My friend Matt M. let me know about this video from The Second City Network that nicely sums up some of the disturbing messages about love, dating, and gender in animated movies such as Beauty and the Beast. Enjoy!
Also watch an earlier on on The Little Mermaid.
Always entertaining, Jamie Keiles, of the Seventeen Magazine Project and Teenagerie, offered the age distribution of the “hot guys” profiled in the June issue of Seventeen magazine. This issue, after all, was the “Hot Guys of Summer” issue. Fun!
Keiles writes that:
…only two of the guys, Justin Bieber and Nick Jonas, were even in the age range for reading the magazine, ages 12 to 19. What I found weirder, though, is that the largest groups of males featured in the article fell into the two oldest age ranges. This means its possible that the oldest male hottie, Charlie Bewley, could have fathered the youngest targeted Seventeen reader, age 12, when he was 17 years old.
Here’s the data based on an N of 13:
Men and women do marry asymmetrically, with women, on average, marrying men who are taller, more educated, who make a bit more money, have a bit more status, and are a bit older. The average age of marriage for women is 25 and the average age for men is 27. So this is some evidence of early socialization to this idea.
But there’s more…
Not to be underestimated, Keiles asked the question that is on all of our minds: What percentage of hot guys are vampires or vampire-adjacent?
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.
Previously we’ve posted on the sexy makeovers recently given to Dora the Explorer, Strawberry Shortcake, Holly Hobby, and the Sun Maid. Here we have three more.
Lisa Frank
Andy Wright at the SF Weekly recently posted about a new look for Lisa Frank art. If you’re a woman in your 30s, like me, you probably remember this art vividly. As Wright describes it, it “…was a branded line of school supplies consisting of Trapper Keepers and folders that looked like they were designed by a six-year-old girl on acid.”
When I was a kid, Lisa Frank didn’t include any people. But today it appears that they’ve added, well this:
Wright: “I have to wonder if little girls actually are more interested in bizarrely proportioned nymphets dressed like sexy hippies than a righteous day-glo tiger cub.”
Trolls, now Trollz
Remember Trolls? Growing up, I remember them looking something like this (source):
But apparently now they look like this (source):
Cabbage Patch Kids
This is a vintage Cabbage Patch Kid from 1983 (source):
This is the front page of the website today:
They still make “Classic” Cabbage Patch Kids, but now they also make “Pop ‘N Style”:
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.
Cross-posted at Jezebel.
With the exception of the t-shirt (which only masquerades as gender neutral), in the U.S. clothes are designed for women or men, but never both. Department stores and retail stores (unless they sell only men’s or women’s clothing) have separate men’s and women’s sections in the store. There is no option to buy clothes, one must buy women’s or men’s clothes.
This is even true for children’s clothes. One might make the argument that adult males and females have different bodies (an argument I might argue with), but we can’t say that pre-pubertal children do. Nevertheless, the cultural rules that require boys and men to dress differently than girls and women make such a clothing line seem impossible.
Well, Evie sent in an example of a UK clothing company trying to do the impossible. The company, Polarn O. Pyret, explains:
Our unisex collection (UNI) consists of clothing that is based on situation and function rather than on gender. As a clothing manufacturer, we want to make it our responsibility to offer an alternative to clothing that is based on gender. There is really no reason to design different models and fits for small boys and girls since there is no great difference in the way their bodies are shaped. We have taken an overall approach to unisex clothing, and consider not only color but also pattern and fit.
Evie’s attention was drawn by this ad in a store window:
Their website, you’ll notice, doesn’t have the regular “girls” and “boys” section seen ubiquitously:
This company is nice evidence that the-way-it-is isn’t the-way-it-has-to-be.
UPDATE: Mary and Cheryl pointed out that, if you click on “babies” or either of the “kids” tabs, you get the option of “boys,” “girls,” or “uni” (unisex) lines. So the company isn’t making a principled stand here. They’re still willing to take the money of parents who want to dress their kids in gendered clothes, but they are offering an alternative for those parents who don’t. It’s pretty telling that even this strategy — offering a unisex line alongside girls and boys lines — is so rare.
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.
Jamie Keiles is a new high school graduate from Pennsylvania who embarked on a fantastic project: trying to live according to the advice of Seventeen magazine… and blogging about it.
Her insights are many and she’s funny and accessible. The whole blog is worth reading. And you can check out her new project at Teenagerie.
In this post, however, I wanted to highlight her analysis of the ad content of the June/July 2010 issue. She writes:
Magazines profit from ad sales more than they do from newsstand sales or subscriptions. From a business standpoint, the essential purpose of magazines (or television, or radio) is to round up a group of similarly demographic’d consumers that advertisers can easily target. I figured that the advertising content might have something to say about what the average Seventeen reader is imagined to be like. In the 171 page issue, there were 91 ad spaces. Here is how the content broke down:
So… mostly, as Jamie puts it, “stuff that makes you look better.” Jamie then broke it down by advertisements for products and ones for experiences:
She ponders:
I’m not heading toward any sort of conclusive argument with these graphs. Just thought it was an interesting exercise to explore how low the bar is set for Seventeen readers when it comes to what advertisers think will interest them. Products advertised definitely skew more toward tangible than experiential, and more toward short-term use than long-term investment. It would be interesting to do a similar data sample with the Economist or the New York Times. Wonder if this way of thinking is something that applies to all demographics, or mostly just teens.
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.
Chris Marshal and Captain Crab sent along this gem from The Second City Network:
Borrowed from Evolving Thoughts, via Pharyngula.
More on Disney: media consolidation and Tinkerbell, the real Johnny Appleseed, fallen princesses, modernizing the fairy tale, pickaninny slaves in Fantasia? yes, racist Disney characters, infantilizing adult women, gendered Disney t-shirts for kids, Deconstructing Disney princesses, are the new Disney princesses feminist?, race and gender in Princess and the Frog, socializing girls into marriage, and…
…did you know that the very first political tv commercial was made by Disney? I like Ike!
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 two-minute clip from Toddlers and Tiara’s (a reality show about child beauty pageants), sent in by Dmitriy T.M., is a great example of how mothers teach their daughters that beauty hurts… and that pain is a price they should be willing to pay:
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.
Last week I posted photos of the Justin Bieber/Kim Kardashian photoshoot for Elle. I compared it to my earlier post on the sexualization of Jaden Smith. In both I argued that we accept the sexualization of boys at younger ages than girls, seeing it as adorable and proof that they are sufficiently heterosexual and masculine rather than that they are in danger of sexual exploitation.
Yesterday Rob W. sent in a photo that I think illustrates this point well:
Who is the adult woman wearing this shirt? That’s Karissa Shannon, who is dating Hugh Hefner.
Imagine, if you can, if this were an adult man associated in some way with a famous producer of pornography widely known for dating groups of much younger women, and that adult man’s shirt had this same message but about two teen/pre-teen girls (or, for that matter, imagine a famous gay man wearing this exact shirt). And then imagine the concern and horror that would ensue, the apologies through the man’s agent, and so on.
A short google search did turn up a post (re-posted in several other places) calling the shirt inappropriate, but given that Shannon is referred to as “sloppy seconds” in it, I’m not sure how to take it (since “sloppy seconds” reaffirms a sexual double-standard itself). A lot of other sites, on the other hand, found it adorable and/or funny, and asked readers to weigh in on Team Justin vs. Team Jaden.
