Sent along by Dmitiry T.M.
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.
This ad, spotted by Stephanie DeH. in a physical therapist’s office, asks viewers to donate blood with the argument that it’s “easier” to save a life than to save the world:
Text:
Saving the world isn’t easy. Saving a life is.
Just one pint of blood can save up to three lives.
The ad commits two fallacies.
First, it compares saving the whole world (or maybe every tree in the world) with saving just “a” life. Saving a life may, indeed, be easier than saving the whole world, but it’s not a fair comparison. Saving the whole world is hard, but about as hard as saving every life on it.
Second, it suggests that we have to choose. “You could try to save the world,” the ad says, “but it’s pretty hopeless. It’s much easier to save a life. So put down that tree and donate blood.” Giving blood, then, is placed in competition with environmental activism as if (or because) volunteerism is a zero sum game.
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.
Fluid hair salon released this ad to let people know that it is donating all clipped hair to the oil recovery efforts in the Gulf:
The ad is a perfect example of the way in which entirely-unrelated messages get inexplicably translated into half-naked women looking uncomfortable. Why not advertise donations to oil recovery with clean beaches, or dirty beaches, or oil booms, or rinsed off birds, or smiling shrimpers, or actual hair-based oil spill mats? Why in heaven’s name slather a perfectly clean woman in goop that looks like oil and make her crawl in a marsh?
Because half-naked women who are dirty, disgusting, and uncomfortable are high-fashion. Because we love to see women on their knees in the mud. To a great extent, elite fashion imagery involves putting women in gross situations and pretending that it’s cool. These images assault their bodies and their dignity. So how else would an elite salon advertise its good-doing? Female punishment is the language of fashion. Fluid just speaks it fluently.
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.
Talking Points Memo has an article about a new advertising campaign from Spirit Airlines (as of this morning the images are still available on their homepage, though I presume — hope — they’ll be taken down soon). In order to highlight their fares to coastal locations no affected by the oil spill, they created an ad campaign titled “Best Protection”:
Get it? BP? Oh, funny.
The ads show bikini-clad women sunning themselves on the beach and carry the tagline “check out the oil on our beaches.” Two examples:
Honestly, I’m just stunned. Seriously, how do these things get made? Who comes up with this, and how is it that nowhere along the line from the idea to actually putting the images up on the website does someone in authority say, “Um, I think this is a really bad idea.”
Classy, Spirit Air. Classy.
The image above, of a bird rescued from the gulf and cleaned of oil, may ease the ache in our hearts, but research suggests that euthanizing the birds would be more humane.
Environmental biologist and expert on oil clean-up, Silvia Gaus, explained that:
Catching and cleaning oil-soaked birds oftentimes leads to fatal amounts of stress for the animals… Furthermore, forcing the birds to ingest coal solutions — or Pepto Bismol, as animal-rescue workers are doing along the Gulf Coast — in an attempt to prevent the poisonous effects of the oil is ineffective… The birds will eventually perish anyway from kidney and liver damage (paraphrased at Speigel).
Further, birds who are relocated are often so disoriented that they die anyway, not able to re-establish survival routines in their new environment.
Gaus claims that 99% of the rescued and cleaned birds will die, usually within about seven days, and it will be a more painful death that takes longer than if they’d just been left alone. As a consequence, many recommend quick and painless euthanization. A National Geographic article complicates the story, reporting that survival rates depend on characteristics of the spill, but still reports that scientists largely have little hope that many birds rescued from the Gulf will survive. A better strategy for saving birds, they say, is trying to keep them out of the oil in the first place.
If cleaning birds is unlikely to save them, and euthanizing them ultimately more humane, why are we cleaning birds?
The obvious answer is that it is good for BP’s public relations. We feel better when we see the shiny oil-free feathers; those images make us feel like there is hope for the animals caught in the spill. It makes it look as if BP is really doing something good. In this case, why would BP care if the de-oiling worked? They benefit whether the birds die (a slower, more painful) death or not. It costs about $700 to clean an oiled pelican, but that may be money well spent.
There may be an even more nefarious reason. There are fines and penalties for killing wildlife that can be levied against corporations. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, for example, specifies that corporations can be fined up to $500,000 if responsible for the death of a brown pelican. Perhaps if the bird dies after release, without direct evidence that its death was caused by oil ingestion (without an expensive autopsy), then BP will not be vulnerable to those fines. Further, the total number of dead birds attributed to their spill be lower; those numbers, instead, will be in the column marked “saved.”
UPDATE: Jay Holcomb at the International Bird Rescue Research Center disagrees with Gaus and other pessimistic scientists. (Thanks to Paul for the link.) It may also be that techniques for cleaning the birds have improved over time. So the 1% number is probably wrong, or at least needs to be qualified. Still, I think BP’s interests still apply, but it’s overstating it to say that de-oiling is bad for birds. Thanks to everyone in the comments who added contrasting information!
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 most people look at the Gulf of Mexico and see seafood and beaches, oil executives see the Gulf differently. They see a giant grid containing thousands of squares of possibility, each potentially yielding billions of dollars.
You see this:
(photo credit: Dmitriy Pritykin)
They see this, a grid of the entire gulf representing regions available for lease (click to enlarge):
(source)
This is a close up off the Louisiana coast (green lines and regions are oil pipelines and fields, the pink are the same for gas):
(source)
There are 6,652 leased squares, amounting to 22 percent of the lease-able Gulf (click to enlarge) and approximately 4,000 oil production platforms in the Gulf:
(source)
I offer this only as an illustration of the degree to which the Gulf has been commodified. The Gulf is big, big, big business:
(source)
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.
Google searches are (as far as I know) purely a function of their algorithm.* A company, for example, is not supposed to be able to pay Google to increase its rank in the results. Google does, however, sell something on its search results page. If a company buys a search term, when a person searches for that term, Google will place a “sponsored link” at the top of its results page that is discreetly identified as advertising. See the upper right corner of the very gently shaded link that appears at the top of search results for the word “dell.” This is advertising purchased by Dell computers:
Keith Marsalek at nola.com alerted me to the fact that British Petroleum (BP) has bought a bunch of search terms and phrases such that, when one searches for information about the oil spill, the first thing that comes up is BP’s public relations website (selection below). They are hoping that internet users, whether they recognize that BP has bought the top slot or not, will read their version of events and, perhaps, only their version of events.
Read nola.com’s oil spill page instead.
UPDATE: To clarify, I’m not suggesting that this is surprising or that BP is uniquely evil in doing this. I’m simply pointing out that money buys the power to shape the distribution of information. Many of you have commented that “sponsored links” are ads and just skip right over them. But others might not. The link and the shading is very subtle. Even if a person sees the phrase “sponsored link,” they might interpret it to mean that Google thinks it’s a good link, one they sponsored. Not everyone is a sophisticated consumer of the internet. And, even if they know it’s an ad, not everyone is as suspicious of ads, nor of companies, as some. So I think buying the ad will, in fact, make it so that more people will be exposed to BP’s version than otherwise. And that’s all I was trying to say. It’s just a simple example of the relationship between power and knowledge.
* I know there is plenty of controversy over there algorithm as well. Feel free to discuss that in the comments.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Dmitriy T.M. and Andrew L. sent a link to a collection of post-World War I men’s magazine covers. They are a window into a time when being a man was clearly a very distinct achievement, but much less related to consumption than it is today.
Today’s men’s magazines emphasize control over oneself and the conquest of women, as do these vintage magazines, but instead of tests of strength, cunning, and fighting ability, they emphasize conquest through consumption. The message is to consume the right exercise, the right products (usually hygiene or tech-related), the right advice on picking up women and, well, the right women. In contrast, these old magazines pit man against nature or other men; consumption has not yet colonized the idea of masculinity.
View a selection of the covers at The Art of Manliness.
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.
