gender: beauty

This ad for laser hair removal in a New York newspaper, sent by Jac B., is particularly egregious in its effort to make women insecure:

Meanwhile, in a divulged secret at PostSecret this Sunday, a woman who conforms by bleaching her upper lip takes some glee in the possibility that she makes people face their own discomfort by refusing to full-on wax it:

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.

Dodai at Jezebel recently posted an Elle cover from May 1986. Like her, I was struck by how un-retouched the photo appeared to be. Dodai says that you can see freckles and moles on her face.

Dodai also argues that the fashion spreads in the 1986 issue look like they are happy and having fun and she compares them to the spreads in the May 2010 issue in which, she says, the models appear somber. See for yourself.

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.

Get rid of it so that she will love you completely and without reserve (so long as you remain physically perfect):

Thanks to Marie-Claire for sending this in!

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.

Charlotte alerted us to a make-up brand called Primitive that makes and sells natural lips sticks, glosses, and pencils.

The company is drawing on familiar associations of primitiveness with naturalness.  We were natural “for centuries,” but have now somehow graduated from naturalness, such that we need to make a special effort to recapture the simple, intelligent, real, and honest beauty of our foremothers.

So, Primitive romanticizes our primitive past while making a questionable assertion about the relationship between time and naturalness.  In addition, the names of their products locate primitiveness in some parts of the (modern) globe and not others.

The products are named after places that are, almost exclusively, in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the South Pacific.  In a previous post I introduced the idea of “anachronistic space.”  I wrote: “Catherine MacKinnon coined the term ‘anachronistic space’ to refer to the idea that different parts of the globe represent different historical periods.”  In this case, Primitive is counting on our associating a (romanticized) primitiveness with only some places and not others.  It’s 2010 in Mali and Morocco.  They don’t represent our own past, they represent unique modernities.  And the places left out of these product names — largely North America and Europe — don’t represent the future.  They are not wholly modern societies that have shed their primitive past; they, just like all societies, are a mixture of old and new stitched together to form the present.

For more instances in which anachronistic space appears, see our posts on representing the fashion of the Surma and Mursi tribes and Wild African Cream.

And for more on the social construction of the modern and the primitive, see these posts: “Africans” as props for white femininity, Union Carbide brings modernity to the world, primitive Australia cures modern ills, women as carries of tradition and progress, representing the Middle East, equating modernity with permissiveness, and civilizing the Pueblos.

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 Dove deodorant commercial, sent in by Emma H., is a nice, simple example of how women are taught that certain feminine performances are required.  In the commercial, the woman wants to wear a sleeveless dress. Her comment is followed by the following text:

Emphasis on “has” and “of course,” of course.

Watch it:

This is the same Dove, of course, that markets itself with the “real beauty” campaign and is owned by the same company as Axe.

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.

Marketing hygiene/beauty products to men by implying it will make them more masculine and attractive to women is nothing new, but a recent Old Spice commercial throws in something I haven’t seen much: the ad is aimed at women.

C.J. and Anna M. pointed out the commercial, in which women (who, presumably, do the shopping) learn that we’d find men more attractive if we bought them the right body wash so they didn’t smell like women. Notice the stereotypes of the things that women really, really, really find attractive about men, namely, the ability to buy boats and diamonds and act out plot lines from romance novels:

Old Spice also targets men more directly, as in this commercial Katrin found:

Sofia R. sent in an ad that goes along with the commercial:

Guys, don’t ever forget that if your masculinity is in any way open to question–like, say, you have a stupid, gender-ambiguous name–you need to compensate by being sure to distance yourself from any other signs of girliness.

If you don’t like Old Spice, perhaps you’d be interested in the new line of products for men from Dove, sent in by J.Z. and Alexandra N.:

Once you have finally proven your manliness by doing enough sufficiently manly things (and making sure to procreate, and probably not having a name like Jamie), it’s safe to care about your skin and stuff.

Commenter Jennifer says,

I’m wondering if the Dove commercial, rather than using stereotypes solely for the purpose of selling products, is attempting to buck some of the stereotypes. I mean, it seems like the commercial points out some of the aspects of life that prove “Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too” like the necessity to be good at sports, be brave and strong, and be heterosexual. In some ways, I thought the commercial kind of refreshing.

Poor men. They feel so put-upon with all the expectations of them. Especially the ridiculous things women ask them to do. Women are so whiny and demanding and sap all the fun out of men’s lives. As this Dodge commercial sent in by Sara P. shows, the only thing left for a guy to do is take a “last stand” by getting a macho car:

Sara and Jesse W. also sent us this parody of the above ad, from a woman’s perspective, cracks me up:

Just in case you might not have gotten the main points, let me summarize for you:

* Don’t be a sissy! Show you’re a man with manly beauty products! Chicks will dig it.

* But once you’ve proven you’re a man, you can be a little more open about using manly beauty products.

* Having relationships with women totally emasculates you! Why won’t they just shut up?!?

UPDATE: Reader Theo linked to another commercial about how women just won’t shut up!

NEW! (Feb. ’10): Emma M.H. and Liz M. sent in this commercial for FloTV that also shows women emasculating and controlling men:

ALSO NEW! (Feb. ’10):This Daily Show clip, sent in by Chrissy B., summarizes just how very bad men have it these days:

Jersey Shore has come to end, we’re (genuinely) sad to say. We know we had fun. But is it possible we also saw something, dare I say it, subversive about beauty, gender and sexuality? I think so.

A panel discussion on the show and “Guido culture” at Queens College yesterday (you read that right), included New York State Senator and Jezebel heroine Diane Savino, who knows from stinging cultural analysis.

[Savino] explained, “‘guido’ was never a pejorative.” It grew out of the greaser look and became a way for Italian-Americans who did not fit the standard of beauty to take pride in their own heritage and define cool for themselves.

When she was growing up, everybody listened to rock; girls were supposed to be skinny with straight blonde hair (like Marcia Brady on “The Brady Bunch”); guys wore ripped jeans, sneakers and straggly hair.

The 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever” marked a turning point. “It changed the image for all of us,” Ms. Savino said. As Tony Manero, John Travolta wore a white suit, had slicked short hair, liked disco music and was hot. “It was a way we could develop our own standard of beauty,” she added.

In the same way, Virginia Heffernan writes in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Italian-Americans in the Northeast originally disdained their own accents until movies like “Mean Streets, Saturday Night Fever, Working Girl and, of course, Taxi Driver.” Those representations, she says, led to a “hammy” reclamation of an identity that had been mirrored back to them through Hollywood. These were second and third generation immigrants, who had mostly reached the middle class but maybe didn’t feel wholly a part of the mainstream, who telegraphed their identity through stylized symbols like Italian flags and red sauce that felt potent but no longer limited their social mobility.

That goes for the ladies too. Female beauty that took on a showily “ethnic cast” was distinct from what was already being sold. As Regina Nigro recently put it on The Awl:

We (I) laugh at bon mots like “You don’t even look Italian!” (the insult that Sammi “Sweetheart” flings at the blonde blue-eyed “grenade” …) but, ridiculous as it is, that assessment betrays a value system: Skinny blonde pale WASP princesses are deemed not attractive when measured by the JS aesthetic. And this seems curious and laughable to us.

“You don’t even look Italian!” is crazy funny but is the underlying judgment (dark hair/olive skin/Italian-looking = pretty; the inverse = not pretty) any worse than any other standard of beauty? It’s an alternative perspective, one that I suspect is so funny partly because it is so unfamiliar.

Of course, there is plenty about the Jersey Shore sexual aesthetic that is broadly familiar. The worst insult is to call a woman fat (or a “hippo”); big, exposed boobs are a baseline requirement, and the men are judged by the attractiveness of the women they acquire. (The other guys repeatedly mock The Situation about the looks of the women he brings home; Ronnie taunts him that he hasn’t brought home a girl anywhere near as pretty as Sammi).

And yet it’s oddly refreshing how much artifice itself is celebrated, with everyone participating mightily, and openly, in becoming the ideal Guido. No one is just born one, or supposed to make it look effortless. There are communal visits to tanning salons and unblinking references to fake breasts, and everyone takes hours to get ready. Vinny describes a girl admiringly: “Fake boobs, nice butt, said she was a model.”

Heffernan, writing about regional accents being reinforced by the show, uses Sammi as an example: “Every part of Sweetheart’s identity – including her skin color, which on the show is not an inborn marker of ethnicity but a badge of achievement (in the tanning bed) – is the product of intense calculation.” And Heffernan didn’t even get to Sammi’s hair extensions, which are brandished for emphasis.

No character more desperately self-produces than The Situation and his third-person pronouncements. Men are not inscluded [sic] from all this ritual artifice. In the last episode, J-Woww practically goes into heat when she sees some “juicehead gorillas” on the beach, and she lists “Human Growth Hormone” among the attractions. This, by the way, leads The Situation to mumble defensively, “Big is out and lean is in.”

That’s because on The Jersey Shore, men’s bodies are just as scrutinized as women’s, and their beauty rituals are as elaborate, expensive, and time-consuming as those of the women. Maybe even more so — in addition to blowouts, tanning sessions, and agonizing over which appliqued shirt will set them apart from the gelled masses, they spend hours at the gym, something we never see the girls do.

As much as the cast performed all this around the clock during the show’s taping, the audition tapes seen here and in the video below are even more extreme, mixing ethnic calculation with the general famewhoring savviness reality producers have become accustomed to.

Looking at this through what we know now: Sammi calls herself a “hookup slut” but aside from a few flirtations, turned out to be conventionally monogamous on the show. Vinny, in straight-up costume, claims he has to take off his pants “to really show you the magic,” but turned out to be the mildest-mannered cast member, one who unashamedly adores his doting mother. Underneath playing to the producers, though, is a more personal kind of construction, and a more particular one. And ironically, although the cast members’ self-creation was one of the most entertaining parts of the show, some underlying sense of unembarrassed authenticity, even wholesomeness, made it most worth watching.

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Irin Carmon is a reporter at Jezebel.com, from where we’re super pleased to have borrowed the post below. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Village Voice, and others; more information is at www.irincarmon.com.

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Z at It’s The Thought That Counts asked us to submit for commentary a product called the BeBand on sale at Target.  The Band is designed for pregnant women and women who’ve recently given birth:

(Note the carefully placed rings!  This model is no unwed mother!)

The box says that it will “cover unbuttoned pre-pregnancy jeans,” “hold up too-big maternity pants,” and allow you to “fit into pre-pregnancy pants sooner after giving birth”:

But it’s interesting that that’s the fine print.  The large print emphasizes beauty (“Be Belly Beautiful”) and the product is also sold under the name BellaBand.

Questions:

I’ve never been pregnant, is this a new product?  If so, is it a useful product or an invented need?

Even if this is a useful product, what do you think of the emphasis on beauty on the part of the marketers?

Is this not just another part of a demand for women to be freakin’ gorgeous at every part of their lifecycle?

NEW! (Mar. ’10): Along the same lines, R. Walker told us about a product called Shrinkx Hips:

For the low price of $54.99, “Shrinkx Hips provides constant, even pressure to gently guide hips back to their pre-pregnancy position” (if you wear it for 8 weeks). R.W. said it seems like a torture device, and I rather agree. But hey, apparently it makes you look like that model afterward, so what’s a little pain?

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.