that are clearly meant to appear unappetizing and illustrate they are sacrificing flavor for their diet, as well as policing one another’s food choices:
Notice at 12 seconds in they all wave away the plate of cookies, but then, just for a second, one of the women shows weakness and starts to reach for one. The woman next to her, however, quickly reins her in with a disapproving look and gesture. As Brianna points out,
Even the tag line “feel fuller for longer” shows eating is not about sustenance, or taking pleasure in food. Being in perpetual hunger – that’s the status quo, at least until a magic yogurt comes along to save you.
Now for a palate cleanser, watch Sarah Haskins’s take on yogurt commercials.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Stephanie L. and Amie A. both sent in screen shots of the MSN tabs “for him” and “for her.” It’s not particularly surprising that MSN segregates its content by sex, but the gendered themes were interesting, especially given that Stephanie and Amie captured two moments in time.
First, notice that the information MSN chose as relevant to him is almost always leisure related:
The two lists above include how to build a man cave (where men escape daily responsibilities), the new Nikes, technological innovation and great inventions to read about, sports news, dating advice, and wacky stories about cocaine, $100,000 dollar bills, catching lobster, and urine. Except for a non-leisure-related, health story, all are either about leisure activities or a way to provide leisure with wacky, weird or fun news.
What about for her?
Her stories are about work (male careers), sexual harassment, babies (breastfeeding and baby talk), teenagers, the economy, and food (superfoods and allergy labels). The video on wildlife, the story about Chelsea Clinton, the piece on Mad Men, the new hospital gown design (???) can be interpreted as leisure-related in that they’d be fun to read.
Overall, then, the material aimed at men is almost entirely related to leisure, whereas the material aimed at women is heavily tilted towards her responsibility for work and the family and serious topics like sexual harassment and the economy. Perhaps MSN knows what it’s doing. In fact, men do have more leisure time than women. So this is a structural problem related to how we organize work and family, as well as a cultural problem in how we represent and relate to men and women.
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 an analysis of the language newspapers used to describe waterboarding, four Harvard students — Neal Desai, Andre Pineda, Majken Runquist, and Mark Fusunyan — discovered that the use of the word torture significantly declined after the Bush administration began contesting its definition as such (read the full paper here). The figures below, for the New York and the Los Angeles Times, shows that in the last decade the newspapers switched from calling it “torture,” to using descriptors (they call it “softer treatment” and include adjectives like “harsh,” “controversial,” or “aggressive”), or simply calling it waterboarding (“no treatment”).
According to BoingBoing, the executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, argues that to use the term “torture” would be to take sides. The authors of the study argue that the reverse is true, especially given that the change coincided with the Bush administration’s dismissal of waterboarding’s definition as torture. They conclude:
The status quo ante was that waterboarding is torture, in American law, international law, and in the newspapers’ own words. Had the papers not changed their coverage, it would still have been called torture. By straying from that established norm, the newspapers imply disagreement with it, despite their claims to the contrary. In the context of their decades‐long practice, the newspaper’s sudden equivocation on waterboarding can hardly be termed neutral.
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.
Rachel sent in a link to a post about the recession by Tim Cavanaugh at Reason that led me to an interactive graphic at the Wall Street Journal that lets you track job loss by either sector or by race/ethnicity and sex from December 2007 to August 2010.
Here is the race/ethnicity and sex data for January 2008 (for reasons I cannot understand, Asians are not separated out by sex, and as usual, American Indians aren’t included):
And here’s the breakdown for January 2010:
Unfortunately, the numbers aren’t weighted by the number of total workers per category, so we don’t have any way to know how these raw numbers translate into percentages of workers losing their jobs.
By economic sector, for January ’08:
January ’10:
[On a nitpicky note, the sector graphs show job losses in negative numbers, which would work if it showed total change in # of jobs. But I think we’d be thrilled if we had -8… thousand job losses, as the graph is labeled. Just a small sloppy labeling issue.]
As the data show, and as we’ve discussed before, the economic recession has disproportionately affected men. But Cavanaugh cautions that it might be a little soon to declare men an at-risk species or lament the bad luck of being born male. Presumably, if men’s over-representation in construction, for instance, has meant they suffered more than women from the real estate bust, if you felt like it you could turn it around and argue that perhaps they disproportionately benefited from the boom that preceded it. Additionally the employment sectors are pretty broad; “retail” or “finance” will include some specific occupations that are fairly gender balanced, some that are dominated by men, and some dominated by women. And overall loss in retail jobs doesn’t tell us if the losses are spread equally across occupations within the sector.
Should we care about the suffering of men and their families in the recession? Of course. And to the degree that men are disproportionately represented in occupations that are prone to boom/bust cycles, we’re likely to continue to see greater volatility in their employment rates than women’s, sometimes to their advantage, sometimes not. But we might want to be a little careful and look at some more in-depth data before we declare, as some commentators seem to want to do, that women have basically escaped the recession. If nothing else, men and women aren’t islands; lots of us share household expenses, and a woman whose husband loses his job but keeps her own doesn’t exactly avoid any negative consequences of the recession.
Related posts: more comparisons of joblessness, race and recession, unemployment and education level, not everyone suffers during a recession, the gender employment gap,
In a fascinating essay, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz argues that we do, indeed, play Farmville because we’re polite. More people in the U.S. play Farmville than any other video game.
…over seventy-three million people play Farmville. Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.
(source)
The game isn’t popular, he argues, because it’s a good game. In fact, Liszkiewicz thinks it’s a decidedly bad game.
…games offer a break from responsibility and routine, yet Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again…
Farmville is so laborious and tedious, that one of the rewards of playing Farmville is playing less Farmville:
As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks.
(source)
So why the heck is Farmville the most popular video game in America? Liszkiewicz says, “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.”
(source)
In other words:
Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.
(source)
* Title borrowed from BoingBoing.
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.
