Tom Megginson blogged about a billboard advertising Gaylea spreadable butter that made fun of brutality… affixed to the back of a women’s shelter in Ottawa:
See also our post featuring dueling advertising and public service announcements.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Nathan Yau, at Flowing Data, calls BP out on a piece of data representation trickery. In a video on the BP website explaining the progress they were making cleaning up the oil, Kent Wells offered the following graph:
The bars represent oil collected over time. But, as Yau points out, the data offered by Wells is cumulative. It’s not the case that each consecutive day (May 16 to May 23) they are collecting more oil. Instead, each collective day they have collected more oil overall. If they keep collecting oil, we should expect nothing less.
Instead of showing the data cumulatively, they could have presented how much oil they collected each individual day. But the data, in that case, doesn’t look as good. Yau put this together:
This graph suggests that BP’s collection of oil is diminishing and makes viewers want to know why. The graph they offered, however, hides their decreasing efficacy.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
This ad for laser hair removal in a New York newspaper, sent by Jac B., is particularly egregious in its effort to make women insecure:
Meanwhile, in a divulged secret at PostSecret this Sunday, a woman who conforms by bleaching her upper lip takes some glee in the possibility that she makes people face their own discomfort by refusing to full-on wax it:
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.
Why does the iconic New York City paper cup look so… Greek?
The designer of the cup, Leslie Buck, arrived in the U.S. after fleeing the Nazis during World War II. He joined a new company called “Sherri Cup” in the ’60s. He designed the cup, with no art training, with a Grecian theme and in the colors of the Greek flag, to appeal to… Greeks. It turns out that a large portion of the city’s diners at that time were owned by Greeks. It was an instant hit.
So, we have immigration, ethnic occupational segregation, and Buck’s ingenuity to thank for decades of cozy, New Yorky feelings inspired by that little cup.
Buck died this April. You can read his obituary, and the whole story of the cup, at the New York Times.
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.
Crossposted at Jezebel.
Meg R. noticed something funny at Woman Within, a website that sells clothing sizes 12w to 44w. All of the models were very thin, thus not representative of the intended customer base at all. But, even odder, they were all swimming in clothes that (by today’s standards) were far too large for them. So the website featured thin models selling plus-size clothes (not, in itself, that surprising), but didn’t scale down the clothes to fit them! We might imagine that using thin women would make customers, even if they aren’t thin, like the clothes (because we all internalize thin preference), but modeling poorly fitting clothes, as Meg said, wasn’t doing the product any favors! We’re both baffled by the logic.
Some examples:
NEW! (July ’10): Liz R. sent in another example. This ad is for clothing sized 16-24 but with a very thin model:
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.
Cosmopolitan Magazine has been around since 1886 so it has seen quite a great deal of change over that time. The evolution of The Cosmopolitan Magazine into what is known today as Cosmo shows just how dramatic that change has been. In its early days, The Cosmopolitan was billed as a woman’s fashion magazine that included articles on the home, family, and cooking, but also included articles like “Some Examples of Recent Art” and “The Progress of Science.”
Later it became more focused as a showcase for new fiction and published works by authors like Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Kurt Vonnegut, Willa Cather, and H. G. Wells. Typically, each issue would have five to eight short-stories, a full novelette, a full short novel, and some article on fashion and health. During this time, the cover art was almost exclusively illustrated — even when the covers featured celebrities.
With the introduction of television, there was a drastic decline in the demand for fiction-based magazines. In response to the waning sales there was a radical shift in the direction of Cosmopolitan. In the mid sixties, Helen Gurley Brown stepped in as editor in chief. She brought with her the message of sexual freedom for single women, and started replacing the cover illustrations with photos of young models in minimal clothing. Sales increased as a result.
Since then the magazine has become more sexually centered. It still features many articles on having pleasurable sex and maintain fulfilling relationships. There is a much greater emphasis on how women can make themselves more desirable to men. One look at the website reveals the tone of the magazine. These are the first three articles listed:
“4 Traits Men Find Irresistible”
“What Men Secretly Think of your Hair and Makeup”
“What You Should Do if He Cheats”
The late Kurt Vonnegut (who had multiple short stories featured in Cosmopolitan in the fifties) had this to say about the magazine: “One monthly that bought several of my stories, Cosmopolitan, now survives as a harrowingly explicit sex manual.” Indeed, browsing through the cover art of the past few years gives one the impression that there are an infinite number of sex positions. It is hard to feel sexually liberated while reading a magazine that talks about the vagina (or Hoo-Ha) like it’s something you can buy at a pet store. They have also been criticized for perpetuating a nearly impossible standard of beauty and for retouching models to make them appear thinner. Today Cosmopolitan retains almost no reminants of its origins. It is fascinating to see how it has shifted with the culture and how our culture has changed because of it.
Sources: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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Lauren McGuire is a SocImages intern and an assistant to a disability activist. She recently launched her own blog, The Fatal Foxtrot, that is focused on the awkward passage into adulthood.
If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.
rachel56 sent in a fascinating story. Charley’s Grilled Subs is a super-successful franchise with locations in 16 countries. The restaurant specializes in Philly-style cheese steaks. If you go to their website and watch the video telling Charley’s story (here), this guy plays Charley:
But, in fact, that’s not Charley. This is:
So here we have a Korean-American owner of a business that is Philadelphia themed. I’m going to assume, and feel free to call me out on this, that he decided to portray “Charley” as white because he (or his marketers) imagined that Americans (whoever they are) think like this: Philly = America = white. The idea that Charley is Korean might cause cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the state of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time, such as Charley = Philly = America and Charley = Korean, when American does not = Korean.
When I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, I used to frequent a fast food noodle place called “Chin’s Asia Fresh.” I always wondered if there was really a Chin or if it was a made-up character. According to the website there is a Leeann Chin who, growing up in Canton, China, “learned cooking traditions from her mother and an eye for the best ingredients from her father.” Of course, as is clear from Charley’s story, the “history” sections of restaurants can be fiction so… I guess I still wonder. Of course, it would be advantageous for the Chin’s chain to market itself as authentically Asian, just as it is apparently advantageous for the Charley’s chain to market itself as “authentically” “American” (i.e., white).
All of this is a great example of how image is constrained and enabled by racial and ethnic stereotypes.
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.
Tom C. sent us an ad for Google that does an excellent job of resisting the urge to make separate commercials aimed at men and women. In the ad below, a searcher seeks information on masculine-typed and feminine-typed activities, as well as more neutral ones. It leaves open the sex of the searcher. It’s a nice counterpart to the profoundly gendered advertising we see almost everywhere else… and evidence that it doesn’t have to be that way.
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For another example of non-gendered advertising, see this vintage Uniroyal tires ad.
In comparison, Hulu sometimes asks whether you want to see ads made “for her” or “for him,” Facebook wants to know what sex you are so as to better sell to you, and Best Buy will just assume you’re a dude,
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.
