U.K. men’s magazine Asylum promotes itself, women’s objectification:
Thanks to Giorgos S. for sending along the screen shots!
Other examples in which women are products here, here, here, here, here, and here.
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Way back in June Missives from Marx sent in a link to a story at Dark Roasted Blend about tourism in the rainforest along the Amazon River near Manaus, Brazil. One stop was at a small riverside village where tourists are taken to have an “encounter of two different cultures.” Here’s a photo from the post:
Underneath the photo was the following caption:
A cruise ship arrival is a great event for the small village located on the mouth of Valeria River. The friendly villagers are always happy to welcome all visitors, eager to make contact and get news from foreign lands.
“Friendly villagers” “eager to make contact” and learn about “foreign lands”? It’s an incredibly patronizing description that sounds like it could have been in a travel brochure for the British Empire decades ago.
From the post:
Because of the small space, the visitors are literally poking into the river people’s lives. But they look happy enough to share with us their ways of life: we are being shown their schools, the local market and even the way their houses are made.
They seem to understand that visits like these sustain the little trade they are able to make by selling souvenirs and exquisite crafts. There are very few inhabitants and they are all very proud of their amazonian heritage. Although modern living is slowly making its way through, they dress up with traditional costumes.
Yes, they do understand that the tourist visits sustain their economy. They let people poke into their lives because they need the money. And they dress up in traditional “costumes” (?) because it makes tourists happy and then the tourists give them more money.
The kids, apparently, haven’t learned the etiquette for dealing with tourists. The post has several images of children with labels like “Little Warrior,” with descriptions such as:
They are not used being on display for the large audience and they all look like they would be happier playing, rather than demonstrating their skills. One particular girl attracted the crowds with her beautiful, magnetic eyes. She was demonstrating archery, but her eyes were throwing the real darts.
The poster acknowledges that the children don’t like being on display, but doesn’t think that might mean that a) you shouldn’t then treat them like tourist attractions or b) maybe the adults don’t really like being on display much either but have learned to play along better. I also wonder whether the children are demonstrating “their skills” or whether a kid holding a bow and arrows is part of the play-acting for tourists.
I once went on a river tour outside of Manaus; the one described here sounds almost identical. I felt uneasy about the idea of visiting the village but there wasn’t really a choice (they forced us off the boat at each stop) and my boyfriend at the time was excited, and so we walked around. It was an incredibly creepy experience. The people there were obviously poor, and tourists were walking around gawking at them, feeling entirely comfortable looking right into their yards and houses. I felt terribly awkward; even my boyfriend felt weird and just wanted to leave. I would not say the people looked thrilled to see us. Some did, especially those selling soda at the cantina (part of that “modern world”). But more than one person, mostly children, glared. And it was very clear that they were being nice to us and offering to be in photos with tourists in hopes of making a little money.
The whole thing felt like cultural tourism–hey, Americans/Europeans! Look at these people in their pre-modern villages and traditional “costumes”! Isn’t this a neat cultural encounter? Feel free to roam around and look at anything you want–the jolly villagers are just thrilled to death to have you here!
In another case of this, James T. sent in this video, found at 3quarksdaily:
It’s distressing to see this type of tourism prestened in such a positive light without at least discussing the ethical issues that might arise when relatively wealthy tourists encounter an impoverished group dependent on tourists’ money for some of their livelihood.
Lynn drew our attention to the American Apparel webpages for men’s and women’s clothes. She notes a distinct difference:
On the Women’s clothing pages, the girls are modelling THEMSELVES in addition to the clothes. You see a butt purposefully sticking out here, a shirt pulled up to there, a head thrown back in a coquettish manner, a back arched this way and that.
On the Men’s pages, the men are essentially just “standing there”, letting the clothes speak for themselves.
I’ve included screen shots of all of the models in the slide show, so you can judge for yourself (sorry for the funky formatting; there were more images of women than men).
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Angry Asian Man wrote about two East High Schools–in Rochester, New York and Akron, Ohio–with a peculiar mascot: the Orientals.
East High School merch (Rochester, New York):
Screen shot of the East High School website (Akron, Ohio):
Notice the Asian-y font and the stylistic dragon.
When high schools and sports teams recruit a type of person as a mascot, it objectifies and caricatures them. It also encourages opposing teams to say things like “Kill the Orientals.” This can only be okay when we aren’t really thinking about these kinds of people as real humans beings.
This reminded me: As an undergraduate, I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara. Our mascot was the Gaucho, which I remember being described as a Mexican cowboy (though South American cowboy may be more descriptive). I went by the UCSB website and found these two logos. There is a story about the first identifying it as a brand new logo; the second is for kids:
I am troubled by the Gaucho mascot for the same reasons that I don’t like the Orientals mascot, but at least authentic gauchos are not likely to enroll at UCSB the way that “Orientals” are likely students of the East High Schools.
Then again, this is the image on the front page of the UCSB athlectics website:
It does indeed read: “GLORY. HONOR. COURAGE. TORTILLAS.” This seems to invalidate any argument that the use of the Gaucho mascot is “respectful.”
Thinking about the Orientals and the Gauchos, alongside the many American Indian mascots still found in the U.S., Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish, and the soccer team in the Netherlands who call themselves the Jews, may give us some perspective on this mascot phenomenon that thinking about one at a time doesn’t. If we feel that one of these mascots is less discriminatory than another, what drives that feeling? And is it logical? Or does it stem from a trained sensibility that isn’t applied to all marginalized groups across the board? Or is it in response to different characteristics of these different groups? Or different contexts?
Maybe all five mascots are equally offensive and offensive for the same reasons. But thinking about them together may also be useful for teasing out how, exactly, they are offensive. What do you think?
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Kelebek sent in an Australian commercial for Brut deodorant. In it, a male robot transforms various objects (a motorcycle, a drink) into “better” versions, more fitting of a super macho robot. One of the improved items is a Barbie doll/woman:
The woman is, quite literally, an object, to be “modified,” and then posed with his other belongings. And as we see, being “brutally male” is associated with drinking a lot, driving powerful vehicles, having hot women, and probably engaging in the type of risky behaviors that partially explain why men in many industrialized nations live shorter lives than women.
The commercial was pulled from TV by the Advertising Standards Bureau after they determined it was offensive to women. The commercial had to be recut…so that the woman isn’t one of the “objects” in the back of his vehicle at the end. The scene where he modifies the Barbie to be a live woman, and the phrase “reject, modify object,” weren’t removed. And:
Brut brand manager Deane De Villiers defended the ad, saying the robot carried the woman with the utmost of respect “as one would carry one’s bride”.
Yes. If your bride were an object you created to your very own specifications.
And for fun, read the comments to that Sun-Herald article.
This ad from 2000 (found here) is an opportunity to differentiate between types of objectification, in its most literal sense. Instead of making a product into the shape of a woman (see here and here), the woman is made into the product.
See also this post on where there’s a similar example in which a woman’s curves are meant to reflect the curves of a kitchen counter, this one in which a woman is made into a glass of beer, and, to a slightly lesser extent, this ad in which a white and black woman are used to represent a boring and tasty beverage respectively.
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Reading Resist Racism, I found a link to an article in this Sunday’s Washington Post by a journalist by the name of Amit Paley who chronicled her exploration of “tribes” in Thailand. The article is a study in class privilege, with a global twist. It begins with the sentence: “You can see almost anything in the world if you pay enough.”
She wanted to see women of the Padaung (or Kayan), who are from Burma but now live in Thailand as refugees. The Kayan women are famous for wearing brass rings around their necks, leading to the illusion of an elongated neck created by the depression of their collarbone. Paley writes:
Ever since I glimpsed the Padaung as a child in my grandfather’s National Geographics, I had wanted to see these curious women, who suffer painful disfigurement to emerge as graceful beauties.
Her description of human beings, indirectly, as curiosities, combined with the comment that you can see “anything… if you pay enough” (my emphasis) is an excellent example of the objectification of ethnic others.
Paley’s desire to see these women is almost thwarted by the majority of tourist companies in Thailand who describe her effort as exploitative and immoral. They even suggest that the women are “prisoners held captive in the villages by businessmen” making money off of tourism. This is confirmed by Wikipedia, for what it’s worth.
This doesn’t stop Paley, who keeps asking until she finds a company that will take her to one of the remote villages in which Kayan women live.
The women she meets confirm that they wear traditional garb, continue traditional practices (such as the brass rings), and are even forced to remain in the villages, in order to attract tourists. Men, largely, appear to be exempted from earning their keep in this way.
Paley says that one powerful male village member said that the women “must wear the dress because of tradition” and “spoke excitedly about its appeal to tourists and noted that half of the village’s income of $30,000 a year comes from tourism.”
A woman in brass rings told her “We do it to put on a show for the foreigners and tourists!”
Paley finishes with this lackluster reflection:
So is it unethical to visit the long-necked women? It is clearly true that money spent to visit them supports an artificial village from which they essentially cannot leave. On the other hand, many of them appeared to prefer living in virtual confinement as long as they are paid and safe. According to what they told me, their situation beats the alternative of living in a repressive country plagued by abject poverty and hunger.
I don’t feel guilty about visiting the Padaung, but my feelings might be different if I had traveled solely as a tourist rather than as a journalist. And I certainly don’t like their lot in life: Shouldn’t everyone have the freedom to live and travel wherever they want?
Well, Paley has shown that she certainly does have that freedom. And she is apparently willing to use her “journalist” identity to justify just about any advantage that her privilege affords her.
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.
Ann S. sent us this promotional photograph of Beyonce. In it, I think, she is wearing something which is supposed to be a motorcyle that she is then riding. !?
So she is a motorcycle and she is riding herself? This is such a mess of objectification that I cannot bring it into focus:
—————————
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
