The ever-fantastic Sarah Haskins on car ads aimed at women:
For other examples of marketing cars to women, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.
sex
Burk brought my attention to the video game Battle Raper. I found a Battle Raper website, but it was all in Japanese, and I couldn’t find an English version, so I will provide you a short description from Wikipedia:
Battle Raper is a 3D fighting game in which the objective is to strip, grope, and sometimes actively rape the female characters, including a special move by the boss character and only male fighter where the female opponent is forced to perform fellatio as the camera zooms in. Like in most Hentai games, however, the penis is rendered invisible or transparent. There is also a feature in the game which allows the player to have sex with the female characters.
Here is a screenshot (found at Something Awful) of a female character crying because she is being forced to perform oral sex on the male character:
You can also damage your opponent by molesting their breasts or crotch. Once you win the game playing each of the different characters, you open a function where you can look at all the rape scenes. Here’s a shot of a female character’s face as she’s being raped:
Apparently in Battle Raper 2, they took out the rape function.
A simple description of this game will have to do, because I just can’t bring myself to write any commentary about it.
UPDATE: For the record, I’m not saying a) the Japanese are more sexist than other cultures, b) this game is (or isn’t) representative of video games in general or hentai games in particular, c) that video games lead to any particular behaviors or make people act violently, or d) that people shouldn’t be able to play these games in the privacy of their own homes.
It was sent to me as a possible post, I thought it was interesting, and I thought the discussion by some gamers I found on different websites was also fascinating: lots of people saying “Oh, I play violent stuff, but this was unacceptable even for me!” and saying how they put rape in a different category than any other type of violence, so these types of games are worse than “regular” violent video games. I thought of it as a case that might be useful for discussions of cultural representations of rape, and particularly how we often treat rape as a “special” type of crime that is somehow worse than any other type, possibly even murder. Why we do that, and what it means (particularly, how does it impact the stigmatizing of rape victims, who are often treated as though they are permanently broken and defiled?), are sociologically interesting questions.
NEW (Apr. ’10)! Dmitriy T.M., Beth W., Tom M., Abby D., and Jillian Y. all sent in another game with the same theme. The narrative for this one, called Rapelay, is as follows:
The player plays as a chikan (a perverted man who frequently fondles women) in crowded subway trains. A young woman named Aoi has the player arrested for molesting her. Afterwards, the player plans to exact revenge by molesting and raping her entire family (source).
This is the cover:
A still from the game:
Most media coverage won’t offer images, saying that they are too graphic to show.
This Halloween, in Maryland, sex offenders who had been released from prison were required to put this sticker in a front window (news story here).
I can’t say it better than Gwen, so I quote her from this post:
I find the intense stigmatization of child sexual abuse, compared to other crimes, fascinating. With other crimes, once you finish the terms of probation, you’re pretty much done with the criminal justice system. Only with sex crimes (and generally only if they were against children) is there a requirement that the ex-felon register with law enforcement every time s/he moves even once probation is over, sometimes for a certain number of years, sometimes forever, depending on the state. I mean, you don’t have to do this if you murder someone, or even lots of people (or even if the victims were kids). Our culture currently defines child sexual abusers as unique, particularly horrific criminal who can never really be rehabilitated or reintegrated into society.
I wonder, though, to what degree this law makes children safer. It seems like a false sense of security–if you just know who the convicted sex abusers in your neighborhood are, you can protect your kids. Yet most child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child and his/her family, not a stranger who just moved in to the neighborhood, and very often they have no criminal record, so these types of programs would be useless.
Marc sent in a link to some sexist vintage ads found at Blog of Hilarity [note: I had an actual link to Blog of Hilarity, but commenter LillyB pointed out that when she clicked on it, she got warnings from her AntiVirus about the site; I just had the same thing happen, so I decided for safety’s sake to remove the link]. Some of them I’ll be adding to other posts, but I thought these deserved their own post.
This one, for Love’s Baby Soft, is so creepy I can hardly stand to look at it:
The shape of the bottles, the sexualization of young girls…ick. A teddy bear? Really? The text below the bottles:
Love’s Baby Soft is that irresistible, clean-baby smell, grown-up enough to be sexy. It’s soft-smelling. Pure and innocent. It may well be the sexist fragrance around.
Notice it’s not grown up…it’s grown up enough. Jean Kilbourne uses this, or a similar Love’s Baby Soft, ad in her documentary Killing Us Softly 3 when she discusses how young girls are sexualized and adult women are encouraged to infantilize themselves.
Here’s an ad for Kellogg’s PEP vitamins:
I know I always look super cute when I’m scrubbing the kitchen.
Finally, this Trix ad seems sort of creepy to me, and I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the way the girl is staring at the camera, or that her pupils seem fixed and dilated:
The text isn’t exceptionally interesting, but it does use the word “gay” in the original sense of “happy,” something a company would certainly not do today.
Thanks, Marc!
Xavier M. sent us a link to this print ad, which he saw in a Belgian men’s magazine, that uses sex to encourage organ donation (found here).
Text: “Becoming a donor is probably your only chance to get inside her.”
There are some interesting implications here about why we engage in altruism and who is deserving of that altruism.
See also similar posts on PETA (see here and here) and human rights violations in Burma.
At AdFreak, I discovered that Sea Monkeys are being used to sell sex. Sure enough:
NEW (Mar. ’10)! Christina W. sent in this ad campaign for French cheeses using a pin-up calendar:
The video is a backstage look at a sexy calendar photo shoot for…cheese:
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/113146614[/vimeo]
NEW (Jun. ’10)! Stephanie DeH. sent in this lovely CPR instructional video (which also got its own post):
ALSO NEW (Jun. ’10)! Lindsey Dale, at Nobody, collected the following ads selling, with sex, archery, a laser detector, tea, and coffee:
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.
Jason S. sent us this picture of a T-shirt he saw for sale in Berkeley, California. The T-shirt says:
Wingman Services: Don’t Be Sent Out On A Dangerous SOLO Mission! Let Us BANG Her Fat Friends For You!
A “wingman” is a guy who helps his buddy get laid. Here the suggestion is that the “wingman” will take the fall and have sex with the fat one so that his buddy can have the desirable, skinny one. Notice also the violent language used to describe sex.
In honor of the election, we offer you a summary of all our election 2008 posts.
This election has certainly brought racial tensions front and center. We highlighted two racist caricatures of Obama: on a waffles box and as a cannibal. We also discussed the cover of The New Yorker on which Barack and Michelle Obama were caricatured as terrorists. Whether or not this was racist was widely discussed and offered an interesting opportunity to ask “Who decides what we talk about?” In response to the argument that we were being too sensitive about the caricatures, we offered some evidence that caricatures of black people do not need to be racist.
Anti-Obama propaganda also included comparison with OJ Simpson, a monkey, celebrities, Osama Bin Laden, fascists and communists, a terrorist, a terrorist again, and a “half-breed Muslin.” See here for other racist anti-Obama propaganda. Gwen asked “So what if Obama is an Arab?” (Note, too, this satirical T-shirt.)
We saw racialization–or the active production of racial meaning–in the fist bump controversy, in calling Michelle Obama a “baby mama,” and in asserting the whiteness of the White House. We discussed the resemblance between Obama and his Grandfather and the meaning of “Main Street” to illustrate the social construction of race. And we offered examples of white privilege: in one we discuss the option of white ethnics to emphasize their ethnicity; in two we discuss a cartoonist who calls Colin Powell a race traitor for endorsing Obama and a Howard Stern clip that suggests that Blacks only endorse Obama because he’s Black. We also remark on how easy it is to deride social theories of inequality.
The McCain/Palin ticket was no stranger to derision. See also our post in which the McCain/Palin ticket is said to be favored by Nazis, another in which Palin effigy is lynched, and a third that discusses ageism in the election.
We’ve also seen plenty of sexism in this campaign. Hillary Clinton has been represented as a nut buster, asked to “iron my shirt,” critiqued for crying, and called a “bitch.” There are more examples here and here. Also see this montage of sexism among political pundits. Both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were sexualized. See here, here, and here for Clinton and here, here, here, here, and here for Palin. (By the way, Barack Obama was sexualized as well, see here, here, and here.)
We commented, more sociologically, on the gender politics of this election. We discussed the mothering of baby Trig, conservative feminism, the politics of pink, and took a humorous look at the women’s vote with Sarah Haskins.
We also pointed to the way in which Obama and Clinton attempted to appeal to small town people and the ease with which we make fun of them.
For the intersection of race and gender, see our post in which Michelle Obama is called an angry black woman, is said to need to “soften” to be a First Lady, and our post that features the Bros Before Hos T-shirt (scroll to the bottom). For the intersection of race and class, see our post on Obama’s negotiation of the “elitist” label. And, in making intersectionality invisible, see the SNL skit, “bitch is the new black.”
Looking more broadly at politics and media coverage, we discussed the portrayal of evil in the Reverend Wright scandal, McCain’s trivialization of war, the linking of a Democratic adminstration with a terrorist attack, pundit hypocrisy, political networks, a voter registration campaign that uses bondage imagery, suspiciously delicious polling techniques, how cell phones shape polling findings, and trends in media coverage of Obama versus Clinton and Obama versus McCain.
In addition, we offered some examples of punditry from alternative media: on young voters, a call for alliance from the labor movement, a call to get your Jewish grandparents to vote for Obama, a political revival of the Budweiser Wassap video, and two examples of art inspired by the election (here and here).
We also put up posts of figures representing public opinion on blacks, a woman president, and politician parents. And we offered images illustrating how the world would vote.
Finally, our favorite: “We’re not sociologists, we’re Americans!”
Adriana E. sent in this video made by The Human Rights Action Center, featuring Tila Tequila, designed to inspire opposition to human rights abuses in Burma. Like other organizations, such as PETA (see here and here), this PSA uses sex appeal to inspire activist outrage.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK8inPfHg_0[/youtube]
Ironically, as Adriana notes, Tila Tequila is famous for being bisexual, but really only interacts suggestively in this video with the boys. I guess hypersexualizing a woman is all fine and good, but bisexuality would be a real turn off.
Do any of you think that this is effective in inspiring concern for Burma?
Burk brought my attention to the video game Battle Raper. I found a Battle Raper website, but it was all in Japanese, and I couldn’t find an English version, so I will provide you a short description from Wikipedia:
Battle Raper is a 3D fighting game in which the objective is to strip, grope, and sometimes actively rape the female characters, including a special move by the boss character and only male fighter where the female opponent is forced to perform fellatio as the camera zooms in. Like in most Hentai games, however, the penis is rendered invisible or transparent. There is also a feature in the game which allows the player to have sex with the female characters.
Here is a screenshot (found at Something Awful) of a female character crying because she is being forced to perform oral sex on the male character:
You can also damage your opponent by molesting their breasts or crotch. Once you win the game playing each of the different characters, you open a function where you can look at all the rape scenes. Here’s a shot of a female character’s face as she’s being raped:
Apparently in Battle Raper 2, they took out the rape function.
A simple description of this game will have to do, because I just can’t bring myself to write any commentary about it.
UPDATE: For the record, I’m not saying a) the Japanese are more sexist than other cultures, b) this game is (or isn’t) representative of video games in general or hentai games in particular, c) that video games lead to any particular behaviors or make people act violently, or d) that people shouldn’t be able to play these games in the privacy of their own homes.
It was sent to me as a possible post, I thought it was interesting, and I thought the discussion by some gamers I found on different websites was also fascinating: lots of people saying “Oh, I play violent stuff, but this was unacceptable even for me!” and saying how they put rape in a different category than any other type of violence, so these types of games are worse than “regular” violent video games. I thought of it as a case that might be useful for discussions of cultural representations of rape, and particularly how we often treat rape as a “special” type of crime that is somehow worse than any other type, possibly even murder. Why we do that, and what it means (particularly, how does it impact the stigmatizing of rape victims, who are often treated as though they are permanently broken and defiled?), are sociologically interesting questions.
NEW (Apr. ’10)! Dmitriy T.M., Beth W., Tom M., Abby D., and Jillian Y. all sent in another game with the same theme. The narrative for this one, called Rapelay, is as follows:
The player plays as a chikan (a perverted man who frequently fondles women) in crowded subway trains. A young woman named Aoi has the player arrested for molesting her. Afterwards, the player plans to exact revenge by molesting and raping her entire family (source).
This is the cover:
A still from the game:
Most media coverage won’t offer images, saying that they are too graphic to show.
This Halloween, in Maryland, sex offenders who had been released from prison were required to put this sticker in a front window (news story here).
I can’t say it better than Gwen, so I quote her from this post:
I find the intense stigmatization of child sexual abuse, compared to other crimes, fascinating. With other crimes, once you finish the terms of probation, you’re pretty much done with the criminal justice system. Only with sex crimes (and generally only if they were against children) is there a requirement that the ex-felon register with law enforcement every time s/he moves even once probation is over, sometimes for a certain number of years, sometimes forever, depending on the state. I mean, you don’t have to do this if you murder someone, or even lots of people (or even if the victims were kids). Our culture currently defines child sexual abusers as unique, particularly horrific criminal who can never really be rehabilitated or reintegrated into society.
I wonder, though, to what degree this law makes children safer. It seems like a false sense of security–if you just know who the convicted sex abusers in your neighborhood are, you can protect your kids. Yet most child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child and his/her family, not a stranger who just moved in to the neighborhood, and very often they have no criminal record, so these types of programs would be useless.
Marc sent in a link to some sexist vintage ads found at Blog of Hilarity [note: I had an actual link to Blog of Hilarity, but commenter LillyB pointed out that when she clicked on it, she got warnings from her AntiVirus about the site; I just had the same thing happen, so I decided for safety’s sake to remove the link]. Some of them I’ll be adding to other posts, but I thought these deserved their own post.
This one, for Love’s Baby Soft, is so creepy I can hardly stand to look at it:
The shape of the bottles, the sexualization of young girls…ick. A teddy bear? Really? The text below the bottles:
Love’s Baby Soft is that irresistible, clean-baby smell, grown-up enough to be sexy. It’s soft-smelling. Pure and innocent. It may well be the sexist fragrance around.
Notice it’s not grown up…it’s grown up enough. Jean Kilbourne uses this, or a similar Love’s Baby Soft, ad in her documentary Killing Us Softly 3 when she discusses how young girls are sexualized and adult women are encouraged to infantilize themselves.
Here’s an ad for Kellogg’s PEP vitamins:
I know I always look super cute when I’m scrubbing the kitchen.
Finally, this Trix ad seems sort of creepy to me, and I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the way the girl is staring at the camera, or that her pupils seem fixed and dilated:
The text isn’t exceptionally interesting, but it does use the word “gay” in the original sense of “happy,” something a company would certainly not do today.
Thanks, Marc!
Xavier M. sent us a link to this print ad, which he saw in a Belgian men’s magazine, that uses sex to encourage organ donation (found here).
Text: “Becoming a donor is probably your only chance to get inside her.”
There are some interesting implications here about why we engage in altruism and who is deserving of that altruism.
See also similar posts on PETA (see here and here) and human rights violations in Burma.
At AdFreak, I discovered that Sea Monkeys are being used to sell sex. Sure enough:
NEW (Mar. ’10)! Christina W. sent in this ad campaign for French cheeses using a pin-up calendar:
The video is a backstage look at a sexy calendar photo shoot for…cheese:
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/113146614[/vimeo]
NEW (Jun. ’10)! Stephanie DeH. sent in this lovely CPR instructional video (which also got its own post):
ALSO NEW (Jun. ’10)! Lindsey Dale, at Nobody, collected the following ads selling, with sex, archery, a laser detector, tea, and coffee:
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.
Jason S. sent us this picture of a T-shirt he saw for sale in Berkeley, California. The T-shirt says:
Wingman Services: Don’t Be Sent Out On A Dangerous SOLO Mission! Let Us BANG Her Fat Friends For You!
A “wingman” is a guy who helps his buddy get laid. Here the suggestion is that the “wingman” will take the fall and have sex with the fat one so that his buddy can have the desirable, skinny one. Notice also the violent language used to describe sex.
In honor of the election, we offer you a summary of all our election 2008 posts.
This election has certainly brought racial tensions front and center. We highlighted two racist caricatures of Obama: on a waffles box and as a cannibal. We also discussed the cover of The New Yorker on which Barack and Michelle Obama were caricatured as terrorists. Whether or not this was racist was widely discussed and offered an interesting opportunity to ask “Who decides what we talk about?” In response to the argument that we were being too sensitive about the caricatures, we offered some evidence that caricatures of black people do not need to be racist.
Anti-Obama propaganda also included comparison with OJ Simpson, a monkey, celebrities, Osama Bin Laden, fascists and communists, a terrorist, a terrorist again, and a “half-breed Muslin.” See here for other racist anti-Obama propaganda. Gwen asked “So what if Obama is an Arab?” (Note, too, this satirical T-shirt.)
We saw racialization–or the active production of racial meaning–in the fist bump controversy, in calling Michelle Obama a “baby mama,” and in asserting the whiteness of the White House. We discussed the resemblance between Obama and his Grandfather and the meaning of “Main Street” to illustrate the social construction of race. And we offered examples of white privilege: in one we discuss the option of white ethnics to emphasize their ethnicity; in two we discuss a cartoonist who calls Colin Powell a race traitor for endorsing Obama and a Howard Stern clip that suggests that Blacks only endorse Obama because he’s Black. We also remark on how easy it is to deride social theories of inequality.
The McCain/Palin ticket was no stranger to derision. See also our post in which the McCain/Palin ticket is said to be favored by Nazis, another in which Palin effigy is lynched, and a third that discusses ageism in the election.
We’ve also seen plenty of sexism in this campaign. Hillary Clinton has been represented as a nut buster, asked to “iron my shirt,” critiqued for crying, and called a “bitch.” There are more examples here and here. Also see this montage of sexism among political pundits. Both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were sexualized. See here, here, and here for Clinton and here, here, here, here, and here for Palin. (By the way, Barack Obama was sexualized as well, see here, here, and here.)
We commented, more sociologically, on the gender politics of this election. We discussed the mothering of baby Trig, conservative feminism, the politics of pink, and took a humorous look at the women’s vote with Sarah Haskins.
We also pointed to the way in which Obama and Clinton attempted to appeal to small town people and the ease with which we make fun of them.
For the intersection of race and gender, see our post in which Michelle Obama is called an angry black woman, is said to need to “soften” to be a First Lady, and our post that features the Bros Before Hos T-shirt (scroll to the bottom). For the intersection of race and class, see our post on Obama’s negotiation of the “elitist” label. And, in making intersectionality invisible, see the SNL skit, “bitch is the new black.”
Looking more broadly at politics and media coverage, we discussed the portrayal of evil in the Reverend Wright scandal, McCain’s trivialization of war, the linking of a Democratic adminstration with a terrorist attack, pundit hypocrisy, political networks, a voter registration campaign that uses bondage imagery, suspiciously delicious polling techniques, how cell phones shape polling findings, and trends in media coverage of Obama versus Clinton and Obama versus McCain.
In addition, we offered some examples of punditry from alternative media: on young voters, a call for alliance from the labor movement, a call to get your Jewish grandparents to vote for Obama, a political revival of the Budweiser Wassap video, and two examples of art inspired by the election (here and here).
We also put up posts of figures representing public opinion on blacks, a woman president, and politician parents. And we offered images illustrating how the world would vote.
Finally, our favorite: “We’re not sociologists, we’re Americans!”
Adriana E. sent in this video made by The Human Rights Action Center, featuring Tila Tequila, designed to inspire opposition to human rights abuses in Burma. Like other organizations, such as PETA (see here and here), this PSA uses sex appeal to inspire activist outrage.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK8inPfHg_0[/youtube]
Ironically, as Adriana notes, Tila Tequila is famous for being bisexual, but really only interacts suggestively in this video with the boys. I guess hypersexualizing a woman is all fine and good, but bisexuality would be a real turn off.
Do any of you think that this is effective in inspiring concern for Burma?