Several readers sent in this charming Nikon ad (found, among other places, at What a Crazy Happenstance), where we learn that women with bigger boobs are the equivalent of a higher-quality camera:
Sigh. It’s apparently quite highly rated on diggit–it’s the Best Camera Ad Ever!
Thanks to Taylor, Connie J., Jeff G., and Emma B.!
Eric S. drew our attention to an ad campaign for Jawbone, a noise cancelling headset. Eric was disturbed by the way the women were used in the advertising. Take a look:
It is interesting that a product that must be actively used (it’s for talking) is advertised with such passive women.
Some scholars, Jean Kilbourne among them, have noted that ads often include women who appear to be dead (see here, here, here, and here). If these women do not appear to be dead, they at least appear doll-like. Their eyes are blank, staring at nothing. It seems to me that one or both of these are going on here… in either case, the strategy dehumanizes the women, making them into objects.
Also in women as racks on which to place product: men’s shoes and accessories.
We recently critiqued Facebook’s “neutral” avatar for appearing both white and male. Both Abby J. and Noah Brier pointed us to the fact that Rob Walker at Murketing has been collecting default avatars. His collection is really interesting. First, it demonstrates that the avatars don’t need to be gendered at all.
Flikr:
Hotmail:
Google:
Vimeo:
My space:
Friendfeed:
Yahoo:
Youtube:
Second, it demonstrates that the avatars don’t have to human at all:
Twitter:
Posterous:
Third, his collection also suggests that, when the avatar is human and discernibly gendered, it usually appears to be male. There’s the Facebook avatar, as well as…
EBay:
Car Domain:
Topix:
Yammer:
The avatar tends to be male, unless the company produces a default male and a default female.
Blip FM:
Goodreads:
This collection reveals that the appearance of a company’s default avatar is by no means inevitable or accidental. Companies must make choices and they are, indeed, making choices about what kind of person is the default person.
Check out his whole collection. It is growing.
Jamie R. sent in a link to a video that presents a lot of attention-grabbing statistics (which may or may not be accurate). At first it appears that the avatar could be unisex, but then at about 1:18, we see the “female” avatar:
Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.
At no other place in the video do we see the female avatar except when the “neutral” one is presented as married…indicating, from the context of the video, that it is not unisex or neutral, but male.
MORE! You may have noticed that our revamping of the site involved putting our names up. Lo and behold, these male avatars popped up next to our names.
So we went into the admin page to see if we had some other option, like maybe something non-human or a female avatar if necessary. These were our options:
First, blank is really the avatar you see in the first screenshot, it’s neutral which, in reality, is male. So there is no way to opt out of having an avatar (our tech guy, Jon, is still working on it).
Second, there is no female avatar option.
Third, though there is no female avatar, there is a Monster and a Wavatar option, whatever the hell that is. So WordPress is allowing you to represent yourself as a Wavatar, but you’re not allowed to be a chick.
Amazing.
NEW (Apr. ’10)! Keri sent a screenshot of her WordPress menu which, she noted, represents the users with two different skin colors. It’s a nice counterpoint to much of what we see above:
For more on how certain kinds of people get imagined as just people, while others get imagined as certain kinds of people, visit our posts on the Body Worlds exhibit, “flesh” colored products, Pixar films, gender and clothes, and Plan and Playmobile toys.
Objections to a BuzzFreeProm ad has led the organization to pull it and apologize. The ad reads: “Go from prom king to queen in three shots or less.”
Lisa Derrick at La Figa had the following exchange with the talent behind the ad:
I will go further. I think that being a “queen,” in the jail sense, is about being, both literally and figuratively, on the bottom. The imprisoned, gay men and, for that matter, women, are all on the bottom in this sense. (The corsage on the prison uniform is a hint that it’s not just about being gay, but about being female.) The problem with this ad, for me, is that it conflates sex and power. That the conflation can span so many different categories suggests that it resonates strongly. And that is what is disappointing to me. I would prefer to live in a world in which sex and power could be disentangled, as opposed to one that affirmed their entanglement. Let’s try to keep kids safe some other way, eh?
BuzzFreeProm has since put up an apology:
Other anti-drug and anti-drinking ads: an anti-meth campaign reminiscent of reefer madness, a vintage hanna-barbara anti-drug commercial, bizarre anti-drinking and driving messages, and threatening women with unattractiveness.
I presume, though I have never seen any evidence for this, that we don’t all get the same email forwards. For instance, I never received this forward… but Steve W. did:
Text:
Did You Know This About Leather Dresses?
Do you know that when a woman wears a leather dress, a man’s heart bests quicker, his throat gets dry, he gets weak in the knees, and he begins to think irrationally???
Ever wonder why?
It’s because she smells like a new golf bag!
Why don’t I typically receive such forwards? To suggest that it has something to do with my sex, which was my first guess, is probably too simple of an explanation. I suspect it also has something to do with my class, politics, and occupation.
What kind of forwards do you (not) get? Do you think you might be surprised at what other people receive in their inbox?
Do you selectively forward certain sentiments to some people and not others? Do certain sentiments come from some people in your social network and not others?
What does the big wide world of forwarding look like? Who forwards what to who? Or, what part of the forwarding-whole is largely invisible to you?
Something I read in another blog sent me digging into the statistics on homicide between husbands and wives or other “intimates.” I remembered from my days in the crim biz that the US was unique in that wives here killed their husbands almost as frequently as husbands killed wives. This statistic, the “spousal rate of killing” (SROK), was introduced in a now-classic 1992 article by Margo Wilson and Martin Daly. In most countries, that rate is 25-30%. In the US, Wilson and Daly pointed out, it was about 75%.
But something has happened, over the last thirty years or so (data here). And as far as I can tell from a quick search on the Internet, nobody seems to have noticed.
(Click on the graph for a larger view.)
Between 1976 and 2005, the number of women killed by their male partners decreased by about 25%, less than the decrease in all homicides nationwide. But the number of men killed by women dropped dramatically, from 1300 to 330, a 75% decrease (since the population increased in those three decades, the change in rates is probably even greater. The SROK fell from 82% to 28%.
My Internet search for explanations was cursory at best, but it turned up nothing. I have only two ideas:
1. Men Behaving Better. Men have stopped doing those things that made women want to kill them.
I offered this explanation to two women in the Justice Studies department here. They rejected it out of hand and without comment. (Maybe they didn’t like the blaming-the-victim assumption: if women kill men, it’s because of what men do. Or maybe they were using a convenience sample of anecdotal data on men’s behavior.). One of these women, Lisa Anne Zilney, offered a counter-explanation . . .
2. Women Having Options. Women’s shelters and other facilities have given women an alternative. Without these, the only way to escape an intolerable situation at home was to get rid of the cause. Providing abused and desperate women a safe place to go saves lives – and apparently not just the lives of women.
I’m not wild about either of these explanations for the steep decline in the SROK (and as I recall, Wilson and Daly weren’t wild about any of their explanations of why it was so high).
Any ideas?
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Thanks Jay! Read his other guest post: When grown men loved teddy bears.
If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.
When Rihanna was beaten by Chris Brown, many people blamed Rihanna for enraging him. Laura McDe sent in another example of victim-blaming in a case of domestic violence. This time a man killed his five children, and then himself, after discovering that his wife had left him for another man. Many headlines placed the blame on his wife (via Shakesville):
The Seattle Times:
Yahoo News:
Kansas City.com:
Google News:
Instead of focusing on the husband’s abusive and frightening behavior, his mental instability, and his horrific decision to kill five children, the headlines focus on his wife’s behavior and how it “ignited” his own. To complete the metaphor, if you are flammable, when you burst into flame, it is the match striker’s fault.
NEW! Shakesville highlighted another example of the excusing men’s violence against women:
That’s right. Poisoning your wife is an act of love. You see, they were estranged and he wanted to make her ill so that he could nurse her back to health and have-her-no-she-can’t-get-away-I’ll-make-sure-of-it. Story here.
Also in blaming the victim: mothers are responsible for their children’s addiction, renters are responsible for lead poisonous apartments, girls are responsible for internet predators, and women are responsible for preventing sexual harassment.
We’ve offered many examples of companies co-opting feminism in order to sell products. In the video below, we see that the co-optation of feminism is nothing new:
(At Vintage Videosift.)
Actually, I shouldn’t be so flippant. Inventions like the washing machine did, indeed, save women a great deal of time and effort. From what I understand, however, as women’s cleaning became more efficient, standards of cleanliness rose. So even as time-saving devices were introduced, the time women spent cleaning did not substantially change. I’d love to hear more from scholars who have a better handle on this history.
Here’s another step in the trajectory, this one from 1971, also about cleaning appliances (found here):
Text:
The American Appliance Industry has always championed women’s liberation.
There was a time when women washed clothes by hand in water carried from a well…
…shapped every day because there was no way to refigerate food…
..tried to keep house with just a broom…
…made clothes without a sewing machine!
It’s obvious. America’s appliances have freed women from the oppression of endlessly dull, backbreaking work. They’ve helped liberate the American woman to enjoy a more stimulating, more interesting life…
In or out of the home.
Women who seek successful careers in the arts, sciences, business, industry, education, or the professions are finding themselves.
It’s all part of America’s new freedom of preference. And Republican Steel Corporation, a leading supplier of steels to the appliance industry, is proud to be a part of it.
Visit your nearest appliance dealer and you’ll see hundreds of our modern steels — intricately shaped and beautifully finished in the world’s finest consumer appliances.
Like to help liberate the women in your life from some hard work and drudgery?
Buy her one of the new convenience appliances this weekend.
Or maybe a whole houseful.
Notice that women’s liberation DOES NOT involve men sharing housework responsibilities, but men replacing women’s labor with tools he purchases for her. Ultimately, even if she has a “successful career” in “the professions,” it is her responsibility to make sure that the housework is completed (and apparently still wouldn’t be able to buy herself one of these machines).
For contemporary examples, see these posts on make up (here and here), botox, cigarettes (here and here), right-hand diamond rings, cooking and cleaning products, fashion, and other miscellaneous products (here, here, and here).
