food/agriculture

Kristin W. sent in this image of a Bed, Bath, & Beyond catalog cover, which concisely captures the way in which we are often encouraged to indulge by eating lots of high-calorie, high-fat foods, but also get cultural messages (often from the same source) that we shouldn’t gain weight:

Notice how the scale tells you “Uh-oh” to let you know you’ve eaten too many treats. So this company provides us with the means to indulge, and to literally warn us when we’ve done so. How helpful.

For other examples, see here.

Thanks, Kristin W.!

Xavier M. sent us a link to this print ad, which he saw in a Belgian men’s magazine, that uses sex to encourage organ donation (found here).

Text: “Becoming a donor is probably your only chance to get inside her.”

There are some interesting implications here about why we engage in altruism and who is deserving of that altruism.

See also similar posts on PETA (see here and here) and human rights violations in Burma.

At AdFreak, I discovered that Sea Monkeys are being used to sell sex. Sure enough:

NEW (Mar. ’10)! Christina W. sent in this ad campaign for French cheeses using a pin-up calendar:

The video is a backstage look at a sexy calendar photo shoot for…cheese:

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/113146614[/vimeo]

NEW (Jun. ’10)! Stephanie DeH. sent in this lovely CPR instructional video (which also got its own post):

ALSO NEW (Jun. ’10)! Lindsey Dale, at Nobody, collected the following ads selling, with sex, archery, a laser detector, tea, and coffee:

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.

Anneliese W. sent us this Australian ad campaign for Noble Rise bread.  The claim is that other breads are “bland” and that Noble Rise bread is not.  To make the claim, the advertisements use Black people to signify spice and flavor.  Anneliese writes:

…what really struck me about this campaign is the use of coloured bodies to represent excitement, flavour and coolness. The slogan for the campaign is something like “take a stand against bland” – bland being ‘normal’ and everyday, and in some ads the obvious unspoken is that blandness is white.  Framing blackness as the opposite of ‘bland’ is just another example of the ‘other-ing’ of black bodies, and re-enforcing the idea that white western culture is ‘bland’ or non-existent.

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=aXfxKJnR54Q[/youtube]

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=xpO3eF7wrC8[/youtube]

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=cwIOM3BzjOM[/youtube]

[youtube]http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=h3SSPQgm2jA[/youtube]

I offer several more examples of this phenonemon here.

Apparently for the last several presidential elections 7-11 has had a “7-Election” marketing campaign, in which they offer blue and red coffee cups and customers “vote” by choosing one or the other. Here is a screenshot from the 7-Election 2008 website:

You can go to the website and see the “voting” results map (current as of this morning), which shows two states at 50/50 and every other state going for Obama:

If you go to the actual website, you can hover over each state and see what the % breakdown is.

Now, in and of itself, I just thought this was slightly interesting as an example of the commodification of political choice (“express your voting preference through a coffee cup!”), and I thought it could be used as an example of made-up statistics that are entirely meaningless. For instance, at the 7-11 near my house, I noticed they only have blue cups available, so it would be impossible to “vote” for McCain. Anyone with just some basic common sense could think of tons of problems with this as a real methodology–it didn’t even really seem worth my time to go into much detail about why a poll based on sale of coffee cups is unscientific and stupid.

But then I noticed something on the website: according to the website, results are reported weekly in USA Today (although I wasn’t able to find links to any weekly reports, which seemed odd). I know USA Today isn’t considered a high-quality newspaper by a lot of people, but still, it’s at least ostensibly reporting news. The 7-Election website also has a link to CNN, so perhaps they are partnering with them, too. Editor & Publisher ran a story on it. The results of a marketing scheme to sell coffee is being treated as news. I’m going to try to use it in class to discuss how things get defined as “newsworthy,” and who sets the agenda for what we’re going to talk about. Here we have a company getting free publicity for its marketing promotion because that marketing promotion has been declared “news.” What important information about the world is being ignored in favor of this? How does treating this as newsworthy legitimize it, as though these statistics are meaningful or accurate? Does that increase sales for 7-11?

I found a lot of comments on blogs where people claimed that after hearing about this campaign, they went out and bought coffee just to “vote” for their preferred candidate, and a few who said they refused to buy coffee because the store was out of the cups they wanted. I find this entire thing incredibly bizarre, and I don’t see why news outlets and individuals are buying into the idea that this is anything other than a way to convince more people to buy 7-11 coffee.

NEW!  In our comments, Penny pointed out that Baskin Robbins does the same thing.  Here are the results from this suspicously delicious poll as of the morning of Nov. 4th:

As Melissa at Shakesville writes:

…Subway reminds women that the only reason they have to feel good about themselves is being thin, that their self-worth is predicated on their looks, that psychological health is evidently dependent on being pretty, that fat axiomatically equals ugly, and that no man would ever love a fat girl.

Before there were flight attendants, there were stewardesses.  Below a vintage commercial for airlines (found here thanks to AdFreak, see also this print ad):

While pressure on airlines to be less sexist means that we don’t see ads like this anymore, Stephen W. alerted us to the ongoing sexism in “general aviation,” that is private planes and jets owned by individuals and companies.

Airports have FBOs (or “fixed based operators”) which are, essentially, glorified gas stations for planes.  A private pilot can choose which airport and thus FBO, or which FBO at which airport, to patronize.  So FBOs will compete for customers.  Stephen pointed to one strategy: plying pilots, assumed to be men, with sex.

This website allows pilots to see what “FBO Girls” all over the country, the women working behind the counters at FBOs, look like.  Another website, FBO Hotties, allows pilots to submit their favorite girls.

Flower Aviation promises that you will be guided into your parking spot by “girls in short ‘skorts’ and tank tops.”

Here are some of the images from the website, notice that when you spend money on fuel, they reward you with red meat (and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies):

So, there you have it.  Private aviation, still very much a man’s world.

Other than the objectification, I think an interesting sociological question might be: Why have the airlines dropped overt sexist advertising, while general aviation has not? One possibility is that general aviation is, literally, less public and, thus, less vulnerable to public censor. Another may be that pilots are still overwhelmingly men, unlike the customers served by airlines, and so there may still be profit in sexism for general aviation, but not in commercial aviation. I’d welcome your thoughts as well.

I just saw a story about this image on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” (image found here):

It is a “joke” included in the “October newsletter by the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated” (I read more about it here; the group is from San Bernardino, CA), in which they claim that if Obama wins, his face will be on food stamps, not dollar bills. From a story in The Press-Enterprise:

Fedele [the group’s president] said she got the illustration in a number of chain e-mails and decided to reprint it for her members in the Trumpeter newsletter because she was offended that Obama would draw attention to his own race. She declined to say who sent her the e-mails with the illustration. She said she doesn’t think in racist terms, pointing out she once supported Republican Alan Keyes, an African-American who previously ran for president. “I didn’t see it the way that it’s being taken. I never connected,” she said. “It was just food to me. It didn’t mean anything else.”

Uh huh. Right. Who could possibly have known that African Americans were historically portrayed in racist carictures eating fried chicken, ribs, and/or watermelon, or that there’s a long-standing political tradition of trying to connect Blacks and welfare in the public mind?

Honestly, it’s been awhile since an image of Obama actually made me gasp, but that one did.

UPDATE: Larry, from the L.A. Times‘ Daily Mirror blog, sent in a link to this post at the blog Please God No, in which the author claims to be the creator of the Obama bucks cartoon and says,

It was a satirical look at some of the Fox News watching right-wingers out there that are afraid of a government that sponsors welfare type programs. It was intended to poke fun at the unrealistic fears and agenda of racism that a fringe element of Republicans strongly embrace.

The author continues,

This “cartoon” (as described in the media), was meant to empower African Americans to stand up for and defend themselves against racial intolerance. This “cartoon” was prescribed to showcase the racial hatred and intolerance towards the “left” and it’s liberal “welfare” economic plan. Guess what? The radical right picked up this fumble and ran with it right into the opponents goal line. The fact that a website like this exists is not evidence of racial hatred or divide, but the fact that an image taken from this website was used in a legitimate publication to promote the Conservative agenda must be proof of either existing racism or utter stupidity.

I thought the author’s response might be interesting for a discussion of political parody and humor and the limits of satire. What makes political humor effective and what makes it, as in this case, actually appeal to the group the humorist claimed to be mocking? If people miss the satire, is that because they’re dumb or because the satire isn’t that good? If someone says they’re being satirical, does that automatically shield them from any accusations of sexism, racism, etc.? I really find the issue of humor to be fascinating–what we find funny, what happens when some groups don’t recognize what another group claims was an attempt to be humorous, and how claims of being satirical or “just joking” can be used to avoid responsibility for the content of statements or images. This seems like a particularly good example of some of those issues.

Dara G. sent in a link to this billboard in West Plains, Missouri, featuring a caricature of Obama in a turban meant to imply he’s an Arab/Muslim (found here):

NEW!  Here’s another (found here):

For other examples of accusations that Obama is Arab/Muslim (and that that is bad), see here, here, here, and here. For a non-racist caricature of Obama (showing it can, indeed, be done), see this post.

Thanks, Dara!

And I just saw on Rachel Maddow’s show that this image showed up briefly on the Sacramento County Republican Party’s website (image found here):

There’s more!

This image is from a recent rally (found here):

And, if you haven’t seen it yet, here is the by-now-classic video of supporters of a McCain rally yelling that Obama is a “terrorist” bound on spreading “terror” (found here):

I presume you can figure out for yourself how these might be used in classes. Negative messages about Arabs/Muslims, attempts to use fear of the connection between Arabs and terrorism, joking about torture, racist imagery, etc. etc….You don’t need me for this one.

To be fair, McCain, in at least one instance, has been attempting to temper this fervor. But, as Gwen mentioned in a previous post, those who stir up hatred often have a difficult time controlling it. I’d love to have some social psychologists weigh in on the phenomenon.

NEW! Man in Ohio hangs Obama from a tree in his front yard and boldly claims racist motivation (found here):

According to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, weekly earnings rose 0.9 percent last year and the overall inflation rate was 4.1:

Found at Everyday Sociology.  Click to enlarge.