Jezebel recently posted this Australian PSA about the dangers of fast food:
It made me think of this British PSA from 1967 that addressed childhood obesity. Our ideas of what you should be eating may have changed in the past 40 years, but the tendency to rely on individualistic explanations and to blame moms for not providing children better food, as though the food they choose for their kids exists outside of any larger social context, seems to have quite the shelf life.
I’m trying to catch up on some of our email, so you’re getting another round-up of similar-themed items, this time on the gendering of food. Laura L. sent in an advertisement for Muscle Milk, a product generally marketed to men, that she saw on the BART (San Francisco’s public transportation system). The ad presents the product as a means to become more attractive by building muscle — a body type usually encouraged for men but not women — and thus gain sexual access to your friends:
It’s interesting because it’s a gendered product that uses a tactic common in products that market to women: you’re body isn’t good enough, but our product will fix it. It’s not the first time the company has used tactics more often seen in products aimed at women.
In another example of the association of meat-eating with men, Tom Megginson, who blogs at Work that Matters, sent us a link to a story at AdFreak about KFC’s inventive promotional campaign for their Double-Down sandwich, which, if you didn’t know, consists of bacon and cheese between two chicken breast patties (fried or grilled). The promotions, which started in Louisville, KY, involve undergrads wearing sweats with “Double Down” across the butt and giving out free stuff:
The KFC announcement of the program makes it clear that only women are wanted as “brand ambassadors” to help them meet their “key target of young men.”
While men are encouraged to eat high-fat/sodium/calorie monster/mega/ultra/double meat-based items, women, of course, get to eat yogurt. Brianna L. found this Australian commercial for Yoplait Formé, in which women are shown eating foods that are clearly meant to appear unappetizing and illustrate they are sacrificing flavor for their diet, as well as policing one another’s food choices:
Notice at 12 seconds in they all wave away the plate of cookies, but then, just for a second, one of the women shows weakness and starts to reach for one. The woman next to her, however, quickly reins her in with a disapproving look and gesture. As Brianna points out,
Even the tag line “feel fuller for longer” shows eating is not about sustenance, or taking pleasure in food. Being in perpetual hunger – that’s the status quo, at least until a magic yogurt comes along to save you.
Now for a palate cleanser, watch Sarah Haskins’s take on yogurt commercials.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Stephanie L. and Amie A. both sent in screen shots of the MSN tabs “for him” and “for her.” It’s not particularly surprising that MSN segregates its content by sex, but the gendered themes were interesting, especially given that Stephanie and Amie captured two moments in time.
First, notice that the information MSN chose as relevant to him is almost always leisure related:
The two lists above include how to build a man cave (where men escape daily responsibilities), the new Nikes, technological innovation and great inventions to read about, sports news, dating advice, and wacky stories about cocaine, $100,000 dollar bills, catching lobster, and urine. Except for a non-leisure-related, health story, all are either about leisure activities or a way to provide leisure with wacky, weird or fun news.
What about for her?
Her stories are about work (male careers), sexual harassment, babies (breastfeeding and baby talk), teenagers, the economy, and food (superfoods and allergy labels). The video on wildlife, the story about Chelsea Clinton, the piece on Mad Men, the new hospital gown design (???) can be interpreted as leisure-related in that they’d be fun to read.
Overall, then, the material aimed at men is almost entirely related to leisure, whereas the material aimed at women is heavily tilted towards her responsibility for work and the family and serious topics like sexual harassment and the economy. Perhaps MSN knows what it’s doing. In fact, men do have more leisure time than women. So this is a structural problem related to how we organize work and family, as well as a cultural problem in how we represent and relate to men and women.
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.
Rachel O., writing from New Zealand, sent in an interesting example of gendered energy drinks. Other than their being gendered, I thought there were two things worth noting.
First, the only difference between the male and female version of the drink (other than the marketing, which is downright diametrical) is the number of calories. The female version, Angel, is low calorie; the male version, Demon, is not. So dieting, an imperative towards thinness, and femininity (not to mention innocence) are all lumped together in the marketing of the product.
Demon (don’t click… loud, scary music):
Angel (safe to click):
The second thing I thought was interesting about these two drinks was that it took a lot of digging to find evidence that they were made by the same company (though I finally found it here). As far as I can tell, neither website admits the existence of the other. This is a really strong separation of the two products, as if femininity and masculinity threaten to spoil each other, it’s best to keep them as far away from one another as possible. God forbid we know that the makers of the aggressive Demon drink sissy it up to also make the sweet, low cal Angel drink. Best to keep our masculinity and femininity pure.
This reminds me of the fact that Dove and Axe are owned by the same company. The two products are sold with divergent marketing campaigns — the former claims to empower women, the latter produces some of the most sexist advertising on TV — but they are both part of Unilever. Only our ignorance of this fact makes Dove’s marketing strategy seem earnest.
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.
Rachel sent in a commercial for Dove chocolate that, as she says, sends “mixed messages…about unrealistic beauty standards for women.” Here’s the video:
Transcript:
We’re only human, but we try to be perfect.
We pretend that high heels are comfortable, and that waxing just takes getting used to.
We pretend we can manage anything that’s thrown at us, and sometimes we can.
And other times, we just have to cut ourselves some slack, and take a moment.
Because although we’re only human, that’s more than enough.
Your moment, your Dove.
The commercial seems to want to have it both ways. On the one hand, trappings of conventional femininity (heels, waxing, as well as being a superwoman who can handle “anything that’s thrown at us”) are accepted as “perfection,” elements of an ideal version of us we aspire to. On the other hand, it’s drawing on the idea that we should just accept ourselves — we’re “more than enough” — but in a way that implies that we have to do this not because there’s something wrong with an ideal of perfection that requires women to put ourselves through painful rituals, but just because sometimes we can’t manage to meet that ideal and have to give ourselves a break and eat some chocolate (of course!) to console ourselves before we get up the energy to throw ourselves back into the search for perfection again. As we often see in advertising, it uses a women’s empowerment message (you’re great the way you are! You can do anything!) in a superficial way that simply suggests consumption as a solution rather than truly challenging the beauty ideals it appears to be critiquing.
Crystal and Corina C. sent in this image of an ad for Snack Factory Pretzel Crisps that recently appeared around NYC (from The Gothamist):
The ads led to some local resistance among those who felt the tagline, while meant to refer to the size of the pretzels, also links to ideas about body size. Here’s a video of a man making some modifications to one of the ads (from Salon):
According to NYC the Blog,
Responding to the criticisms via Twitter, Pretzel Crisps insisted they are just “using the word ‘thin’ in a creative way to describe our product,” and people are “interpreting [the ads] in their own way.”
Later they made another statement:
We hope people noticed what isn’t in the ads: No extra thin, scantily clad female models; No mention of dieting programs, points, etc… Our website and facebook page are all about EATING. We talk about pairing our product in different ways for appetizers. We want people to eat.
Finally, Pretzel Crisps announced they’re taking down the ads.
What struck me was the importance of social media in this whole process. Sites such as NYC the Blog publicized the resistance, magnifying its effect (would the company have even known about the guy pasting images to their ad if he hadn’t gotten NYC the Blog to post his video of it?); Pretzel Thins responded via Twitter; and the ongoing publicity of the criticisms as well as complaints to the company (which are a lot easier to make as a response to a tweet than if you have to look up contact info and get in touch individually) eventually led the company to end the ad campaign.
For a different example of resistance, see Lisa’s recent post on an astroturf protest campaign.
UPDATE: Well. As commenter Rebecca pointed out, they replaced those ads with new ones that indicate they may not have quite gotten the point of the criticisms (via Jezebel):
When I was a young adult there was a pervasive concern with unrealistic expectations of thinness for women and how this contributed to low self-esteem and eating disorders among young girls. I don’t think this discourse is gone, but it’s definitely been joined by a competing discourse, the one that says that kids are too fat and need to diet. In the latter category come these limited calorie snack packs from Disney (with Cars and generic princess themes):
When the anti-eating disorder discourse reigned supreme, I think this product would have been protested off the shelves. They fit quite nicely, however, with the anti-obesity discourse. From that perspective it makes perfect sense to teach kids to count calories.
The rise and fall of discourses is a fascinating topic. What do you think? Do the two discourses co-exist today? Is anti-obesity winning? What’s the future of the anti-eating disorder discourse?
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.
Anna M., Naomi B., Amanda C., Ben Z., and SpeZek sent in a new PETA ad campaign, the latest in a twisted story of objectification metaphor.
Feminists in the ’70s protested the objectification of women by metaphorically linking meat and female bodies (e.g., “we should not be treating women like pieces of meat”). Meat is meat, so the argument went, but women are human beings and should be treated as such.
In mocking response, in 1978 Larry Flynt put a woman being chewed up by a meat grinder on the cover of Hustler magazine. We will treat women like meat if we want, was the message. And we did, and we do, seemingly endlessly.
Forty years later, Pamela Anderson submits to being symbolically carved up for butchering by PETA in order to metaphorically link meat and female bodies again. But this time, in an ironic reversal, it’s designed to condemn the way we treat animals, not the way we treat women.
And, forty years later, feminists are still saying “Please, can we not do the women/meat thing?”
So Canada denies PETA a permit for the launching of this new ad campaign. An official explains: “…it goes against all principles public organizations are fighting for in the everlasting battle of equality between men and women” (source). What a nice thing to say, feminists think.
But Anderson fights feminism with feminism:
How sad that a woman would be banned from using her own body in a political protest over the suffering of cows and chickens… In some parts of the world, women are forced to cover their whole bodies with burqas—is that next?
Yes, Pamela, I’m sure that’s next.
But I digress.
So PETA and Anderson must think that Canadians super-super-respect women like totally and never-never-objectify them to the degree that saying that animals are like women will suddenly inspire horror at the prospect of using animals for food? Or is it that they think men will see the image and be like “oooh I’d really like to rub up against that rump” and then suddenly find cows too sexy to eat? Or they don’t give a shit about women and are willing to use whatever attention-getting tactic they can to save animals from going under the knife (including using the body of a woman that has, um, gone under the knife)?
I submit this for discussion because I just don’t know.
More from PETA: women packaged like meat, and in cages, women who love animals get naked (men wear clothes), the banned superbowl ad, and a collection of various PETA advertising using (mostly women’s) nudity. See also my post on leftist balkanization, or the way that leftist social movements tend to undermine each other.
If you’re interested further, you may want to read Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat and The Pornography of Meat.
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.
