gender

Muriel M.M. brought my attention to the catalog for Galls, a company that makes equipment and uniforms for public safety officers (military, police, firefighting, etc.). Muriel, an EMT, says,

The thing about their products is they don’t change much. Over the ten years I’ve received the catalog I can pretty much tell you what’s going to be in it: guns, batons, handcuffs, clothing such as boots, coats, uniforms, etc. Medical equipment and fire equipment are sold such as sirens, lights, latex gloves, breathing equipment. The list goes on and on.

But the newest version of the catalog Muriel received has something new: handcuffs now come in colors, not just silver. The options are blue, brown, gray, orange, yellow, and pink (light and bright!):

There are a couple of interesting things here. For one, it’s an attempt to provide a little (very limited) individualization to people who have to wear standard uniforms. Of course, it’s a superficial type of customization, similar to getting a cell phone of a particular color, but it provides at least some sense that the product reflects the personality or tastes of the user…something companies figured out long ago could boost sales (how many colors do cell phones come in these days?). Given that, I wonder how many police departments would allow officers to use brightly-colored handcuffs. Officers are allowed to buy customized items, but they can’t just go buy a different color of uniform; it may be that little personalized “touches” like this are allowed, though.

It’s also interesting to think about what the reaction might be to an officer who showed up at work with pink handcuffs. I wonder how many female officers would want to bring attention to their gender by using a product marked by the stereotypical feminine color. It also made me think of this post about cops in Thailand being punished by being forced to wear pink Hello Kitty armbands. I’m assuming a person would buy pink handcuffs to express their taste, but after looking at the old post, it made me wonder if anyone would ever put pink cuffs on male suspects just to try to annoy them. I bet one of my relatives who is a police officer would totally do that, except that it would require him to carry pink cuffs around all the time, which he would never, under any circumstances, do. He flipped out because his son liked a pink ball once.

NEW! Ben O. sent us a link to a similar product, Petals Workwear for Women.  The company makes pink products for female construction workers.

Hard hat:

Tool belt:

Protective ear wear:

Protective eye wear:

NEW (Aug. ’10)! Garland Walton sent along these pink boxing accessories: gloves, tape, and a mouth guard.  All in pink!

See also our post with a cartoon riffing on how people seem to think that pinkification is the answer to gender inequality.

Ii think this ad for Kotex is using the X-TREME meme to sell pads (found here):

The copy reads:

It’s got a million micro cells that say your heavy days are goin’ down.

Three words… bring it on.  Always Infinity can take it.  It’s the world’s first pad of its kind.  Packed with an uber-absorbent material called Infinicel that has the power to hold 10x its weight.  Which means you just kicked the heavy out of heavy days.

Um, “goin’ down,” “bring it on,” “uber-absorbent,” “kicked the heavy”?  They even have an “x” in there.  Not to mention the whole floating in a circle of light thing.

The ever-fantastic Sarah Haskins on car ads aimed at women:

For other examples of marketing cars to women, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Vintage Ads posted these three ads–one for an electric refrigerator and two for Gold Dust Cleaner–that compare the product to a Black servant. 

The copy in the refrigerator ad reads: “And So Electricity Is Made The Willing Servant.”  The accompanying image includes three white women looking leisurely and a Black servant. 

Similarly, these two Gold Dust ads personify the product as Black twin babies. The motto is: “Let the GOLD DUST TWINS do your work.”
 

I think these are fascinating in that they draw our attention to whose work technology is designed to replace. Earlier on this blog we’ve talked about how ads have offered to replace women’s work with the market and with technology.  In these cases, the market and technology were needed to ease women’s workload (they certainly couldn’t expect their husbands to do it).  In this case, Black servants serve to take women one step further from “women’s work.”  Instead of replacing women themselves, the product replace the servants who replaced women, making the comparison of the product to Black servants completely sensical at the time.

Breck C. sent us this link to a collection of photographs of Harajuku Girls.  Harajuku is a style for teenagers in a region of Japan (here is the wikipedia entry).  I can’t think of a way to describe them that does them justice, so here are some pictures (found here, here, here and here):

In 2004, Gwen Stefani began touring with four women posing as Japanese Harajuku girls.  Stefani’s Harajuku Girls serve as her entourage and back-up dancers. Here she is with four (Japanese?) women that she hires to be her Harajuku Girls (found here and here):

In the comments, Inky points out that Stefani says this about them in her song, Rich Girl:

I’d get me four Harajuku girls to
Inspire me and they’d come to my rescue
I’d dress them wicked, I’d give them names
Love, Angel, Music, Baby
Hurry up and come and save me

Stefani also has a Harajuku Lovers clothing line and a series of perfumes, one for her, and one for each Harajuku Girl:

I think that Stefani’s use of Asian women as props (they may or may not be Japanese) fetishizes Asian women and reinforces white privilege.  The Harajuku Girls serve as contrast to Stefani’s performance of ideal white femininity.  It makes me think of both this poster on colonial-era travel and this fashion spread.

Yet, Stefani’s been at this for four years and I can’t remember hearing any objections to her Harajuku Girls, even in feminist and anti-racist alternative media.  Further, if her fashion line, perfume, and continued employment of the Harajuku Girls are any indication, people seem to think the whole thing is awesome.  In the meantime, I bet she’s making bank on her clothing line and perfume.  Where’s that money going?

Do you think my reading is fair?

And, if so, why do you think there’s been so little outcry?

For good measure, here she is performing with her “Girls”:

In our comments, SG asks that we include the following clarification:

This article is really misrepresenting a whole fashion scene and I would like to ask that you correct it- It is just perpetuating the idiocy and ignorance surrounding these styles. “Harajuku is a style for teenagers in a region of Japan”. “Harajuku style” Is a term coined by western media because they are too ignorant to actually research the names of these actual styles. Harajuku is not a style. It is a location. The females you have pictured are in Decora (and two in Visual Kei). The only “harajuku style” that exists is the fictional one made up by Gwen Stefani and the western media.

Thanks SG.

See also our post featuring other examples of ads and artists using Asians as props.

Elizabeth recently posted about an ad for Motrin that suggested that you should take pain medicine so as to keep walking in pain-inducing high heels.  The message was, essentially, “Suffer for fashion, ladies!  Motrin will help!”  I wanted to discuss, also, this second ad in their series (found here) and an anonymous commenter egged me on:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO6SlTUBA38[/youtube]

They start off saying that how mothers make decisions about how to carry their infants according to what is in style (“Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”).  They then point out that what is currently in fashion is painful for mothers.  But, of course, moms are going to do it anyway, because the sacrifice is for the child (“It’s a good kind of pain, it’s for my kid”).  But also about fashion!  And about how in-fashion it is to be a mom!  (“Plus it totally makes me look like an official mom”).

The ad trivializes motherhood (threatening to reduce it to fashion), equating it, in a sense, to the high heels in the other ad.  At the same time, it legitimizes suffering in the service of your child, which reinforces the ideology of intensive mothering that has ramped up the must-haves and must-dos of mothering like never before in human history.

The good news is that Motrin pulled this ad campaign and has apologized after bloggers took them to task.

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.

One of the magazines for the obscenely rich that I’ve been perusing lately was Yachts International magazine.

In it was a glaring Sociological Images story. Paging through the magazine it became exceedingly clear that yachts were one prize for extreme economic success… and women were another. Below I have uploaded every ad in the magazine that included people. Across all of the ads, there are 22 women and four men. The women are, overwhemingly, posed as beautiful objects that adorn beautiful yachts.

Each of the ads is embedded after the jump (there’s a lot and they take some time to load):

more...

Markus G. alerted us to some of the coverage of Samantha Davies, one of the few women to ever compete in the Vendée Globe, an around the world non-stop sailing competition.

The coverage, in the Daily Mail, highlights her sexuality instead of her competence as a sailor.  Sexualizing women is problematic because it undermines any notion of her competence by reducing her to one purpose–fulfilling men’s lust–and erases, in doing so, her skills, work ethic, experience, and knowledge.

The headline reads: “Lone Yachtswoman Samantha Davies: ‘Sometimes I sail naked.'”

Text includes such doozies as:

When you see Samantha Davies pottering about in a teeny pink bikini on her pink sailing boat, Roxy, and spritzing her cabin with perfume, it’s difficult to imagine her facing waves the size of houses, 80-mile-an-hour winds and nights without a second’s sleep.

But that’s how life is for Sam, a 33-year-old Cambridge engineering graduate who once wanted to be a ballerina, still loves to dress in girlie clothes onshore and wears three tiny diamond ear studs and a belly ring.

Let’s get her sailing credentials out of the way – then we can move on to the important questions, such as: ‘How do you have skin that looks like a Clarins advert when you don’t sleep and your face gets ravaged by sun, salt and sea?’

‘In rough seas, sometimes it’s too dangerous to boil water, so you just eat freeze-dried food,’ she smiles. ‘But as I’m a girl, my nutritionist acknowledges that I have to eat chocolate each day!’ 

‘Don’t give me big muscles,’ Sam wails. ‘But you’ve got to pull up your mainsail, and you can’t do that without strong muscles,’ replies her trainer. ‘But my objective after the race,’ insists Sam, ‘is to have smaller, ladylike arms and shoulders!’

…she uses her sex to her advantage: ‘Whenever I don’t want to climb the mast to do a job at the top, I wear a short skirt so that I simply can’t get up there.’

Other pictures included in the news story: