gender: bodies

Parameswaran (2002) writes:

The [National] Geographic’s August 1999 cover dramatically deploys women’s bodies as detailed blueprints, maps that busy readers could use to instantly trace the passage of non-Western cultures from tradition to global modernity…

More of her description of this cover after the image (found here):

An older middle-aged Indian woman, with streams of white and orange flowers pinned to her hair at the base of her neck, symbolizes tradition. The deep red silk sari with a gold border, the gold necklaces around her neck, and the thick gold bangles on her wrists clearly mark her as a traditional upper-class woman… The older Indian woman’s body and posture also announce her alignment with tradition. She is heavyset, almost stocky, and her sari demurely covers her large breasts. Her feet are placed moderately close together and her folded hands rest in her lap. Avoiding the direct eye of the camera, her face, with the trademark dot of the Hindu tradition etched between her eyes, is turned sideways as she bestows a tender maternal gaze on the young woman sitting beside her…

In contrast to the gentle passivity and the slack middle-aged body that index tradition, bold assertiveness, feminine youthfulness, and an androgynous firm body register cosmopolitan modernity in the cover of image. These biological and emotional transformations in the modern, non-Western woman’s physical appearance and personal demeanor appear to be wrought by Westernization. The young, slender Indian woman sitting next to the middle-aged woman has short, shoulder length hair framing her face. The marked absence of the dot on her forehead as well as her clothing, instantly herald her identity as a modern woman. She is dressed in a black, shiny PVC catsuit, unzipped down to the middle of her chest to display her small, almost flat breasts, while her feel are encased in sharply pointed black boots. Disdaining the gaze of the older woman directed towards her, she defiantly stares at the camera and claims her personal space with arrogant confidence. Her legs and felt, unlike the older woman’s feet, are splayed wide apart and her knees point in opposite directions. Her left arm is poised akimbo style while her left palm grips her hip in a strong masculine gesture.

In the magazines sharply polarized, binary rendering of the “new and hip” as radically different from the “old and outmoded,” one woman symbolizes ethnic tradition and the other global modernity…

Citation:  Parameswaran, Radhika. 2002. Local Culture in Global Media: Excavating Colonial and Material Discourses in National Geographic. Community Theory 12, 3: 287-315.

Heather O. sent us a link to product sold at a website featuring items for girls’ rooms.  It’s a “piggy” bank for saving money for a boob job.

In case there is any question as to whether the products are aimed at girls, this is from the front page:

Thanks Heather!

Breck C. encouraged us to post about photographs of body building women from a new book.  When Feministe and Boing Boing posted about them it, predictably, prompted a rash of comments to the effect of “those women are gross/disgusting/unattractive.”

I think Roy at No Cookies For Me says it best:

It doesn’t matter if you find those women attractive or not. They’re very likely not doing it for you. That you find body building “grotesque” is completely beside, behind, or even miles away from the point. Nobody gives a shit that you find it disgusting. If you find it disgusting? Don’t do it. [And n]obody is trying to make you become or date a body builder…

Nicely put.  This reflexive judging of women’s attractiveness reveals the entitlement that many feel to be aesthetically pleased by women’s appearance and, thus, the expectation that women owe it to the world to be attractive (as the world defines it, of course).  It also demonstrates the related idea that women are, first and foremost and no matter what else they do, sexual objects.

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.

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.

The sexualized campaign against breast cancer (i.e., “save the tatas”) is fascinating.  Why should we care about breast cancer?  Because we think boobs are hot and we like to put them in our mouths.

I think it’s the ad companies that win.  This bottled water advertisement (found here) gets to be simultaneously socially conscious and titillating:

Also in breast cancer awareness and advertising: if men had boobs, they’d care about breast cancer, gender symbolism in breast cancer ads, and objectification in the service of breast cancer awareness.

Also don’t miss boobsboobsboobsboobsboobsboobsboobsboobsboobs.

In the 1950s, Clearasil started a new marketing campaign called Clearasil Personality of the Month. These were ads disguised as advice columns that ran in magazines. They featured the stories of real girls who wrote in to Clearasil to talk about their own struggles with acne and, of course, how they finally overcame this horrible affliction with the help of Clearasil. Here is an example (found here), a piece on a college student named Linda Waddell:

Sorry, the resolution isn’t good enough for me to be able to read all the text, so I don’t know what it says. The general layout was that teens and young women wrote in with little bios about themselves and descriptions of the problems they’ve experienced with pimples.

Notice the connection between clear skin and popularity–we see a picture of Linda surrounded by friends in the upper right corner (and, most importantly, a guy is clearly paying attention to her).

I originally read about this feature in Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. She discussed it in the context of talking about increasing concern about acne and the rise of a whole host of products to combat it. However, I think it would be great for a discussion about advertising, particular about efforts to disguise advertising as simple information or entertainment (it’s still often difficult to distinguish these categories in women’s magazines). It’s also a good example of a marketing campaign that attempts to appeal to consumers by getting them to think of a product almost as a friend–here, the product is personified by nice, wholesome-looking girls who were just providing friendly advice to other girls just like them.

You still see the strategy of portraying products as friends that help women–for instance, ads for food products or cleaners that depict them as friends that help women get everything done, since apparently no one in their families will. See this post for a humorous take on some of these ads.

In her book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Joan Jacobs Brumberg has a chaptered titled “Perfect Skin” in which she looks at the rise of acne as a significant concern among adolescent girls. Because pimples and blackheads were believed by some people to be a sign of immorality–masturbation, lascivious thoughts, or promiscuity–both teenagers and their parents were quite distressed at the appearance of teen acne. Though teens had long been concerned about their appearances, the widespread use of mirrors in bathrooms starting in the Victorian Era gave them many more opportunities to examine their faces and find themselves lacking. And girls tended to be more concerned about their faces than boys, perhaps because girls were judged more harshly for any perceived sexual immorality. A whole industry arose to sell generally useless products to teens, particularly girls, to cure their acne.

Marketers for soap and other products used concerns about morality in their ads. Here is an ad for Hand Sapolio, a popular soap in the early 1900s (found in a 1906 issue of McClure’s Magazine):

Notice how the text in the top box mentions that cosmetics, which might be used to cover pimples, were being “inveighed against from the very pulpits,” meaning good moral girls couldn’t use cosmetics to hide their acne. Also I like how the title (“Be Fair to Your Skin, and It Will Be Fair to You–and to Others”) implies that if you aren’t fair to your skin, it is going to do something dreadful to the people around you…presumably busting out into a hideous display of pimples that will pain people to look upon.

I zoomed in and did a couple of smaller screen captures of some sections of the text that also stress morality or “goodness”:

Be clean, both in and out. We cannot undertake the former task–that lies with yourself–but the latter we can aid with HAND SAPOLIO.

This section of text makes it clear that good skin is essential for popularity, at least among the “best” people:

This Hand Sapolio ad (from a 1903 issue of New England Magazine), sums it up:

The first step away from self-respect is lack of care in personal cleanliness: the first move in building up a proper pride in man, woman, or child, is a visit to the Bathtub. You can’t be healthy, or pretty, or even good, unless you are clean. HAND SAPOLIO is a true missionary.

So there we see a connection being made between having good skin and being “good,” which means that, like missionaries who help save heathens, Hand Sapolio is a “missionary” spreading moral goodness and self-respect. Because what could build up self-respect more than being told that if you have less than perfectly clean skin, you can’t be pretty or good?

These could be useful for discussions of how physical appearances were steadily connected to ideas of morality and how biological processes, like getting pimples in adolescence, were turned into diseases that required (often expensive) intervention to “cure.” They could also be good for a discussion of marketing, particularly how ideas of morality were tied to particular products, such that goodness was commodified–by buying the item, you were buying goodness.

This is a screen shot of McCain’s appearance on The View. I thought it nicely demonstrated both rules of femininity and the breaking of rules.  Notice how all of the women, with the exception of Whoopi, have beautifully crossed legs aimed towards McCain so as to express interest.  Whoopi, in contrast, is resisting conventional expectations by taking a masculine pose (ankle on knee) aimed away from McCain.  (Of course, Whoopi as been seen taking controversial “positions” before.)  Finally, McCain himself appears to be failing to live up to normative standards of masculinity in matching the leg cross of his female hosts.  (See the second video in this post about anxiety over masculine leg crossing.)

I’ll grant that Whoopi doesn’t hold this pose:

Though she appears to be the only one who appears to pose according to comfort:

Still stolen from videos at Perez.