bodies: objectification

In 2010 we posted about a Boston.com slide show celebrating Oktoberfest.  We argued that, while many different types of men were included, the women pictured were overwhelmingly young and often had visible cleavage.  That is, the slideshow was an example of the sexual objectification of women.  In response, the slide show editor, Alan Taylor, sent us a note saying that, while he didn’t disagree and was sympathetic to our concern, he was limited by what photographs were available as well as their quality.

This year’s photos, I noted pleasantly, had exactly zero gratuitous cleavage shots.  I thought I’d highlight it as an example of how not to sexually objectify women in an Oktoberfest slide show.

In other words, look! It’s possible to take pictures of young women in dirndls without showing tons of cleavage!

MSNBC does a pretty good job too.  See also, Oktoberfest and Tradition.

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.

A new submission from Rucha S. inspires me to bring back our 4-year-old boob products post.  Hers is added last, so enjoy the scroll!

Sent in by Jessica F. and found at Trend de la Creme. Boob hot water bottles:

Boob ice cubes:

A boob/rocket-shaped “stress toy”:

The boob glasses don’t even make sense:

Taylor S. sent us this picture of “boob stress relievers” sold at a flea market:

Pitseleh S. found these boob clogs at boinkology.  You can also get these clogs with piercings or tattoos.

In comments to another post, Tim pointed us to this ad:

Many, many more after the jump.

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Sociological Images owes a great debt to Jean Kilbourne, a pioneer in the feminist critique of advertising.  She’s most famous, probably, for her video series, Killing Us Softly.

In those videos, she offers a typology of ways that women are subordinated in media content.  One of those is silencing.  Sometimes this means actually covering a woman’s mouth (forcibly, but also playfully), other times copy simply says that she need not (or shouldn’t) speak.  Below are a series of images we’ve collected that illustrate this.  Some of them are dated, but they give you an idea of what the mechanism of silencing looks like.

Canada’s Next Top Model (Cycle 3), sent along by Julie C., included a photoshoot in which the models’ mouths were covered with duct tape.

Erin S. sent in a link to a set of fashion photos in New York Magazine that show faceless women.

Reanimated Horse sent us an American Apparel ad in which the woman’s body is highlighted but her face is obscured:

The next two ads are examples of one’s that suggest that women need not speak, that products can speak for them.

“Eye contact is speaking without words”:

“Make a statement without saying a word”:

Finally, Sarah B. sent along a form of resistance to these kinds of images.  Colin von Heuring, who just started a brand new blog on media subversion, saw an ad with the copy  “You don’t need words to make a statement.”  He decided to “ma[k]e it explicit” (original on the left, modified on the right):

For more on Jean Kilbourne and the subordination of women in advertising, here’s the trailer to Killing Us Softly 4:

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.

First the marketing team for an energy drink out of Poland, called “Black,” hired a Black person, Mike Tyson, to personify its product.  Then, they surround him with White, female models and have the convicted rapist call himself a “beast” that can’t control himself.  Tag lines include “that’s the power of Black” and “Black power.”

So we have, in one ad campaign, the fetishization of Black men, the White supremacist portrayal of White women as the ultimate female, their objectification (see #3, he actually hands one out in the second ad), the trivialization of his crime (he can’t control himself, LOL right!?), the use of animalistic language to refer to Black people, and the appropriation of the Black Power movement.  Anyone see anything else?  Does it matter that this comes out of Poland and not the U.S.?

Thanks to Tom Megginson at Work That Matters for the heads up.

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.

I’ve heard critiques about both the uniforms of the beach volleyball players at this year’s Olympics in London (i.e., bikinis) and the photographic coverage of the athletes (i.e., “butt shots”).  Then yesterday eight readers — Tom Megginson, Cheryl S., Cerberus Xt, Richard D., Anna G., @sphericalfruit, @bfwriter, and @HaphazardSoc — sent us a link to a story that asked the question: “What if every Olympic sport was photographed like beach volleyball?”  More on that later.

First, I wanted to see if the rumors were true, so I googled beach vollyball and three other sports: track, diving, and gymnastics.  All involve relatively skimpy uniforms, but beach volleyball certainly stood out.  The top results included five photographs of just butts in bikini bottoms and four “cheesecake” pictures in which women are posed to look like pin-ups and volleyball is not part of the picture (all images can be clicked to get a closer view).

That may not seem like a lot but, in contrast, none of the top photos for the other three sports included butt shots or pin-up poses (with the exception of one butt shot for track, but it was of a fully-clothed man and used as a photographic device, not a source of titillation).

There’s an interesting lesson here that goes beyond the sexual objectification of women and asks “which women? and why? (because the sport is associated with the beach?) and in response to whose rules? (who is in charge of uniforms?) and to whose benefit? (the photographers, the Olympics, their corporate and media sponsors?).”

Gymnastics: 

Diving:

Track:

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.

Part of the challenge of taking care of a blog involves keeping the archive alive.  One way to do that is to link readers to older posts they they might be interested in.  We do that, in part, with an automated process called Link Within.  When we publish a post, the program searches our archive for similar posts and includes a set of thumbnails at the bottom that readers can click on if they’d like to know more.

At the bottom of a recent post about the role of carrots in World War II, for example, linkwithin offered these options:

There are pitfalls to this type of program that illustrate a bigger problem involved with talking about social inequality.  A reader named Sarah C. emailed us the following observation in response the thumbnails that followed a post about the sexual objectification of women:

I wanted to point out the dissonance I feel when I spend time reading a thoughtful article about gender equality and then when I finish the bottom of the page greets me with a line of 100 x 100 px images of sexualized womens’ bodies.  They are the same kinds of images I would see browsing Cracked or College Humor, or other mainstream sites.  The Huffington Post does it too – sites claiming to be (and often actually are) more or less progressive are using sexist tactics to get people to click, or at least that’s what it seems like…

I think it’s great to include examples of objectification in your posts in order to illustrate your point.  But using those images as a thumbnail gets you the wrong attention.  It feels hypocritical, or at least incongruous with your blog’s goals.

This is what Sarah saw:

Since the thumbnails are automatically generated, we don’t actually know what the thumbnails will be until we see the published post on the site.  So, upon seeing Sarah’s screenshot of the thumbnails, I was taken aback.  I understood immediately why she felt compelled to send us an email.

The phenomenon goes far beyond thumbnails.  Even if we did away with Link Within, our posts on the sexual objectification of women would include images that sexually objectified women.  We are Sociological Images, after all.   So our posts drawing attention to and criticizing the phenomenon also reinforce it.  It’s two steps forward and one step back, plus or minus a step.

But even if we weren’t an image-based blog, even if we simply discussed sexual objectification without an accompanying visual, doing so would remind readers that women are objectified, that they need to worry about how their bodies look, and that they’re being judged by their appearance.  At least one study has demonstrated that simply being exposed to objectifying words, devoid of imagery, can increase the degree to which women self-objectify.

Talking about sexual objectification always threatens to deepen the degree to which people feel sexually objectified, even if that is the opposite of one’s intention.  This phenomenon applies just as well to other forms of oppression.  Talking about the way in which state policies help or hinder Mexican immigrants to the U.S., for example, potentially further entrenches the idea that all Latinos are “illegals.”  Pointing out under-development in parts of Africa potentially affirms the notion that all of Africa is economically backward or politically corrupt.  Referring to women’s lack of representation in math and science may make women even more anxious about pursuing these careers.

This is one of the ways that power works.  It  co-opts the strategies available for fighting back.   Power is flexible and accommodating, it controls and convinces through all possible channels, it finds ways to infiltrate all mediums.  This is why it’s so hard, in the first place, to eradicate prejudice and inequality.

Coming to our blog is, for these reasons, a scary proposition.  Because we sometimes talk about ugly things, there will be ugly things here.  Taking out the thumbnails won’t change that; neither would deleting all of the images we reproduce.  Deleting all posts that address inequality would, but then we would be silently complicit with the status quo.  So, we keep blogging, and we keep uploading, and we keep trying to engage our readers further… for better or worse.

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.

Adrienne K., who blogs at Native Appropriations, recently put together a post about food products that feature stereotypical images of Native Americans. I’m reposting some of them here, but check out her original post for more.

It started out with Calumet baking powder:

Adrienne explains,

In my head, I thought “I could make some stereotype biscuits for breakfast!” Which got me thinking. How many products with stereotypical imagery could I fit in one imaginary breakfast?

Excluding vintage products and items that weren’t easily available, she still found an awful lot. Indian Head corn meal, anyone?

Land-O-Lakes butter:

The Sue Bee Honey logo:

Umpqua ice cream:

Pemmican beef jerky:

And you can top off your meal with Cherikee Red soda:

Adrienne explains,

In isolation, each of these would seem like no big deal–these are the “good” stereotypical images. The “noble savage.” No wild eyes or big noses, just headdresses and Indian maidens. But when taken as a collective, is it any wonder that most people in the world think of Native peoples as headdress-wearing Plains chiefs or buckskin-clad Indian women? I’m not saying there isn’t stereotypical imagery of other racial/ethnic groups in branding, but the ubiquity of Native imagery is striking.

Check out her blog for her full discussion of the problems with the repetition of these limited, anachronistic images of Native Americans.

This is the fourth part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. See also, parts One, Two, and Three. Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

This post details some daily rituals that help interrupt damaging beauty culture scripts.

1) Start enjoying your body as a physical instrument.

Girls are raised to view their bodies as an thing-to-be-looked-at that they have to constantly work on and perfect for the adoration of others, while boys are raised to think of their bodies as tools to use to master their surroundings. We need to flip the script and enjoy our bodies as the physical marvels they are. We should be thinking of our bodies, as bodies! As a vehicle that moves us through the world; as a site of physical power; as the physical extension of our being in the world. We should be climbing things, leaping over things, pushing and pulling things, shaking things, dancing frantically, even if people are looking. Daily rituals of spontaneous physical activity and thanks for movement are the surest way to bring about a personal paradigm shift from viewing our bodies as objects to viewing our bodies as tools to enact our subjectivity.

Fun Related Activity: Parkour,”the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment,” is an activity that one can do anytime, anywhere. I especially enjoy jumping off bike racks between classes while I’m dressed in a suit.

2) Do at least one “embarrassing” action a day.

Another healthy daily ritual that reinforces the idea that we don’t exist to be pleasing to others is to purposefully do at least one action that violates “ladylike” social norms. Discuss your period in public. Eat sloppily in public, then lounge on your chair and pat your protruding belly. Swing your arms a little too much when you walk. Open doors for everyone. Offer to help men carry things. Skip a lot. Galloping also works. Get comfortable with making others uncomfortable.

3) Focus on personal development that isn’t related to beauty culture.

According to research, women spend over 45 minutes to an hour on body maintenance every day. That’s about 15 more minutes than men each day and about 275 hours a year.

But, since you’ve read Part 3 of this series and given up habitual body monitoring, body hatred, and meaningless beauty rituals, you’ll have more time to develop yourself in meaningful ways. This means more time for education, reading, working out to build muscle and agility, dancing, etc. You’ll become a much more interesting person on the inside if you spend less time worrying about the outside.  The study featured above showed that time spent grooming was inversely related to income for women.

4) Actively forgive yourself.

A lifetime of body hatred and self-objectification is difficult to let go of, and if you find yourself falling into old habits of playing self-hating tapes, seeking male attention, or beating yourself up for not being pleasing, forgive yourself. It’s impossible to fully transcend the beauty culture game since it’s so pervasive. It’s a constant struggle. When we fall into old traps, it’s important to recognize that, but quickly move on through self forgiveness. We need all the cognitive space we can get for the next beauty culture assault on our mental health.