clothes/fashion

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Meg R. noticed something funny at Woman Within, a website that sells clothing sizes 12w to 44w.  All of the models were very thin, thus not representative of the intended customer base at all.  But, even odder, they were all swimming in clothes that (by today’s standards) were far too large for them.  So the website featured thin models selling plus-size clothes (not, in itself, that surprising), but didn’t scale down the clothes to fit them!  We might imagine that using thin women would make customers, even if they aren’t thin, like the clothes (because we all internalize thin preference), but modeling poorly fitting clothes, as Meg said, wasn’t doing the product any favors!  We’re both baffled by the logic.

Some examples:

NEW! (July ’10): Liz R. sent in another example. This ad is for clothing sized 16-24 but with a very thin model:

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.

A 6-year-old I know brought home a reading assignment from kindergarten. It’s called The New Nest, by Sandra Iversen, with illustrations by Peter Paul Bajer. An innocent tale of Mama Bird and Papa Bird working together to build a nest from 20 twigs, straw and wool. At the end, Mama Bird is sitting on her eggs wearing pearls. Papa Bird is in a white collar and blue tie.

It’s curious to use men’s and women’s accessories (tie, necklace) to identify the gender of the couple, when the species itself provides a reasonable degree of sexual dimorphism.

That’s seems comparable to the dimorphism found in humans.

Using both gendered clothes and bodies is not necessary, but together they are a powerful teaching tool for children, forming a lesson on the concordance of gender and sex differences: matching the different bodies with the appropriately different clothes.

This book is actually featured in a write-up on teaching reading from the journal The Reading Teacher.

I don’t know what the intentions of the article writers were, but there is nothing in there about teaching about sexual dimorphism, or gender norms and practices.

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

It’s all over the web: Fox and ABC have resisted airing Lane Bryant’s new lingerie ad featuring plus-sized women (e.g., Adweek).  But I don’t think it’s, straightforwardly, because of a bias against fat women.  I think it’s a little more complicated than that.  I think it’s because the ads are scandalous… that they seem more overtly sexual than they would if they featured very thin models.

Think about it. In the media, the thin, young, beautiful, able-bodied white woman is the idealized woman. And the idealized woman is sexy, indeed, but not sexual. Sexy women attract attention; they inspire desire, but they don’t have desires of their own.  A sexy woman hopes that a man will like the look of her and take action.  But she’s not sexual.  She doesn’t take the action herself.  Doing so immediately marks her as suspiciously unfeminine.

Sexual women — women who have desires and express and act on them — are almost always presented as deviant in some other way. They’re working class, they’re Black or Latina, they’re mentally ill, or… they’re fat. Fat women are often characterized as sexual threats.  How many comedies have relied on the scary fat woman (of color) trying to get some?  It’s so funny, right?  Because she’s gross and aggressive!  She wants you and she doesn’t care what you want and so the fact that she’s fat doesn’t stop her.  Scary!

So, there is something innocent and asexual about very thin women.  As the feminine ideal, they are sexy, not sexual.  They incite desire, but they do not have it.

In contrast, fat marks a woman as overtly sexual.  She is a woman with appetites and, you better watch out, she might just eat you up.

This, I contend, is what is so scandalous about plus-sized women in lingerie. They are just too damn hot for TV.

Here’s the commercial:

What do you think?

UPDATE: Maura Kelly, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, let us know that Fox did air the commercial on April 28th. Thanks for the update!

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.

Kevin I. sent in a great short clip instructing women workers newly employed in industrial factories during World War II on how to do their hair to maximize safety. It assumes both ignorance and vanity on the part of women and speaks to the lack of efficiency caused by efforts to remain attractive on the line. Pretty great:

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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

All my life my Grandfather has used the phrase “cotton pickin'” as a slur, as in “wait a cotton pickin’ minute!” and, if he was mad at you (or the dog), “You cotton pickin’…!”

It is debated as to whether the phrase refers to the act of cotton picking, which is tedious and painful work (because the edges of cotton bolls are prickly and sharp), or the people who picked cotton (highly disadvantaged groups, especially black slaves in the American south).

In light of this, it is fascinating that the cotton industry has decided to try and revamp its image by focusing on the act of cotton picking (as opposed to trying to make it invisible).  In this recent Cotton USA ad campaign, sent in by Katrin, cotton picking is full-on romanticized: beautiful people in beautiful clothes decorated in cotton pick cotton in cottony cotton fields:

The image suggests that cotton is beautiful, natural, relaxing, comforting, and comfortable. Indeed, the new tagline for the campaign was: “Soft, sensual, and sustainable.  It’s Cotton USA!” (source).

Interestingly, the U.K. has banned the language of this campaign, arguing that cotton is a highly destructive crop because it is both insecticide- and pesticide-intensive (i.e., not sustainable at all).

In any case, it’s interesting for me, as an American, to see a company try to romanticize an activity so closely linked with slavery.  The Great Grandmother of my co-blogger, Gwen, picked cotton and she said that it was an absolutely miserable job.  The cotton boll itself was prickly and sharp and she had to put her hand inside of the boll and pull the cotton out, such that it would leave both her hands ripped up.  The harvested cotton was carried on her back under a beating sun.  Agricultural labor is punishing, not pastoral.

Today, of course, most cotton in the U.S. is picked by machine, not beautiful 20-somethings (or Great Grandmas).  Most of us would have no knowledge with which to challenge this images so, I suppose, that’s how Cotton USA gets away with such a ludicrous campaign.

See also romanticizing colonialism and our post on how mommies and daddies are baking Goldfish crackers in their comfy kitchens just for you!

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.

Though it’s certainly here now, pink didn’t stabilize as a girls-only color until sometime in the 1950s.  During that decade, pink was the in-style color for bathrooms in residential homes.  Notice that this ad, sent in by Penny R., features a boy in a pink bathroom with no threat of emasculation:

Pam Kueber, at Retro Renovation, estimates that:

…some 5 million pink bathrooms went into the 20 million+ homes built in the United States from 1946-1966… 1 in 4 — at minimum — mid-century homes had a pink bathroom.

She quotes a 1958 Electrical Merchandising that said: “If forced to pick one color as leading this year, most industry men say pink is tops.”

Pink is so strongly associated with women now that it hardly seems appropriate for a family bathroom.  Kueber bemoans that home owners are taking sledge hammers to pink tiles and encourages us to preserve the bathrooms because we all look excellent in pink-tinted light.

See men in pink (then, now, and now).

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.

Crossposted at Racialicious.

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After presenting lots of statistics about racial disparities in criminal justice, I showed my class the videos from ABC News What Would You Do? in which first White and than Black youths vandalize a car in a public parking lot. [See the videos at ABC: Part I and Part II.]

There is only one 911 call on the White boys, but ten on the Black boys. Plus, while the White boys are vandalizing, someone calls 911 to report people who are suspected of planning a robbery — Black kids asleep in a nearby car! Well, most of the class, as expected, saw this the way I did, as evidence of a racial problem. I was trying to emphasize that not arresting Whites when they commit crimes is just as important in racial disparities as arresting Blacks. Some students pointed out (correctly) that it was a demonstration, not a controlled experiment and wondered (fairly) whether the producers selected cases for their strong differences. But a few very vocally insisted that the difference was not about race at all, but that the Black kids were wearing “gang clothing.” They got somewhat offended when I said, “yeah, Black styles” and then cut off that line of argument, saying “OK we disagree on that, but I don’t want to spend the rest of the class arguing about clothing.”

Today I went back to the video and took screen shots of the kids. They are all wearing hooded sweatshirts and jeans, as I said. (One student had insisted that the White kids wore tucked in shirts! Not so.)

There are subtle differences in how they wear the clothes, though. The Black kids’ clothes are bigger on them (and the kids themselves appear to me to be smaller). The White kids’ shirts have words on them which I assume are school names (the resolution isn’t good enough for me to read them) while one Black kid has some sort of design on it that you could construe as edgy — it is definitely not preppy. One Black kid is wearing a cap which (as can be seen elsewhere in the video) is a gold weave thing that I cannot imagine a White kid wearing, but he’s wearing it in the same way as lots of White kids wear baseball caps. In my view the only difference between the clothing was subtle differences in style sensibilities between Blacks and Whites, and that calling the Black kids’ clothing “gang attire” is ridiculous. These few students think that if the Black kids had been in “non-gang” (i.e. “White”) clothing, the result would have been different. (They did not even suggest dressing the White kids in “gang” styles.) I think they are just exhibiting extreme resistance to the obvious. (The same students criticized me for failing to show examples of Black crime.) Opinions?

Edit: I decided to add shots of the kid with the most distinctively Black hat. In these shots you can see that he’s also wearing a do-rag. Just to be fair. I can find no evidence that this is “gang attire.” But it is certainly distinctively Black.

Do you think it’s the do-rag and not the skin color that matters here?

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This Anonymous Guest Post is borrowed from Sociological Confessions. The blogger is a Sociology professor who teaches courses on race relations and does public sociology work on racial disparities in criminal justice. In this post, she poses a question based on an interaction with students who questioned her interpretation of an incident as racial.

I can imagine a world in which gender difference did not translate into gender inequality… a world in which feminized tasks — nurturing others, creating beautiful and comfortable homes, cooking delicious, nutritious meals, and adorning oneself for the pleasure of oneself and others — were actually valued and, importantly, both respected and compensated in ways that reflected that value.

But alas. We don’t live in a world in which gender difference co-exists with gender equality. We live in a world in which boys go to the moon; and girls are princesses…

…at least, according to these “cookie pans” sent in by both Ash and Karen A.:

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.