gender: beauty

Mary M., of Cooking with the Junior League, took a moment out of her busy Dodgers-watching schedule to send me a link to some posters for products aimed at African American women. They were displayed at the Negro Industrial Fair in NYC in 1939 and contain some fascinating ideas about femininity, beauty, and attracting a man.

Given that a woman’s best chance at economic stability was often through marriage, this one probably wasn’t all that off-base:

Of course, it takes an enormous amount of time, energy, and money to be sure your beauty is “constant.” But it’s necessary, because beauty is the true way to get a husband:

Notice the message in that one: you might be incredibly skilled in some areas of traditional femininity (say, cooking), but it’s not enough if you can’t combine it with beauty. And you can get charm and beauty through purchasing the right products:

See also our post on Chris Rock’s documentary “Good Hair“and a woman gets fired for having an Afro.

Though EVERYONE knows that models are very skinny and that this is bad for the self-esteem and health of women, I was just shocked at how deathly thin the models were at the most recent Paris Fashion Week.

Ashley Mears has a really excellent and sophisticated article in the journal Ethnography, based on her experiences as a model, called Discipline of the Catwalk.  She describes how models are subject to (from the abstract) “…a disciplining labor process in which female bodily capital is transformed into a cultural commodity.” More, because market demand is based on constantly changing fashions in women’s “looks,” women have little to no control over their own value in the market.  Mears writes:

This labor process typifies the politics of gender, in which women exercise power over themselves insofar as they internalize and pursue the glamour of their regime.

Given that some things about our bodies are simply not under our control (e.g., height, skin and eye color, etc), thinness may be appealing as it is one thing that models can control.  And, apparently, being very, very skinny is still very, very in.

These women are modeling Lindsey Lohan’s fashion line only incidentally.  It’s just the particular post I happened to see over at Jezebel.

See also a previous post on how celebrity superstar women have been getting skinnier over time.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Not too long ago, we posted about Dora the Explorer’s makeover.  Everyone was talking about it and lots of people felt that it signified  a disinterest in strong role models for girls (Dora being one of the only ones out there), in favor of pretty ones.

A recent post at Vintage Ads reminds us that taking strong female characters and subjecting them to trivializing beauty regimes is nothing new.  Enjoy this ad for the Bionic Woman Beauty Salon:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

We have, of course, posted a number of examples of toys that socialize girls into motherhood and housework (for instance). But this 1960s commercial for the Suzy Homemaker line of toys, sent in by Monica B., is the most comprehensive example I’ve ever seen, including everything from cooking, doing laundry, vacuuming, to looking pretty:

I’m not quite sure why, but I find this commercial really creepy. Maybe it’s the underlying message that you should do housework and be pretty at the same time if you want to be “queen of your home” and, presumably, the housewife everyone else admires and envies.

Alicja W. told me about this Barbie commercial from 1959 (which may be the first Barbie TV commercial, but I’m not positive about that) in which girls are encouraged to identify with, and aspire to, Barbie’s charm and beauty:

It’s not just that Barbie is fun to play with; she’s overtly presented here as a role model for girls, who can dream of someday being “exactly like” her–petite, popular (“at parties she will cast a spell”), and beautiful. And until they can actually become that person, they can “make believe” they’re Barbie. It’s a great example of how toys can be an important part of childhood socialization. In this case, it’s not just a set of behaviors girls were encouraged to mimic (caring for a doll, for instance); the toy is presented as something they should actually aspire to be.

Jessica F. pointed out an interesting graphic at Fleshmap. They looked at which body parts are emphasized or referenced in different genres of music.

From the website:

Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation.

You can also click on the genre headings and go to a larger breakdown of what percent of songs reference each body part.

I find this fascinating, in that it gives us some indication of which body parts might be considered particularly important for defining attractiveness to artists and listeners of various genres…and also which body parts are most likely to be criticized or ridiculed. After all, a reference to a body part may be mocking as well as complimentary.

Of course, there are always issues with dividing artistic works into genres (Who defines the genres? How do you decide which genre songs go into if they have things in common with things in more than one genre?). And while the website provides a methodology, it could definitely be clearer:

Based on a compilation of more than 10,000 songs, the piece visualizes the use of words representing body parts in popular culture. Each musical genre exhibits its own characteristic set of words, with more frequently used terms showing up as bigger images. The entrance image shows how many times different body parts are mentioned; the charts for each genre go into more detail, showing the usage of different synonyms for each part.

They don’t specify how many songs were in each genre, how they were assigned to genres, or what the compilation of 10,000 songs is. I wish we had that info. Still, it does tell us, generally, about some interesting patterns that show how different groups construct–and appreciate–the body differently.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

From Vintage Ads, another great example of the propagation of the stereotype that women are jealous of and hateful towards one another:

The ad reminded me of the Pantene commercials from the 1980s with the slogan “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful…”  The real message not being “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful…” but, “Don’t hate me because you could be beautiful too, and if you can’t, well then I suppose you’re going to have to hate me”:

More examples of this meme here, here, here, and here.

I discuss the phenomenon, and how sexism (NOT estrogen) produces this situation, in a post about Battle of the Bods.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Tarte is a products sold by Sephora, which has a whole line of “naturally gorgeous” brands:

Naturally gorgeous could mean two things, I suppose:

1.  You are gorgeous without make-up.

LOL… moving on:

2.  Our make-up is natural.

This is what Sephora means.  But if you use their “naturally gorgeous” products, will your gorgeous be natural?  Not necessarily.  As Audrey at Triple Pundit points out, the USDA does not regulate cosmetics, and neither does any other governmental agency.  They can apply the word “natural” to any product because no entity ensures that the word actually means anything.

Audrey continues:

According to their website, their natural products are “formulated with high concentrations of plant-based and naturally-derived ingredients, and fewer to no parabens, sodium lauryl sulfate, phthalates, petrochemicals, and synthetic fragrances or dyes.” And the products in their organic section contain over 70% organic ingredients.

So Sephora says they’re natural.  The Environmental Working Group however, an organization with a wholly different agenda, says that products that Sephora labels natural–such as Tarte, Caudalie, Decleor, and Korres Natural Products–present a moderate to high toxin hazard.

I think this is a really nice example of how difficult it can be to figure out what’s true.  First, language is tricky and it’s used to trick us.  Second, we can’t trust corporations (we just can’t).  They say that they have our best interests in mind, but they do not.  Third, other entities also have agendas.  The Environmental Working Group is a non-profit organization, but it too has an agenda.  Audrey points out that if there is a make-up that doesn’t get labeled as toxic by the Environmental Working Group, she has yet to figure out what it is.

So how do we know?  More problematically, how do we know when there is a question like this to be asked of every single product and service we could buy?  Because even if we had time to do the real research to figure out the answer to the cosmetics question, no one has time to do the research to figure out the answers to all the questions.  And while there are website designed to tell you the answers (like the Environmental Working Group or this one on eco-labels), we still have to look more closely at them in order to know whether their answers are good.  So the work in finding the truth isn’t alleviated, it’s just one step removed.

See also this post on the framing of genetically-modified food by activists and this post on what “organic” looks like.

(Image via.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.