This famous Life Magazine cover from 1971 trumpeted the feminist movement:
Six years later, in 1977, Time Magazine reminded us that gender difference (and inequality?) was genetic and, thus, out of our control:
And don’t miss the famous 1978 Hustler cover that appeared the very next year!
Apparently, if you use Viagra, your ejaculation will be so powerful that you will shoot sperm into space to aggressively penetrate Planet Egg:
Found here thanks to copyranter.
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…
Today Gwen and I went to the by now well-known Bodies exhibit that displays preserved human cadavers, purportedly so we can learn more about the human body (and give up smoking).
As we went in we joked about how there probably wouldn’t be any female bodies until the part on reproduction. We were royally pissed off to discover that we were right. This is a great illustration of the way in which men are neutral and women deviants from the standard (that is, men are people and women are women). The first 8 or so bodies were all male and all in action doing masculine things.
The first female body we encountered (there were only two out of more than a dozen) stood immediately outside the fetal development hall and alongside the dissections of the genitals and reproductive organs.* Not only was this the first female, she was arranged not in action, but in a pose for the male gaze. She was standing with her hands on her hips, with her breasts and hips thrust forward, and on her tip toes as if she were wearing high heels. We couldn’t find any pictures of her on the web (and we weren’t allowed to take any), but we did find an image of a female cadaver from another exhibit. She was both pregnant (fulfilling her biological destiny) and positioned like a pin up (fulfilling her role as sexual object for men). So, in addition to marginalizing the female body, they gendered both male and female bodies. Male bodies are on the move, but female bodies are good for only two things: babies and sexual provocation.
The last body (male) had a sign over it that said “Your Body” because, of course, the male body is just the neutral human body that represents us all.
* As we entered the fetal development hall there was a sign that warned people that they should take a second and think about whether they wanted to see the fetuses, while assuring us that all of them died of natural causes (that is, not abortion). I think it’s bizarre that we’re supposed to find these fetal bodies disturbing, but not the bodies of people who lived lives and loved others and were loved and all that good stuff. There is something weird about the priorities here, as if the fetuses were somehow more human than the adults. Also, while we were looking at the deformed fetuses, a woman standing next to us said that all teenagers should have to see the deformed fetuses because “that’s what gonna happen” if they start having sex.
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 graphic from the New York Times illustrates the different environmental costs of meat and vegetable production (click on image to enlarge):
The coining of the term “frankenfood” to refer to genetically-modified (GM) food is an excellent example of the way in which words matter. As of today, a search for the word in google returns about 57,000 hits. It’s been quite an effective frame for the anti-GM food activists. Here are some examples of their work:
In her dissertation, Abby Kinchy discussed the way in which anti-GM food activists invented and used these frames to build support for their movement. In reality, though, (1) we’ve been genetically modifying food by other means for centuries (through cultivation) and (2) there is little evidence (yet) that such foods are all that dangerous.
Sources, in order, Green Acres Farm, Monsterzine, and Democratic Underground.
Click here for a humorous music video about prescription drugs and the pharmaceutical industry.
James Watson won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA. He’s a pretty big deal.
The other day he said some very unfortunate things. The article from which I stole this information summarized those things as follows:
The controversy began with an article in The Times of London in October that quoted Dr. Watson, who was on a book tour, as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” According to the article, he said that “there are many people of color who are very talented,” and he hoped people were equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Well, it turns out that a test of his DNA revealed that he has 16 times more African origin genes than the typical European person: “about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African.”
That’s some awesome irony.
Here is a nice discussion of the scientific merit of his assertion and it’s testability by Janis Prince Inniss from the Everyday Sociology Blog supported by W. W. Norton & Co.
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.
