NEW (Dec. ’09)! Ted K. sent in this contemporaneous commercial for Rice Krinkles:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs-P_u7taMI[/youtube]
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.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or1oEWbN2Lw[/youtube]
Heather from HeatherShow, who uploaded this gem, says:
This infamously botched Public Service Announcement from 1969 confused an entire generation of children into thinking that they too can be attractive, successful, and happy, if only they could get their hands on VD… whatever it is… Sign me up! I want some too!
This is Jewel’s new video for her song “Stronger Woman.” I can’t figure out if Jewel thinks that all women are essentially the same (in the sense that we need to throw off patriarchy) or that contemporary American women are superior (and all women, then and now, should aspire to be like us… oh yeah, and by “us” I mean young, gorgeous, thin, white, blonde women who “love” themselves). In either case, I don’t like it:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaXr2vGDQwk[/youtube]
Click here if the video doesn’t load.
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 ad “liberates” women from the kitchen through technology and capitalism… but not, alas, through true partnerships with men. Women should spend less time cooking, but it’s still HER job.
Oh, also, the reason women haven’t achieved greatness in the United States is because she’s too busy to be bothered. It has absolutely nothing to do with sexism and institutional constraints.
Thanks to Julie C!
This ad, from the 1970s (I think), has the exact same message: “For women with more exciting things to do than scrub floors: ‘One-step floor care.'” Congratulations women, now you can scrub floors faster… but don’t think you can get out of scrubbing floors.
Found at Vintage Ads.
And this one, from the 1950s (I think) is extra creepy (found here). Like the other ads, it replaces “women’s work” with a technological solution. And that solution a gift from her husband. The text:
The one gift that quietly ends garbage ‘trudgery’ — frees the little woman from disagreeable trips to the garbage can… She’ll thank you every time she uses it…
This first graph shows the relative increase in the incomes (inflation adjusted) of the top 1% of income earning households, the middle 60% and the lowest 20% (percentages, presumably, approximate) since 1979.
This second graph shows a more detailed picture of the relative increase in the incomes (inflation adjusted) of households in the 95th , 80th, 60th, 40th, and 20th percentile since 1949. Note how household incomes were rising at about the same rate prior to 1970, at which point those households in the 95th percentile started out growing other percentiles, those in the 20th stayed stagnant, and those in between were somewhere in between.
I borrowed these graphs from Lane Kenworthy, who also offers a truly excellent and detailed explanation of the measures.
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The text says “Awakens like a horsewhip on the backflesh. A slap to the cerebellum since 1780.”
When I think of horsewhips and 1780…well, I don’t necessarily think of horses being whipped.
Am I nuts here?
The centaur scene in Disney’s highly acclaimed cartoon Fantasia (1940) clearly communicates gendered expectations for men and women, but there are also racial politics. First, note that, in the film as released, all of the centaurs end up in color-matched heterosexual pairs. Second, most people do not know that the original centaur scene included a pickaninny slave to the centaur females and exotic, brown-skinned zebra-girl servants.
Here’s a link to the whole thing (embedding disabled, but it works as of Feb. ’11).
A clear still in black and white:
Fuzzy color stills from the youtube clip:
Don’t miss our post showing bugs bunny in blackface, too.
Chris Uggen has a nice discussion of this graph (see here) showing the (it turns out more or less linear) change in drug use between 2001 and 2007. In particular, he offers a nice idea for how to use it to talk about the difference between cohort, age, and period effects.
Graph originally found here.
