emotion

Cross-Posted at BagNewsNotes.

We have posted in the past about how airlines use images of female flight attendants in ads to appeal to customers with promises of caretaking, eye candy, flirtation, and emotion work. Katrin sent in another example. This Cathay Pacific ad, which appeared in the U.K.,  presents Karina Yau, a flight attendant, to customers as the perfect caretaking woman — one who just wants to listen to you, not talk:

Notice also the passive stance — arms pulled into the body, her face turned away and eyes averted, hand fiddling with her coat sleeve. The text reads:

Karina went from fashion model to flight attendant — and still doesn’t think that life has had any real ups and downs. You can meet her and other members of the Cathay Pacific team at www.cathaypacific.co.uk. And while you’re there, check out our great fares to over 110 destinations worldwide. If you see Karina on your next flight, you might recommend a favourite book — she loves to read.

A post on the Cathay Pacific blog about Yau describes her as “modest.” At Cathay’s website you can “meet the team who go the extra mile to make you feel special.” It includes photos and bios of some employees, and I found Yau’s. The text they chose to highlight reinforces the emotion work she engages in for customers — “of course” she “smiled and apologised immediately.”

The ad and the features present customers with the promise of more than just a flight attendant who will do her job well. This flight attendant is the ideal of femininity: she’s beautiful (a former model), she’s submissive (apologizes immediately!), and she’s interested in you — your thoughts, your taste in books — whoever you are.

I wonder to what degree this draws on a specifically racialized femininity — the stereotypical depiction of Asian women as particularly submissive and docile. But since this ad ran in the U.K., I don’t know if that stereotype is as relevant. Readers, what say you?

Mark Fiore suggests that the celebration of Valentine’s Day is, um, complicated:

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.

We have posted previously about how desserts, particularly chocolate ones, are often advertised to women as indulgences they can use to overcome romantic disappointments, or even as substitute sources of love. L. Ellis sent in an example of this, an ad found in Bon Appetit for Sugar in the Raw that tells women to make brownies to deal with breakup:

Indeed, you can calculate how much dessert you’re going to need by how much time you invested in the guy (“Count the years you dated. If it exceeds 5, double the recipe.”). The ad is also a great example of the contradictory messages women get to be thin but also indulge — today you can “devour that pan of chocolaty goodness,” full of butter and sugar, while you cry over your lost love, but it’s a short-lived reprieve. Inevitably, you now being single and all, the “diet starts tomorrow.”

A set of stock photos on Hairpin must have hit a nerve because eight people — Renée Y., R. Walker, Amy E., Duff McDuffee, Lauren McG., Patricia P., Amy H., and Dmitriy T.M. — have sent it in.  The images appear, titled “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” without comment.  Here’s a sampling:

These images resonate with readers, I think, because they are so damn familiar.  They are a good example of advertising in general.  They practically beg: “Please please please think it is fun to eat salad!”  And they insist: “Eating salad will make you haaaaappppppyyyyy!”  Much advertising today needs to convince you that the product will make you happy because we don’t need almost anything we buy.  Necessity lost out to desire in marketing a long time ago.

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.

Mark Grief wrote a fantastic analysis of the “hipster” in the New York Times.  Drawing on a book he edited,”What Was the Hipster?“, with Kathleen Ross and Dayna Tortorici, Grief offers an analysis based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu.

Bourdieu observed that the rich justified and naturalized their economic advantage over others not only by pointing to their bank accounts, but by being the arbiters of taste.  Bourdieu shows us that taste…

…is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit.

Style, in other words, is not just arbitrary; it is about establishing that you are better than other people.

Those below us economically, the reasoning goes, don’t appreciate what we do; similarly, they couldn’t fill our jobs, handle our wealth or survive our difficulties.

But the rich aren’t the only ones who attempt to use taste and style to gain and preserve status.  Indeed, hipsters may be the purest example of this phenomenon.

“Once you take the Bourdieuian view,” Grief explains, “you can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain” by liking cool things first.

I will quote Grief liberally because he does such a fantastic job of describing the field:

One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as “liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands”; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the “creative professions.” These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy — but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural “cool.”

They, in turn, may malign the “trust fund hipsters.” This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into “cultural capital” (Bourdieu’s most famous coinage), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in her trucker hat.)

Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch- surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious — the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be “superior”: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.

All hipsters play at being the inventors or first adopters of novelties: pride comes from knowing, and deciding, what’s cool in advance of the rest of the world.

This, Grief concludes, is why everyone, especially hipsters, hates to be called a hipster.  The whole idea is to have authentically superior tastes.  Once you are revealed as someone who cares about having the right tastes, you are disqualified as a person who has good taste effortlessly.  Likewise, if you are suddenly one who has the same tastes as everyone else, you are just one of the masses.  Being a hipster, it turns out, is a perilous identity that must be constantly re-worked and re-authenticated.

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.

Genesis C. smartly decided to deactivate her Facebook account, and thus its distractions, during her final exams. “It felt as if Facebook was doing all it could to convince me to stay.”  First Genesis sought to delete her account altogether, but finding a delete button took quite a bit of digging (and some googling).  She set about to delete, but the site insists on a 14 day waiting period.  A deleted account in two weeks wasn’t going to help her study now, so she decided to deactivate instead.  She continues:

After I selected the “deactivate” button under “account settings” Facebook asked me “Are you sure you want to deactivate your account?” and under that it displayed pictures of a few friends, captioned with the lines “[Friend’s name here] will miss you.”

The images they included weren’t profile pictures, but pictures in which Genesis had been tagged, so Facebook deliberately included people that she knew personally.

Genesis concludes:

I just thought it was very interesting to find out how manipulative a social network like Facebook can be by trying their best to make you feel that you really need Facebook in your life. First of all by making it very hard to finalize your deletion request and by making you feel that by deleting/deactivating your account you lose connection with your closest friends, as if it were the only form of communicating with these people.

See also an ABC News story on deleting/deactivating your Facebook account.

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.

Alyssa M. sent in an ad that gives us a window into the advertising aimed at tween and teen girls.  The ad, for Auntie Anne’s pretzels (an American chain that appears mostly in shopping malls) appeared in Seventeen magazine.  The copy reads “Pick A Reason to Get One — Any Reason” and, in the background, is a long list of reasons.

The ad:

I’ll let Alyssa take it from here:

..the reasons in the background reflect gendered expectations that are placed on [teen girls]. One of the reasons, for example, is “I’ll run another lap during P.E.”  This reflects the idea that women should feel guilty about eating food, and that they should make up for eating a salty pretzel by exercising more. It also illustrates that women must justify eating by promising themselves that they will prevent any weight gain, which would stray from the type of woman that society deems best (the thin woman).  Another reason provided is that “It’s the one thing at the mall that always fits!!”  This again reflects the social necessity for women to be thin, as it implies that women are concerned with the fact that clothes at the mall are often too small, which implies that the women are too large. This ad very much focuses on girls’ size and waistlines and illustrates that a thin girl is the best girl, and that to be accepted by society, teen girls must act in accordance with this expectation.

Another theme seen throughout the ad is that food can be consumed in order to ease the emotional pain of a traumatic event such as a breakup. For example, two other reasons given are that “My almost-boyfriend dumped me” and “It’s the perfect breakup snack.” Both suggest that a breakup warrants an unhealthy indulgence like a pretzel, but this also implies that unhealthy foods like this are only acceptable during a bad experience like a breakup. Eating is okay when you need it to comfort yourself, but if you are not going through such an experience, then you need to watch your weight and “run another lap during P.E.” Those who break this rule are at risk of being policed by others and losing the body type that society appreciates most. This ad therefore supports the expectation placed on teen girls to be thin and concerned with their weights.

Close ups:

Alyssa’s analysis reminds me of Jamal Fahim’s argument for how chocolatiers convince women to indulge in their product.

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 Deadly Persuasion, Jean Kilbourne discusses the tactics of car advertisers.  Cars, she argues, are offered as keys to happiness.  Often they are anthromorphized, even positioned as a lover or a soul mate.

In this commercial, sent in by Jennifer G., we see just this sort of advertising. The car is described with the words “luxury,” “fire,” “bold,” and “daring.” It is, indeed, “…capable of moving your soul…”

The idea that we are moved by this advertising might seem patently ridiculous.  Phil Patton of the New York Times, however, reports the findings of a Mercedes/Roper survey:

…36 percent of Americans said they loved their car and 23 percent considered their car their best friend. The poll found that 12 percent of respondents said their car understood them better than their significant other.

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.