bodies

Taylor D. sent in a link to a collection of vintage ads that includes this one:

From Vintage Ads:

Holly M. sent us this one:

NEW! Larry Harnisch, of The Daily Mirror, sent us this one:

The fact that these girls were considered “chubby” is only slightly more distressing than the fact that polyester blends were considered fashionable.

What do they call sizes for “larger” kids these days? I know they don’t say “chubby,” but I don’t think they use the “plus-size” term for kids–am I wrong? Is there a standard industry term?

Captain Crab sent in a link to this story in the Mail Online about two girls who were kicked out of school for being “two blonde.” Here are the girls:

The girls claim the headmaster said they would be expelled “unless they dyed their hair brown.” He says he simply sent them home until they had it dyed, and that this is in accordance with the school’s dress code, which does not allow “unnatural” hair colors.

It brings up some interesting questions about “naturalness” and how we alter our bodies. Is an “unnatural” hair color any color that a human has never had without help from some type of chemical or other coloring agent? Or is “unnatural” a color other than what your hair would be if you didn’t dye it? Both of these girls dyed their hair colors that many women dye their hair and that some people do have “naturally,” that is, without bleaching it. Does the fact that they chose blonde have anything to do with the reaction? If they had dyed their hair black or auburn, would they have been sent home? I have no idea, I’m just wondering.

You could also use this story to discuss attempts to control kids at school through the use of uniforms, dress/appearance codes, etc., and the way kids always try to get around them, leading to constant renegotiations of what is acceptable and unacceptable between students and school authorities.

Thanks, Captain!

In early American history, male circumcision was very uncommon.  In the 1950s, however, about 90% of newborn boys were circumcised in the U.S.  Today, the number is just over 50%.

The International Coalition for Genital Integrity has put together a slideshow that traces developments in research and argumentation about male circumcision alongside rising and falling rates of the practice in the U.S., the U.K., and the world from 1832 till today.  

It’s interesting how rates of circumcision change drastically over time in the U.S., but stay relatively stable (low) in the U.K. 

It is also neat to see some of the arguments about circumcision that were made over time.  For example, the long-standing belief that circumcision cured sexual excess (like wet dreams and masturbation), the explicit support for circumcision on the basis that it reduced sexual sensitivity (and that was good), and the belief that circumcision could cure paralysis, bedwetting, crossed eyes, deafness, tuburculosis, cancer of the tongue, and more.  Dovetailing with American racism, in 1894 an article argued that circumcising the “Negro” would reduce the rape of white women by black men.

Beth sent in a link to WowWee, a company that makes robot toys, including Robosapien:

The description of Robosapien:

Robosapien™ is a sophisticated fusion of technology and personality. Loaded with attitude and intelligence, Robosapien is the first robot based on the science of applied biomorphic robotics. With a full range of dynamic motion, interactive sensors and a unique personality, Robosapien is more than a mechanical companion — he’s a multi-functional, thinking, feeling robot with attitude!

There is also a female version, called Femisapien:

From the website:

Intelligent and interactive, RS Femisapien™ speaks her own language called “emotish” which consists of gentle sounds and gestures. There is no remote required; interact with her directly and she responds to your hand gestures, touch, and sound.

So the default robot is male, with the female being not a female Robosapien but rather an entirely different product. And the photos and descriptions of Robosapien emphasize aggression, movement, personality, and “attitude,” while Femisapien speaks “emotish” (seriously?), which is “gentle”–a characteristic that seems to be missing from Robosapien, who is dynamic and, um, maybe shoots lasers from his hands.

It’s a nice example of gendered assumptions being built into product design and marketing. There’s no particular reason that the male and female versions of a robot have to look so very different, but even if they did, the decision to associate one with words and characteristics that evoke emotion and gentleness and the other with aggression and movement isn’t accidental; it’s a result of how we think about males and females.

For another excellent example of the men are people and women are women thing, see this post on the Body Worlds exhibit.

NEW! Kyle M. sent us a link to his post on the advertising for the sci-fi show Surrogates.  He makes some great observations.  I noticed, too, that the way in which the robotic components of men and women were designed differed slightly in gendered ways.  The “spines” of the men are significantly more robust than the thin, spindly spines given to the female characters.  Notice, also, that the way in which the models are posed emphasizes women’s thinness (in all of these ads, she is positioned sideways, minimizing her size) and men’s broadness (positioned so that the width of his body is emphasized).

Freud distinguished between a “mature” (vaginal) and “immature” (clitoral) orgasm, telling women that to require clitoral stimulation for orgasm was a psychological problem. Contesting this, in 1970 Anne Koedt wrote The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.  She explains:

Frigidity has generally been defined by men as the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms. Actually the vagina is not a highly sensitive area and is not constructed to achieve orgasm. It is the clitoris which is the center of sexual sensitivity and which is the female equivalent of the penis… Rather than tracing female frigidity to the false assumptions about female anatomy, our “experts” have declared frigidity a psychological problem of women.

Indeed, studies show that about 1/3rd of women regularly reach orgasm during penile-vaginal sex.  The rest (that is, the majority) require more direct clitoral stimulation.  Koedt goes on (my emphasis):

All this leads to some interesting questions about conventional sex and our role in it. Men have orgasms essentially by friction with the vagina, not the clitoral area, which is external and not able to cause friction the way penetration does. Women have thus been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men; our own biology has not been properly analyzed. Instead, we are fed the myth of the liberated woman and her vaginal orgasm – an orgasm which in fact does not exist.

Koedt’s article was highly influential and rejecting the notion of the “vaginal orgasm” (both anatomically and functionally) was part of second wave feminism. 

Still, the vaginal orgasm keeps coming back.  During the ’90s, it came back in the form of the G-spot.  You, too, can have a vaginal orgasm if you can just find that totally-orgasmic-pleasure-spot-rich-in-blood-vessels-and-nerve-endings-that-makes-for-wildly-amazing-orgasms-with-ejaculation that you, strangely, never knew was there!  (See what Betty Dodson has to say about the g-spot here.)

Most recently, the vaginal orgasm has come back in the form of orgasmic birth.  The idea is that women can, if they really want to, have an orgasm (or orgasms) during childbirth. 

Now, I don’t want to argue that women never have orgasms from penile-vaginal intercourse.  They do.  I also don’t care to debate whether a g-spot exists.  And I am certainly not going to look a mother in the face and tell her she did not have an orgasm during childbirth.  I am sure some women do.  (And, anyway, I get a kick out of thinking about such a mother telling her teenager the story of his birth, so I’m going to keep believing it is true).

Anyway, what I do want to do is discuss how the video below uses the idea of orgasmic birth to reinscribe the myth of the vaginal orgasm.  The reporter says that orgasmic birth is just “basic science” and then turns to interview an M.D.  The M.D. uses the vaginal orgasm as scientific evidence for the possibility of orgasmic birth.  She says: obviously a baby would cause an orgasm when it comes out the vagina, since a penis causes an orgasm when it goes into the vagina.  But, of course, it usually doesn’t.  That last part isn’t “basic science,” it’s ideology (as Koedt so nicely points out).

I wonder how many women now feel doubly bad.  Not only can they not have orgasms from penile-vaginal intercourse, they also experienced pain during childbirth!  Bad ladies!  Watch the whole 8-minute clip or start at 3:28 to see the interview with the M.D.:

Via Jezebel.

Because Barbies and Bratz dolls are so popular with young children, the products regularly get flak for revealing, sexualized clothing. [The Black Canary Barbie, for example, provoked outcry, which we covered in a previous post.] Old Hearts Club Dolls consciously set themselves in opposition to Barbies and Bratz. The About page on OHC’s Web site states:

Unlike any other doll, Only Hearts Club™ dolls combine detailed and realistic facial features with soft, fully-poseable bodies. The dolls bodies and clothing actually look like those of the young girls they are intended to be. The dolls’ fashions are hip, based upon what real girls are wearing, and are also age-appropriate.

“Realistic facial features” are in contrast those of Barbies and Bratz, who feature stylized, large eyes and lips. The “soft” bodies of OHC dolls are explicitly different from the hard plastic used to make fashion dolls. Finally, “age-appropriate” is code for “non-sexualized, non-revealing.”

While other alternatives to the popular fashion dolls have tried and failed to get off the ground [see August 15, 1991 New York Times article about the Happy To Be Me doll], OHC dolls have been going strong since 2004. For example, I have seen them in independent toy stores around the Boston area; toy stores have even sold out of them, much to my frustration when I want to purchase one.  You could use the story of these dolls in a conversation about portrayals of femininity in toys or current debates about “modesty” in fashion.

From AdGoodness come these three print ads for a new digital camera, the Nikon S60, which apparently has a feature that allows it to auto-detect and focus on faces. The three examples include a bunch of people rubber-necking at two young “porn lesbians” [the top one of which has a horribly Photoshopped head!], a bunch of people of color sneaking up on a white safari dude, and a bunch of ghosts looking at a woman in a hotel room.  Of all the possible examples that could be used to highlight this face-finding feature, who thought it was a good idea to use some hackneyed stereotypes about sexual orientation and race?

We were shopping for my 6-year-old stepdaughter in Walmart in the Boston metro area this weekend. I took a picture of a display of T-shirts for sale for girls, available in size 6X-14. Clockwise, these 4 say “Peace, love and lipgloss,” “it’s a girls [sic] world! (we just let the boys live in it),” “”Friends are forever / Boys are whatever,” and “My favorite things: 1. My mom, 2. Fridays, 3. Shopping, 4. My best friends, 5. My brother (Just kidding).”

Here’s another one from the same display that says “My dad’s awesome…when he buys me stuff!” Presumably a dad is therefore not awesome when he is trying to raise a happy, healthy kid with techniques that do not include purchasing sparkly pink shirts with pro-capitalism messages.