This vintage ad for 7-Up is a great illustration of how our ideas about what sounds tasty is culturally and historically contingent.
For other great examples, see these posts on soup for breakfast, spam, poop coffee, the rise and fall of aspic, and prunes (they’re for kids!).
From Found in Mom’s Basement.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
On this sign, woman = person… and in most places in the world, most of the time, that is weird!
The sign, found here (via), can be found in Haarlem, Netherlands.
UPDATE: In the comments, Tara linked to a BBC story about Fuenlabrada, Spain. They’ve replaced half of all walk/don’t walk signs with figures in skirts.
And Astrid linked to some examples from Germany.
The social construction of female as skirted aside, neat!
Spain:
Germany:
NEW! Pharmacopaeia also linked to a sign from New Zealand:
Also in the comments, Caroline asked us to link to our post where stick figures suddenly sprout skirts when paired with children.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Ideal bodies vary across cultures and time. In the U.S. today, childhood obesity is considered a significant social problem and is widely covered in the news, on talk shows, and the like. When food was more scarce, however, having a fat child was a sign of health and well-being. This ad, from 1898, is for a tonic that will fatten up your child. How times change.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Cole S.H. sent in “…a set of screenshots of Google’s autocomplete feature, which is based on number of searches of a given phrase,” with comments in red written in by the creator (originally found on reddit, link to original here):
It provides some interesting insights into popular conceptions of men, women, and relationships.
Some of the search terms related to men/husbands/boyfriends: attracted to breasts, jerks, afraid of commitment, abusive, mean, selfish, grumpy. Search terms related to women/wives/girlfriends: emotional, difficult, complicated, attracted to bad boys, crazy, always mad, better than men.
Apparently both men and women are considered mean and stupid, so there is some equality. I do think it’s interesting that one of the popular search terms about women is why they are “better than men”; it’s weird to me that there’s a whole genre of jokes about women being smarter/better than men, and that I know people who tell them or find them funny who would be offended at a similar joke about men being smarter than women.
Reader SB has some similar images at The Sexual Buzz.
Also check out our post on Amazon’s gendered gift-giving suggestions.
NOTE: There’s been some confusion about what I meant about this giving “insights” about gender conceptions–I’m not saying most people think negative things about the other sex, or that this is scientific data. I just think it’s interesting that when people are searching for information about perceived negative aspects of men or women, they frame it in different ways–men are “grumpy” or “abusive,” while women are “always mad,” and men are “selfish” while women are “crazy.” Those fit in pretty well with who we associate with various emotions or behaviors. That’s all I was getting at.
Today we think of prunes as something old people eat. But, as this ad from 1958 reveals, the California Prune Advisory Board hoped to make prunes a favorite with moms and kids.
Text:
Win their hearts with prune tarts
Just yummy, Mummy! A delicious, healthy way to satisfy that yearning for sweets. Wonderful California prunes are fairly bursting with energy, iron, vitamins and minerals.
To make delicious, decorative prune tarts just use your favorite prune whip recipe. Pour into tart shells and top with whole prunes, stuffed with almonds.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Sociologist Yen Le Espiritu popularized the idea of a pan-ethnic identity. “Asian American” is a pan-ethnic identity. It is an invented label applied to dozens of different groups with wildly different cultural traditions and languages. Most Americans (Asian and not), over time, came to accept the term as meaningful. American Indian is also a pan-ethnic term, as is African American and most other such labels.
On the one hand, pan-ethnic labels can be empowering. There is power in numbers. A large community identified across ethnic and national identities by race (however fake that racial designation is) can, for example, become a powerful voting bloc to which politicians must attend, or be mobilized to work together to fight for a common cause.
On the other hand, pan-ethnic labels can be disempowering. They tend to ignore the distinctions that make ethnic and national identities meaningful, and the rough categories erase differences among groups, thus making it more difficult to see and, thus, problematize disadvantage.
This latter problem motivated the Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) of the University of California campuses to run its “Count Me In” campaign. They notice that, though “Asian Americans” were well represented on University of California campuses (they make up 43% of incoming frosh in 2006), certain groups deemed “Asian” remain underrepresented. These include students of Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian descent, among others.
The campaign asked the University of California system to disaggregate their “Asian” category.
In response the University of California added 23 new categories to their application.
For a much more extensive discussion of this issue, see Fatemeh Fakhraie’s post at Racialicious(where I stole this video clip).
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Because meat is what men eat…
See also this BEEF! BEEF! BEEF! Campbell’s Soup ad.
From MultiCultClassics.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Are sounds gendered? Yes. Does the gender of sounds change over time?
From the surprisingly interesting blog of Laura Wattenberg comes these graphs showing that popular masculine endings to names has changed over time.
1906:
1956:
No dramatic changes from 1906 to 1956, but then, in 2006, n is triumphant!
2006:
Laura also offers some data showing how boy and girl name endings have shifted since the 1880s:
This figure, relatedly, shows trends in the endings of girl babies’ names in France:
Graphs from here, here, and here. Hat tip to Montclair Socioblog.
UPDATE: In the comment thread, Sator Arepo notes:
Sounds are not equal to letters. The graphs are misleading in that they (with exception of the French language spectrograph-like pictures) they equate the sound of the end of the name with the appearance of the letter in the written word.
Commenter pfctdayelise notes something similar, above. However, it’s even more misleading in the tables, and would depend widely on the origin of a name whether and how certain letters were pronounced.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
