sexual orientation

Sometimes you see an image or video that is pretty subtle and complicated, and it takes some mental wrangling to figure out what it’s conveying and what cultural ideas it’s drawing on or contradicting.

And then there are things like this, sent in by Joshua B.:

1. Normalization of heterosexual male gaze (until the very end)

2. Girls getting naked

3. While washing a car ‘n stuff

4. And they come in various ethnic flavors

That’s pretty much it.

About the man at the end, reader Victoria says,

I think it’s still the male gaze – just adding gay men to the mix at the end. The “Or, if you prefer” (or whatever they say) seems to clearly speak to the men in the audience.

I agree.

Larry Harnisch, of the Daily Mirror, who spends a lot of time at his job going through the L.A. Times‘ archives, found this story from 1969:

Of course, most airlines had strict requirements for flight attendants’ physical appearance, including weight limits and guidelines for hair and makeup. But Renwick argued that her hair was much shorter than many White flight attendants’ hair. Many in the African American community felt she was being punished not for the length of her hair, but for wearing it in a natural style instead of straightening it.  United eventually paid her $5,000, “endors[ed] the Afro hairstyle,” and offered her her job back, and offer she did not accept.

Also check out our recent post on Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair.

In a completely unrelated post, I found this advertisement for the movie Staircase on Larry’s blog:

Text:

What makes a man live with another man? What makes them claw at each other…humiliate each other…yet never leave each other?

Under the title “Staircase” it says “the story of a marriage made in hell.” Larry says, “Rex Harrison and Richard Burton play two hairdressers who live together…”

Larry’s post also includes a review from September 26, 1969, that contains the following memorable phrases (the image is too small to read if I post it here, so click over to Larry’s post to see it):

…a pair of querulous old queans [sic]

They are bitchiness itself…

…two failed half-men…

…the boys’ ghastly mothers…

…what, with the deepest of ironies, is called the gay world.

That’s something else, eh?

Brian Safi offers a fun tripartite typology of (mostly) gay men in advertising: (1) homoeroticism as simultaneously hilarious and disgusting in ads aimed at straight men, (2) coded gay cues in ads aimed at a general market, and (3) parallel ads, differing only slightly from each other, playing in straight and gay media. The second set of ads = especially hilarious. Enjoy.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Giorgos S. sent us a link to a story in the Guardian about the cover of DVDs of the movie “Lesbian Vampire Killers.” Some stores are carrying censored versions. Giorgos says he’s seen the censored version at Borders stores in the U.K.:

So apparently the phrase “they won’t go down without a bite” is fine, and major cleavage requires just a tad bit of coverage with a sticker that says “Warning: Contains explicitly fit bloodsucking hotties!” The sticker that nearly entirely obscures the word “lesbian” says, “Warning: may display sexually suggestive cover image.”

The distributors blame stores, saying a number of large retailers requested that they obscure particular parts of the cover. The stores say they didn’t request that the word “lesbian” be hidden. I suppose we’ll never know what happened there. It does crack me up that you’d be willing to sell a movie called “Lesbian Vampire Killers,” but then be worried about the cover.

The issue of censorship leaves aside, of course, the content of the film itself. This may surprise you, but it was apparently widely negatively reviewed. IMDb summarizes the plot thusly:

Their women having been enslaved by the local pack of lesbian vampires thanks to an ancient curse, the remaining menfolk of a rural town send two hapless young lads out onto the moors as a sacrifice.

Here’s the original marketing poster:

I like how her nipples have been photoshopped out (unless lesbian vampires have nipples on the sides of their boobs).

If anyone’s seen it, I’d be interested to know if it portrays lesbians as ridiculously as I suspect it does.

See also: airbrushing out men’s nipples.

I mean, it’s Ellen DeGeneres. She’s a comedian. Everyone knows she’s just being funny.

Besides, she’s totally gay. Gay ladies don’t really care about beauty, am I right or am I right?

What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I think. Satire or no, Cover Girl’s done a lot of market research and they think it’s going to make people buy make up just like any old advertisement.  And I think they’re right.

In fact, I think satire is disarming.  When we see this commercial, our “don’t fuck with us” response doesn’t kick in because it’s just funny ol’ Ellen bein’ wacky.  Advertising counts on us thinking it doesn’t affect us.  Otherwise we’d be pissed.  I think satire is a useful tool with which advertisers trick us into letting down our guard.

We’ve been hitting satire hard lately.  I think it’s because it’s really pretty tricky to figure out.  See our previous posts on or featuring satire here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Here’s one that actually refers to data (as opposed to just involves us mouthing off.)

(Via Moody Springs.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

Andrew Gelman, over at FiveThirtyEight, presents a graph from data put together by Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips regarding opinions about various policies affecting gays and lesbians:

In another post, Nate Silver asks how public opinion about same-sex marriage might change if polls worded the question somewhat differently. Instead of asking “should the government allow same-sex couples to marry?”, we could just as well ask “should the government prevent same-sex couples from marrying?” He suggests that pro-gay-marriage groups might also frame the issue in this way–of keeping the government from taking away rights that people presumably already have rather than as the government giving new rights. It’s an interesting thought, and illustrates the role that question wording can play in affecting how survey respondents think about an issue.

UPDATE: Well, I was taken to task for not providing a better explanation of the graph. However, commenter Christopher explains it pretty well:

For each state, the status of seven public policies is listed as either pro- or anti-gay with seven colored circles which are either filled or empty with respect to the status. In addition, the position of the circle reflects the status of public opinion for each policy.

That is, each color represents one of the policies listed in the legend in the upper-left corner, so, for instance, red = public support for same-sex marriage. If the dot is filled in, it means gay-friendly legislation about the issue was actually passed in the state. If the dot is an empty circle, it means no gay-friendly legislation exists in the state. And the position of the circle tells you what percent of people in each state support each policy.

The contact hypothesis postulates that being near people of a different social group (e.g., race, class, sexual orientation, etc) translates into greater tolerance for that type of person. In other words, it’s harder to hate all Latinos (for example) when your neighbor is Latino and, damn it, you kind of like him.  Andrew Sullivan posted this figure:

Jose at Thick Culture suggests that this could be evidence for the contact hypothesis.  But he also asks whether it might also be true that less homophobic people are more likely to come into contact with gays and lesbians because of a third variable that correlates with both (like choosing to live in a big city), making the relationship spurious.

(What’s a spurious relationship?  Here’s one:  People who eat ice cream are more likely to drown.  Both incidence of ice cream eating and rates of drowning are related to summertime.  The relationship between ice cream and drowning is spurious.  That is, there is no relationship.  Yet they appear related because they are both related to a third variable.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Emily K. sent in a link to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2009 report on hate groups in the U.S. Here’s a map (larger, not-stretched-out version available as a pdf here):

The site also has an interactive map where you can select individual states and get more info on the hate groups that are active there, and another where “hate incidents” are marked.

Sorry for the sporadic posting lately–it’s the last week of the semester and I’m grading constantly.

UPDATE: One of my best friends just informed me that when investigating the SPLC hate incidents map, he realized he knew one of the people listed as a perpetrator in an incident in a certain Southern state; I promised to give no more details than that. This led to a discussion of the weirdness of some of the folks we grew up with, including a guy I went to school with who washed his head in gasoline to try to kill lice and ended up setting his entire head on fire. And no, I don’t know why a person would decide to use gasoline to kill lice. I also don’t know how one of my uncles managed to shoot himself in the foot while elk hunting, why that didn’t deter another uncle from going, falling down a mountain slope, and cracking his ribs, or why my mom married an evangelical Christian who didn’t like women to wear pants eight weeks after she met him on the internet. These are some of the many mysteries of life.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Commenter OP Minded says,

Kind of outrageous that the SPLC has “Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement” in Framingham, MA listed as a hate group. There is no doubt that they are in favor of enforcing immigration law (after all, it is the law) but they don’t fall anywhere near a “hate group”. Calls into question this entire list.

Another commenter says,

To follow up on opminded@2: It’s too bad the Southern Poverty Law Center also uses these trumped-up threats to pad its already-deep coffers. Less than 70 percent of its expenses go toward its programs; the rest is for administration and fundraising.  Any human rights organization with almost $220 million in net assets isn’t doing its job.

The anonymous commenter suggests going to Charity Navigator to get more information.

I did not know about these criticisms (a problem in general about charities is not knowing for sure how the money is spent). My experience with the SPLC relates to their work with African American farmers in the South, a group that has experienced major land loss due to various factors largely involving racism and unscrupulous land developers. Their work on that particular issue was considered pretty solid. But of course there aren’t all that many organizations working on that problem, so any efforts were greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the additional info!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Commenter CLL says,

Over the years, SPLC has done terrific work helping people with little access to power receive the justice they deserve. Groups the SPLC has identified as “hate” groups have gone beyond simply disagreeing with policy (or lack of enforcement), and have instead encouraged their adherents to express discontent in more direct attacks on the object(s) of their scorn — thus qualifying as “hate” groups.

Spending 69.6% of income on programs remains a pretty normal ratio for not-for-profits that rely heavily on professional staff. Some organizations play fast and loose with their Fundraising allocations to cook the percentages down to numbers that look better on sites like Charity Navigator — but the proof of effectiveness is in accomplishment of mission.