emotion

Blanca M. sent in this picture she took here in Las Vegas of a truck advertising Air Conditioning Technical Institute. The truck says “Hot City, Cool Career,” and then had this image on the side.

When you go to the website, you see a video (which I can’t embed, sorry) of a man driving up to a house in a sports car. A blonde woman comes out and gushes over the car. The man then says “Six months ago she wouldn’t have given me a second look. I had no job, no education, I was living with my parents.”

So apparently air conditioning tech school is appropriate only for men, and guarantees that you will make enough money to get the hot women you’ve always wanted. Aside from the clear objectification of women as sexual rewards for men, it reinforces the idea of women as opportunistic gold-diggers. It’s also an interesting perspective on how men should view relationships–that they should be perfectly happy to be with women who don’t like them for who they are, and who would presumably leave them if they lost their job or got a pay cut. As long as the woman’s hot, a guy is apparently supposed to be satisfied with the relationship and not worry about little things like whether his wife actually loves him–we reserve concerns about love and emotional closeness for women only.

Thanks, Blanca!

This sign was posted in sight of the customer at the Days Inn (where I stayed when I failed to get out of Logan airport after the American Sociological Association meetings in August of 2008).  I have incuded three observations after the image and text.

Text:

At Days Inns…

We Promise…
“Service with a smile, a cheerful greeting, a pleasant Hello.”

We Mean It When We Say…
“It’s no trouble at all.”

We Want To Know…
“If you enjoyed your stay.”

Because At Days Inn…
“We look forward to seeing you again.”

That’s our promise to you from every member of the Days Inn family.

(1) It is a nice example of the kind of emotional work that employees are required to do.  It’s not just about getting customers into rooms efficiently and politely, it’s about a putting on a shit-eating grin and kissing their asses.  Or else you’re fired.

(2)  It’s also an example of a for-profit company calling itself a “family.”  You are supposed to do things selflessly for your family, but you work at a job for money.  Comparing a company to a family, I suspect, is one way to get employees to give to the company out of kinship-like duty instead of on contractual terms for money.  This, of course, and ironically, lines the pockets of executives quite nicely.

(3) The logic behind their use of quotation marks eludes me.

NEW: I took these picture in a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Hollywood in October 2008.  Close-ups and remarks below.

Like in the Days Inn example, employees at Kaiser are to do more than simply do their job effectively, they must do it “pleasant[ly]” and with “care.”  It is one thing to be instructed to “gather information with consideration for confidentiality,” and quite another to be asked to “convey trust and confidence.”  Scholars of emotion work note that the emotional part of jobs is (1) rarely seen as a skill or (2) a toll that makes your job trying and is, therefore, (3) undercompensated.  Yet, the ability to “convey trust and confidence” in strangers is certainly a special one and the health insurance employee that can do that is certainly valuable.  Unfortunately, like with other type of care work (i.e., nursing, teaching), that “value” is mostly lipservice and rarely translates into anything with exchange value (i.e., CASH).

For another example of emotion work, this one a sneak look behind the counter, click here.

My friend at Trucker Bomb alerted me to this clip from the 1956 film “Indestructible Man.” I’m saving it until one of my students waxes nostalgic about the “good old days” in which gender roles were clearer, and people didn’t have to be so confused all of the time about, say, whether it’s okay to open a door for a “lady”. This sort of comment often comes up when we discuss the difference between courtesy (which can apply to everyone) and chivalry (which is predicated on the notion that women are weaker than men). It could also be useful in discussions about gender as it relates to marriage, careers, or golly, just about anything!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgGFzUS4tkg[/youtube]

Man, the good old days were awesome, in a pause-while-laughing-to-barf-a-little kind of way.

Please welcome Guest Blogger Elizabeth Allen.  Elizabeth wrote about commercial for a gastric band (found via Shakesville), an alternative to gastric bypass surgery, on her own blog, Blog of Eternal Stench.  We liked it so much (and like so much of her other stuff, too), that we asked to reproduce it here on Sociological Images.  Enjoy!

This horrid TV commercial on the Realize Gastric Band site equates the controversial stomach reduction surgery known as gastric banding with happiness, success and fulfillment. It does so with dramatized examples of 1) a fat man playing with his karate-learning kidsy and 2) a fat woman slow-dancing with her [also fat] romantic partner. The fat man in 1) says, “I want to watch my little warrior do karate” or something very similar. The fat woman in 2) says, “I want to kiss him [romantic partner] under the Eiffel Tower.”

The commercial goes on to tell viewers how the Realize Band can help them get what they want. “Ask your doctor if bariatric surgery is right for you,” the voiceover encourages. The commercial concludes with how wonderful the Realize Band is, especially since you can track your success and have a support group. Incidentally, “tracking your success” is accompanied by a picture on a user’s computer screen of a line graph showing a steady trend downward. We also see an animated female morphing from fat to less fat.

This ad is offensive for so many reasons. Where do I start?

1. The fat man and fat woman who have exciting goals in life do NOT have to undergo bariatric surgery in order to achieve them. In fact, bariatric surgery has nothing to do with their goals, which are about the people they love. Being fat does not impede one’s ability to love, support and show affection for one’s loved ones. Being less fat is not necessary in order to truly prove one’s devotion to another person.

However, the commercial for the Realize Band obviously wants to encourage potential consumers that, if they really loved their families, they would undergo controversial, risky and damaging surgery. In this way, the Realize Band perpetuates the old chestnut that a person’s weight/physicality/shape/size represents a moral issue. According to this commercial’s subtext, being fat is a deep personal failing and horrible vice.

2. I object to ads for medical procedures that motivate the consumer to say, “I want this product. Doctor, give it to me!” While I’m all for being an aggressive, assertive, inquisitive consumer and searching out a range of treatment options for any condition, I do not think that people who suggest treatments they have seen on TV are truly being informed consumers. As I illustrate in point 1, TV ads such as this one for the Realize Band work in impressions, rather than information. Realize Band’s commercial here exploits feelings of guilt, inadequacy and shame to motivate people to use its product. Feelings of personal worthlessness stemming from emotional manipulation never make a good basis for choosing a particular medical treatment.

3. The concept of “tracking your success” gives the false impression that the Realize Band will have a wholly beneficial effect on one’s life, which could not be further from the truth. Gastric reduction or bypass surgery creates a host of health effects in those who have it.

–For example, since one’s stomach has been drastically reduced and/or routed around, one loses the ability to easily absorb nutrients and minerals. One can’t just take supplements to combat these deficiencies. Anemia may result from iron deficiency. You may need intravenous iron infusions for the rest of your life.

–One’s stomach often becomes much more sensitive to spicy, hard or dense foods. One may get bad heartburn or what the business likes to call “productive burping.” Actually, “productive burping” isn’t just about embarrassing noises emanating from your gut; it’s about throwing up. Gastric bypass or banding surgery increases the chances of the survivor throwing up a whole lot.

–If a survivor of gastric surgery throws up a lot, stomach acid flows frequently across the teeth. Like people with bulimia, survivors of gastric bypass or banding may suffer rapid degradation of their dental enamel. This is not the picture of an unqualified success.

4. While the Realize Band commercial shows a picture of “success,” i.e., steady weight loss, in the form of the downward trending line graph and the shrinking woman, the story is rarely this straightforward. Gastric bypass or banding surgery often results in an initial weight loss. However, very few people keep off all of the weight that they shed. In fact, they may slowly gain it back. For example, one study associates laparoscopic bands, like the Realize Band, with “inadequate weight loss” and “uncontrollable weight regain” in some patients. Another recent long-term study of people who have had gastric bypass surgery found that about half of participants regained weight within 2 years after their surgery. A study with a 10-year perspective on gastric-bypass survivors notes, “Significant weight gain occurs continuously in patients after reaching the nadir weight.” It is very rare for a person who has had gastric surgery to go from size 22 to size 12, which it looks like what is happening in the commercial’s illustration.

5. The fat man and the fat woman look perfectly happy as they are. Maybe if they stopped internalizing the medical community’s hatred of their shapes and realized that their size does not limit their capacity for humane, compassionate, joyful existence, they truly would reach their stated goals.

Speaking of the “angry black man” stereotype and the idea that being angry about racism is out-of-line (see point three after the block quote), a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. commissioned by the U.S. government was considered too angry looking by the U.S. Commission On Fine Arts (see news stories here and here). Its sculptor was required to make him seem less “confrontational” before it was allowed to be installed on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

Via Gawker.

Elizabeth A. at blogofstench sent us her post on this ad for “Disaboom, a site of news, networking and such for people with disabilities and their hangers-on.” 

She notes how the site and the ad challenge the stereotype of disabled people as asexual but, much like Viktoria in Bizarre magazine, does so by conforming to normative standards of attractiveness.  But I really liked her observations regarding the extent of his disability. She writes:

…not only is this guy the picture of modern white bourgeois hegemonic masculinity, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s also passing as non-disabled. Tattoos aside, he looks like a non-disabled guy sitting down in a chair that just happens to have wheels. While some people indeed use wheelchairs with no back and no handlebars and a low-slung profile, other people with disabilities have much more obvious tools that they use; an electric wheelchair, for example, can have six wheels, headlights and tail lights, a control box with joystick and horn, storage pouches on either side, footrests, leg braces, head rest, reclining seat, adjustable cushions and posture support, a backpack on the back and an obvious computer on board, all of which are much more obvious than a discreet little set of wheels under your butt… I feel that the Disaboom ad downplays the unavoidable obviousness of some mobility aids in its attempt to make the guy in the picture seem more stereotypically “non-disabled.”

Not to mention, I might add, a disability that interferes with urination and defecation or one that caused involuntary body movements.

A student pointed me to bharatmatrimony.com, a matchmaking website targeting the general Indian sub-continent:

You can choose to search a variety of more specific groups (Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, etc.). Among other search criteria, you can specify caste and sub-caste.

I did a quick search (I put in “any” for caste) and found that the profiles are publicly available (presumably you only have to pay if you actually want to contact them), and include such information as complexion (one profile said “wheatish”), blood type (??), eating habits (vegetarian or not), horoscope and whether or not the person requires a good horoscope match, the person’s caste and sub-caste, annual income, and their preferences in a partner (they can state a caste and first-language preference but not a complexion preference, from what I can tell).

The website might be useful for any number of discussions–about technology and the increasing global reach of the internet, of modern methods of dating, about what type of information we might think is important at first glance about a person (although in the U.S. I bet many people would say asking about someone’s complexion is inappropriate or racist, I presume we have things on our dating sites that would seem rude in India; also, I’d argue American users of dating website don’t openly ask about complexion but can get that information from photos and so may be judging potential partners on it anyway). This could also bring up an interesting discussion of language–I suspect many students would be horrified at the idea of a “matchmaker,” which implies arranged marriages to some degree, but a “dating service” seems different (even though eharmony and other sites call potential partners “matches”).

The same student also uncovered these anti-dowry posters:

They can be found here. I have tried to find a website for The Sisterhood Collective or the ad agency that supposedly made these posters but have not be able to, so I do not have definitive proof they are real (I have no reason to say they aren’t, only that I’m usually cautious of things that supposedly were displayed in other countries that seem a little too funny/horrific to be true, so I always try to do a little digging if I can. Snopes.com didn’t have anything on it.

One thing that I thought was interesting about the anti-dowry posters was that when I first saw them, the language (“you fucking prick”) made me assume they were directed at men, although when I looked at them again I realized there was no reason they couldn’t be directed at women. If they were meant to target a male audience, it could lead to an interesting discussion of the implication that only men are engaged in patriarchal oppression, ignoring the role that older women (particularly potential mothers-in-law) play in reinforcing dowry and the devaluation of women.

Finally, here’s the cover (found here) of the very first issue of Vogue India, from October, 2007:

Here we see that the image of beauty provided by the magazine to the millions of women in India includes a narrow set of features: light skin, straight hair, stereotypically “European” facial features–and, of course, very, very thin bodies. Compare to this Indian ad for skin-lightening cream for a discussion of standards of beauty and how a generalized “White” ideal of beauty has been increasingly globalized.

Thanks, Kellie G.!

I snapped this picture at my local grocery store. Sorry about the blurriness. It reads: ” ‘THE CUSTOMER IS THE REASON FOR OUR BUSINESS’… Please, Thank Check Writing Customers BY NAME!” And then under the smiley face it says “Customers First. NO CHATTER!”

What an amazing example of how employees are required to do emotional labor! First, the employee should refer to them by name if possible, thereby pretending to know them. Second, the employee should be friendly and chat with his or her customers, but only if they initiate. So no one cares if the employee is in the mood to chat, he or she must respond to the customer’s initiation or lack thereof.

As someone who has not had a service job like cashier at a grocery store in a very long time, I am distressed by how insulting this little “reminder” is… with it’s CAPITAL letters, exclamation points, and mocking smiley face.

A good book on the topic of emotion work is Fast Food, Fast Talk by Robin Leidner. An even better one is The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild.