emotion

In the contemporary Western world, naked and near-naked bodies are revealed everywhere.  But most of the bodies we see are those of models and actors, carefully cultivated, chosen, and digitally altered to look a particular way.  Except, artist Clarity Haynes notes, the “before” pictures in advertisements for diet plans and cosmetic surgeries.  She writes:

“Before” pictures pop up constantly on our computers and in magazines, as part of the daily landscape of imagery. These “before” pictures, meant to shock and scare, show bodies that are presented as needing urgent correction and control, through weight loss or plastic surgery.

In an effort to reclaim these “before” bodies, Haynes has lovingly painted a range of female bodies.  The Breast Portrait Project, she continues:

…is about finding dignity and beauty in the physical characteristics of the body that our popular culture often ridicules and heaps with shame, and in the process allowing the models who participate to feel pride in their particular selves — and by extension, the viewers of the work as well, regardless of their gender.

Visit Hayne’s gallery.  And, for more normalizing of normal bodies, see these selections of breasts,  bellies, and vulvas.

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.

While some bodies are socially-defined as For Display, others are defined as embarrassing or disgusting.  Indigo and Artemis sent in a great example of these distinctions being reinforced. This series of billboards appeared in The Netherlands with the tagline “The Sooner You Advertise Here, the Better”:

The billboard humorously advertises the billboards availability for advertising, a clever version of “Your Ad Here.”  It does so, of course, by suggesting that the model’s body is so repulsive that the threat of simply seeing it should be enough to make us reach for our wallets.  While cultural beliefs about who is and isn’t attractive are often framed as biological or evolutionary, it can’t be denied that, at least in this case, we are receiving a strong social message as well.

Via Copyranter and The Daily Dish.

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.

Cross-posted at Jezebel and AOL’s Black Voices.

In a new book called “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease,” psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl draws on a variety of sources — patient records, psychiatric studies, racialized drug advertisements, and popular metaphors for madness — to contend that schizophrenia transformed from being a mostly white, middle-class affliction in the 1950s, to one that identified with blackness, volatility, and civil strife at the height of the Civil Rights movement.

The racialized resonance between emerging definitions of schizophrenia and anxieties about black protest seem clear in pharmaceutical advertisements and essays appearing in leading American psychiatric journals during the 1960s and 70s.  For instance, the advertisement for the major tranquilizer Haldol that ran in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows an angry, hostile African American man with a clenched, inverted, Black Power fist.

The deranged black figure literally shakes his fist at the assumed physician viewer, while in the background a burning, urban landscape appears to directly reference the type of civil strive that alarmed many in the “establishment” at that time.  The ad compels psychiatrists to conflate black anger as a form of threatening psychosis and mental illness.  Indeed the ad seems to play off presumed fears of assaultive and belligerent black men.

As the urban background suggests, this fear extended beyond individual safety to social unrest.  In a 1969 essay titled “The Protest Psychosis,” after which Metzl’s book is named, psychiatrists postulated that the growing racial disharmony in the US at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, reflected a new manifestation of psychotic behaviors and delusions afflicting America’s black lower class.  Accordingly, “paranoid delusions that one is being constantly victimized” drew some men to fixate on misguided ventures to overthrow the establishment.  Luckily, pharmaceutical companies proposed that chemical interventions could directly pacify the masculinzed, black threat depicted in advertisements like the above.  “Assaultive and belligerent?” it asks.  “Cooperation often begins with Haldol.”

Moreover, ads for Thorazine and Stelazine during this period often conjured up images of the “unruly” and “primitive” precisely at a time when the demographic composition of this diagnosis was dramatically shifting from a mostly white clientele, to a group of predominately black, confined, mental patients.  It is telling that within this context, the makers of Thorazine would choose to portray the drug’s supposed specificity to schizophrenia in their advertisements by displaying a variety of war staffs, walking sticks, and other phallic artifacts from African descent.

The below ad for Thorazine, for example, exclaims western medicine’s superiority in treating mental illness with modern pharmaceuticals, by contrasting the primitive tools used by less enlightened cultures.

Notably, these claims of superiority and medical efficacy drew from a particular set of pejorative ideas of the “primitive” that were already well established within some sectors of psychiatry that equated mental illness with primitive, animalistic and regressive impulses.   As Metzl contends in his book:

…pharmaceutical advertisements shamelessly called on these long-held racist tropes to promote the message that social “problems” raised by angry black men could be treated at the clinical level, with antipsychotic medications.

These adds are in sharp contrast to previous marketing campaigns that framed schizophrenia in the 1950s as a mental condition affecting mostly middle class patients, and especially women.  Also shown below, ideas of schizophrenia were at that time an amorphous collection of psychotic and neurotic symptoms that were thought to afflict many women who struggled to accept the routines of domesticity.

While schizophrenia is certainly a real, frightening, debilitating disease, Metzl reminds us that cultural assumptions of the “other” shape how psychiatry understands and treats the condition.

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Arturo Baiocchi is a doctoral student in Minnesota interested in issues of mental health, race, and inequality.  He is writing his dissertation on how young adults leaving the foster care system understand their mental health needs.  He is also a frequent contributor to various Society Pages podcasts and wanted to post something related to a recent interview he did about the racialization of mental illness.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Abby W. let us know about a disturbing scene in this week’s episode of the TV show Gossip Girl. The scene depicts an interaction between two individuals, Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf, who have turned into one of the show’s anchor couples that fans root for, always ending up together again despite their on-again off-again nature. In this episode, they’re off again and Blair has been dating someone else (a prince, of course). According to Zap 2 It, earlier in the episode, Chuck apparently humiliated Blair by talking about their prior sexual escapades in front of her boyfriend’s mother. She then goes to Chuck’s penthouse to tell him that her boyfriend has proposed to her, leading to this scene (warning: though he doesn’t hit her, if you’re sensitive to images of violence, you may want to skip the video):

So after publicly humiliating her by referring to her sexual past, Chuck tells Blair “you’re mine” and that she can’t be with anyone else, grabs her and throws her onto the sofa, and when she reiterates that it’s over, he ends up punching a window and injuring her with flying glass. And yet, in an interview with E!, one of Gossip Girl‘s executive producers says that this shouldn’t been seen as abusive behavior. In fact, if there’s anyone to be worried about, it’s Chuck:

I think it’s very clear that Blair is not afraid in those moments, for herself. They have a volatile relationship, they always have, but I do not believe—or I should say we do not believe—that it is abuse when it’s the two of them. Chuck does not try to hurt Blair. He punches the glass because he has rage, but he has never, and will never, hurt Blair. He knows it and she knows it, and I feel it’s very important to know that she is not scared—if anything, she is scared for Chuck—and what he might do to himself, but she is never afraid of what he might do to her.

Ah, Chuck…He’s such a classic romantic hero, like Rhett Butler, sort of strong enough that you can stretch him pretty far.

…

He’s always had that Gothic thing, and those guys are always imbued with a dark side in addition to their vulnerability about their girlfriends.

It’s a disturbing example of the way that controlling and violent behavior by men toward the women in their lives is often depicted as evidence of passion that the female character totally accepts (they just “have a volatile relationship,” so it’s “not abuse when it’s the two of them”). Chuck’s repeated mistreatment of Blair (apparently last season he promised his uncle he could have sex with Blair as part of a business deal) is excused (he’s drunk, and really upset about whatever he learned about his family!), and in fact, his inappropriate behavior is romanticized by the executive producer and the interviewer. A man who publicly humiliates his girlfriend, uses her sexuality as a pawn in business deals, and leaves her injured from flying glass when he finds out he’s losing control over her (not to mention tried to force a 14-year-old girl to have sex with him in the very first episode of the show, back before we were supposed to find him lovable) is still referred to as a “classic romantic hero” who should not be seen as abusive or scary.

In fact, the promo for next week’s episode reinforces the message that Chuck is acting like this because he needs Blair so much that he falls apart without her, and individuals with nefarious plans are intentionally using this knowledge to get to him. So Chuck isn’t abusive; he’s a fragile victim who just loves Blair too much for his own good:

This is particularly disturbing given that the show is popular among teens, many of whom experience abuse in their relationships but are unsure how to deal with it or whether it “counts” as abuse. These types of representations of normalize such behavior, excusing the men who engage in it and giving the message to women that being treated in such a way isn’t a major warning sign but, rather, evidence of a man’s deep passion and vulnerability.

Cross-posted at Ms.

Growing up in America, we learn that sweets and junk food are “guilty pleasures.” Women, especially, are supposed to refrain from such indulgences.  And, if they cannot — if they, for example, desire more than that modest slice of cake served to each birthday guest — then they should feel not only guilt, but shame.  For overindulging is grotesque and it, accordingly, should be hidden and kept secret.

This is the cultural background to Lee Price‘s realist paintings of women (mostly her) eating sweets and junk food.  She draws two contrasts.  First, she makes very public something we are supposed to do only in private.  Not only do the paintings literally display the transgression, the birds eye view and frequent nudity exaggerates the sheer display of the indulgence.  And, second, she takes something that is supposedly disgusting and shameful and presents it in a medium associated with (high) art, challenging the association of indulgence with poor character and a lack of refinement.  Fascinating.

Visit Lee Price’s website.
Via 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.

A Guinness commercial borrows from the rules of masculinity to advertise its dark beer for St. Patrick’s Day:

It’s okay, but VideoJug does the man hug better.

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.

Kristina K. sent in a link to an interactive map at the New York Times that shows the results of Gallup’s 2010 polls of well-being. [UPDATE: Reader Danielle pointed out I forgot to provide a link to the map. Sorry! You can find it here.] Gallup surveys 1,000 people per day about a variety of indicators of well-being, including questions about physical, mental, and emotional health, various health-related behaviors, ability to access health care, access to adequate food and housing, and perceptions of their communities. Here are the overall composite scores, by congressional district (a higher score is better):

The general geographic pattern indicates a swath of relatively low well-being curving from Louisiana up through Michigan, while those in the upper Great Plains and the inter-mountain West are doing better than average.

Percent reporting experiencing a lot of stress:

Percent who have ever been told they have depression:

Of course, this may reflect differences in rates of depression, but it could also reflect differences in medical professionals’ likelihood of identifying a set of symptoms as depression and bringing it up with a patient. For example, we see significant differences by state in the frequency of Caesarean sections among pregnant women.

Percent of people who smoke:

Percent reporting an inability to buy sufficient food:

The Gallup page on well-being presents more data. Here is a map of 2009 overall well-being that is a bit easier to read since it’s presented by state rather than congressional district:

Hawaii had the highest overall score, at 70.2; West Virginia had the lowest, 60.5. If you go to their site and click on a state, you can get a breakdown of scores in each area (emotional well-being, physical health, healthy behaviors, and so on).

Finally, the NYT provides some demographic information on who was most likely to have said they spent a lot of the previous day laughing or smiling vs. being sad:

Disneyland markets itself as “The Happiest Place on Earth” and goes to great pains to create a visual experience that defies our everyday realities, but these photos by Arin Fishkin, of bored kids waiting in line, contrasts starkly with Disney’s claims.   I’ve always thought it was really interesting how companies that sell “fun” (theme parks, obviously, but also places like casinos and dance clubs) do so by downright insisting “this is what fun looks like!”   “There are flashing lights! Fun! There are bright colors! Fun! There is happy music! Fun! This is what fun looks like and you are having it!!!”  Anyway, just because Disneyland says it’s fun, doesn’t mean it is.

Via 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.