media

Jamie Keiles, of  the Seventeen Magazine Project and Teenagerie, wondered how racially representative Seventeen was compared to the U.S. population.  So she offered some data based on the May 2010 issue.  Her methods:

There are 332 faces in this month’s issue of Seventeen. I counted a face as a head with at least one visible eye. That is, backs of heads and disembodied mouths or eyes were not included in my data. I researched the races of the models and celebrities that I could identify. Those whose race I could not determine with reasonable certainty I’ve excluded from my data, making for 319 surveyed faces.

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 BlogHer.

Michaela M. alerted us to the news that Essence, the iconic fashion and lifestyle magazine for Black women, has hired an Australian-born, White woman, Elliana Placas, as its new Fashion Director.  Disappointed, former Essence fashion editor, Michaela Angela Davis, wrote:

If there were balance in the industry; if we didn’t have a history of being ignored and disrespected; if more mainstream fashion media included people of color before the ONE magazine dedicated to black women ‘diversified’, it would feel different.

In this 3-minute clip, Davis explains her position to Anderson Cooper:

The controversy over her hire is an example of a more widespread question about representation. Most agree that the presence of Black politicians, actors, models, teachers, professors, authors, and athletes (to name a few) is a good thing for Black people. It’s good, presumably, for two reasons. First, their presence in these roles normalizes Black achievement, beauty, intelligence, etc. The election of Barack Obama, for example, shows us that being Black and being the President of the United States are not mutually exclusive. The success of Tyra Banks and Alek Wek, similarly, upsets the notion that Black women aren’t beautiful.  It is good for all of us to be exposed to evidence that upsets negative stereotypes about Black people, stereotypes that all of us, no matter our color, unconsciously internalize to some degree (test your unconscious preferences here).

But there is a second reason why we often believe that representation is good. It is often presumed that people advocate for their own. Having a Black woman as Fashion Director, it is hoped, will mean that the content of the magazine will be empowering to Black women. That is, that the Director will be sensitive to the historic and ongoing racist idealization of white femininity that makes Black women’s bodies, hair, facial features, and skin color seem to need fixing.  Even if her racial politics are sound (and this is always a serious worry), she certainly does not have the experiences that Black woman in the U.S. often share nor, necessarily, the deep connection to the Black population that will make this a driving concern.

Essence‘s current Fashion and Beauty page with it’s August 2010 cover, featuring Janet Jackson, in the upper left corner:

The hiring of Placas is disappointing in the sense that it is a lost opportunity to put a Black woman in a position of power.  If, however, Placas is going to have this job, people concerned about the empowerment of Black women need to turn to evaluating her product.  The worry caused by her appointment is an opportunity to insist that Essence do right by Black women.  That is, Essence should be a refuge from racism.  One that, hopefully, does not subject Black women to the same sexism as White women in the name of equality.  Light skin does not preclude Placas from being able to do this, just as dark skin does not protect a person from internalizing and perpetuating colorism.

Ultimately, while having a darker-skinned, Black-identified person in the role of Fashion Director would be good, the production of a magazine that empowers Black women is also very important and this is something that Placas may be able to do.  It is up to us to insist that she does.

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 is not a major social issue, and I am not going to make it one. Rather, I think the way this story is being presented in the media effectively illustrates how race matters and is constructed in particular social contexts. Among track and field (“athletics”) aficionados, the 100 meters is frequently considered the premier event. At the elite level, the 100 meters is a power sprint, measuring fast twitch, explosive, kinetic energy manifested through meticulously honed technique.

For males, breaking the 10-second mark is still a colossal accomplishment. One might not think so since track and field doesn’t get much media attention in general (at least not in the United States), and when it does, we’re now more accustomed to watching Usain Bolt blast away his competitors, seemingly cruising to numerous sub-10-second performances (his world record currently stands at 9.58). A few weeks ago sprinter Christophe Lemaitre won France’s national competition with a time of 9.98 second, squeaking below that 10-second mark.  A typical headline of Lemaitre’s accomplishment (from Reuters.com, July 9, 2010):

Lemaitre first white man to run 100m in under 10 seconds

And from the article:

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s Christophe Lemaitre became the first white man to run the 100 meters in under 10 seconds when he clocked 9.98 on Friday, the French athletics federation said.

Lemaitre, 20, set his time during the French championships in Valence, southern France.

“He is the first white man to run the 100 meters in less than 10 seconds,” Jean-Philippe Manzelle, French athletics Federation press officer, told Reuters.

There have been other white sprinters who have excelled at the world level in recent years. Lolo Jones comes to mind in the 100m hurdles; Jeremy Wariner dominated the open 400m in recent years. And if we’re talking sprinters of “outlier” ethnicities in general, Liu Xiang of China recently held the world record in the 110m hurdles. But the early discourse around Lemaitre could be a bit more pointed in the way he is being constructed through the media as a great white hope.

When should race matter in sport, and when it does, how should it be discussed? In this case, at the very least, Lemaitre’s race is framed such that his being “white” is of greater importance than his win. As the track and field season moves on and should Lemaitre continue to run sub-10-second times, I expect to see increased media coverage about his whiteness. He is not going to beat Usain Bolt or America’s top sprinters at international competitions. But on the European circuit, I expect he will make waves. Mainstream media discussion of his success or failure should be interesting to follow.

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David Mayeda is adjunct faculty at Hawaii Pacific University in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, where he will also come on board as Assistant Professor this coming fall semester.  His recent book publications include Celluloid Dreams: How Film Shapes America and Fighting for Acceptance: Mixed Martial Artists and Violence in American Society.  He also blogs at The Grumpy Sociologist.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

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.

Christina W. alerted us to the availability of the first episode of John Berger’s 1972 BBC documentary, Ways of Seeing.  Berger was is a artist, author, and art critic.  In the first episode of the documentary (in four parts below) he asks how the ease of reproduction made possible by the camera (both still and moving) has changed the meaning of art.  The episode is a bit slow (for my taste), but has some interesting ideas.

First he argues that the ability to reproduce works of art in books, on posters, postcards, and television screens means that art is experienced in a decontextualized way (or in the context of, say, your living room). No longer something we pilgrimage to, to consume in a very specific context, they come to us.  This, he argues, has multiplied a work of art’s possible meanings.

As an aside, he makes an interesting argument that the obsession with authenticity — “usually linked with cash value,” he says, “but also invoked in the name of culture and civilization” — is actually “a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible.”

He then talks about how our experience of art is mediated by media (whether it be an art book or a discussion of art in a television program), so that our reaction to it is inevitably shaped by its re-interpretation.  The art critic, for example, tells us what to think about a piece of art. (No doubt, his call for skepticism certainly can be applied to Sociological Images.)

But reproduction and the multiplication of meaning also makes it easier to make connections and have personalized reactions.

(Btw, there is a pretty awesome moment at 4:38 of the third installment.)

Start watching Episode Two here.

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.

Deepa D. sent in an interesting post from Racebending about the race/ethnicity and gender of stars who get top billing in Paramount movies. Three volunteers at Racebending analyzed relevant data on movies produced or distributed by Paramount Pictures since 2000, as well as those currently in development. They focused on top billing — that is, which stars are most frequently highlighted in promotional materials, whose names appear highest in the credits, and so on. This both reflects power and status in Hollywood (the more prestige you have, the higher you’re likely to be credited compared to lower-status stars with similar screen time) and contributes to it (higher billing leads to more exposure and attention. Racebending explains:

Various types of Credit include Main Title Credit (before the movie starts), End Title Credit (after the movie is over), Paid Advertising Credit (mention during commercials and publicity), Above-the-Title Credit (name shows up on top of the movie name in promos and on screen), and Billing Block Credit (the block of text on posters and trailers.)

Their methodology:

For our review, we simply looked at which actor is listed first on imdb.com. Even if several actors have received top billing or above the title billing, someone is always listed first…

Our review of actors in top billing was necessarily subjective, but the cultural ethnicity and gender of most of Paramount’s top-billed actors like John Travolta, Angelina Jolie, and Samuel L. Jackson are well established in the public sphere. For animated characters like Shrek the Ogre, Spongebob Squarepants, and Eliza Thornberry we looked to the gender and ethnicity of the voice actor. We simply tallied the first actor billed, (for example: Malin Ackerman in Watchmen, Chris Pine in Star Trek, Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears, Jamie Foxx in The Soloist, Noah Ringer in The Last Airbender.)

The analysis found that the vast majority of top-billed stars in Paramount films from 2000 to 2009 are male, while movie audiences are about 45% male:

An even higher proportion — 86% — of top-billed stars are White (the green bars show each groups percent of the overall U.S. population):

The category White there specifically includes White non-Hispanics. No Latinos had top billing in Paramount movies during this time period. Also,

Out of 133 movies either produced or distributed, 17 had a black lead actor and only one had an Asian actor–Parry Shen in the film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002). However, Paramount did not produce Better Luck Tomorrow, the company distributed the film to theaters after the film made the independent film circuit.

When the data are broken down by race/ethnicity and gender, we see that the vast majority of top-billed stars who are non-White are men. Non-White women are almost entirely shut out:

The chart on the right represents films currently under development. While Whites predominate in the starring roles in these projects, notice that White women make up only 6% of top-billed stars, and non-White men make up about twice that proportion.

This is, of course, just one studio. If you have links to similar data on other studios, or on movies more generally, send them in!

Related posts: the Bechdel test, the real stars of Glee, underrepresenting women in Hollywood, the Smurfette principle, whitening Heroes, White actors in yellowface, casting cheat sheet, Hollywood’s discomfort with Asian lead characters, race in Transformers II, gender in Pixar films, racist Disney characters, and the gender hierarchy in Bee Movie.

[Note: A couple of readers have sent in info that calls into question the graphic below — not the relative sizes and such, but the specific numbers cited for the size of various spills (making them look larger than other reports). This may be a reflection of how the organization defines “spilled” oil (they say “lost to the environment”), and I provide their definition below. Thanks to T for providing a list of generally accepted estimates of major spills. Given that the organization providing the data is an association of oil tanker owners, it seems unlikely that they would be intentionally exaggerating the sizes of spills for political purposes or something. So while the graphic’s illustration of the relative size of these spills is still accurate in a general sense, unless I can track down a clear explanation for the cited numbers, I wouldn’t rely on them. Sorry for the confusion, and I’ll continue updating if I can figure out what’s going on.]

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Allie B. sent in a graphic comparing the BP leak to major tanker oil spills (and I forgot to add the numbers reported are in tonnes, which is about 2,240 pounds each):

The info is based on data from The International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation Limited, an industry group that provides a lot of data on spills from oil tankers (so that doesn’t include leaks or spills from pipelines, wells, and so on). From the website:

It should be noted that the figures for the amount of oil spilt in an incident include all oil lost to the environment, including that which burnt or remained in a sunken vessel. There is considerable annual variation in both the incidence of oil spills and the amounts of oil lost. Consequently, the figures in the following tables, and any averages derived from them should be viewed with caution.

UPDATE: Commenter T points out that some of the numbers here (especially the Gulf War spill) don’t match up with more widely-reported data and seem to exaggerate the size of some of the spills. The relative sizes still hold up in general, but be cautious with the actual reported sizes of the spills. It may be that their way of defining spills (all oil “lost to the environment”) includes significantly more oil than what is traditionally counted as being part of a spill. I’m trying to track down exactly what’s going on here.

Given how much media coverage BP leak is getting, it’s a bit shocking to see it in comparison to the tanker spills represented here. That isn’t to say that somehow by comparison the BP leak isn’t that bad; rather, it made me aware of how little I usually hear about the environmental impacts of the global petroleum industry as long as they don’t happen along the U.S. coastline.

For instance, a recent NYT article discusses the impacts of oil leaks and spills in Nigeria:

The Niger Delta…has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless…leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months…

I think the illustration brings into perspective how our perceptions of environmental disasters are shaped (not surprisingly, I know) by the amount of media coverage it gets and whether it occurs in a place we’re familiar with. Some pollution gets national and international media attention (at least for a while), and some is largely ignored outside the local area directly affected. The BP leak is by no means the largest oil-related ecological disaster in history — not even close yet, and hopefully it won’t get there — but media coverage and clean-up efforts aren’t distributed equally. And, again, I’m not saying that somehow this means we shouldn’t be too concerned about the Gulf leak. But it does make clear that we’re not equally concerned about, say, all people whose livelihoods are devastated by petroleum leaks/spills in waterways.

And just out of curiosity about the link between U.S. oil consumption and Nigerian oil production, I went to the webpage of the U.S. Energy Information Administration to see how much oil the U.S. imports from Nigeria. It’s currently our 4th-largest source of crude imports, and our daily Nigerian imports are up quite a bit over a year ago (about 1.1 million barrels in April ’10 compared to 673,000 a day in April ’09):

And I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I had no idea Canada is currently our biggest source of imported crude oil (and total petroleum imports as well).

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.