social construction

Bern K. and Megan P. sent us another example of androcentrism (see here, here, here, and here), one that is nicely combined with the representation of women as annoying naggers, and the social construction of diamonds as men’s best friend.  Bern writes:

It starts off with promise, showing that it’s ridiculous for a man to buy his wife a vacuum cleaner for their anniversary. It finishes, unfortunately, by suggesting that the only way to get out of the doghouse is to buy his wife diamonds.

In the 5-minute commercial, men are punished by their wives for being insensitive or insulting by being sent to the “doghouse.”  In this five minute advertisement for JC Penney, men who have been sent to the doghouse are punished by being forced to do feminine tasks: fold laundry, eat quiche, and drink chai lattes.  There is some irony in that the main dude was sent to the doghouse for buying his wife a vacuum for their anniversary.  Apparently he wouldn’t want to be caught dead vacuuming… which is exactly why the gift might be considered insulting.  After all, when you give a woman a cleaning product for a gift, it means you think it’s HER JOB.

The video:

The website include the sound of a woman nagging and giving inconsistent orders (“speak less,” “talk more”).

How to get out of the doghouse? Buy your wife diamonds (at JC Penney):

I like how it says that she’ll be “screaming and jumping for joy.”  Gah, women are so shallow and annoying.

There’s more!  The website is interactive.  You can actually put people in the doghouse.  If you are on Facebook, you can upload someone’s profile picture and have it show up on the website.  A fascinating new way to merge advertising and social networking sites.

NEW (Jan. ’10)!  JC Penney apparently thought this campaign was so delightful that they updated it. Joel P. sent us the link. It’s really quite obnoxious (for all the reasons discussed above):

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U45oxUyiMc[/youtube]

Jezebel also has a nice analysis.

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 found this Absolut Vodka ad in Entertainment Weekly:

It draws on that whole Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus ideology in which men and women are so different we can barely understand each other without expert help.

UPDATE: Commenter ihdl pointed out this German dictionary, titled Woman-German, German-Woman: Quick Help for the Clueless Man:

And Emberiza noted that a Man-German, German-Man is available as well:

Thanks for pointing them out!

Kona Grill specializes in “imaginative meals.”  In their ad campaign (discovered here), they sexualize their mixing of usually segregated culinary traditions (“East meets West”).  Here they put a fork and chopsticks in bed together:

Their food, apparently, is like interracial sex.  This is interesting in itself, but the copy goes further.  It reads:

A restuarant.  A bar.  A place where opposites attract.  Visit konagrill.com for a little taste.

So not only are East and West (or Asians and Americans) different, they’re “opposites.”  Such advertising not only fetishizes interracial relationships, but it reinforces the idea that race and culture are such powerful and defining characteristics that people from the East and the West could not possibly have anything in common (except sex, of course).

I found this Merrill Lynch ad in The New Yorker last week:

What I found interesting about it was the text, which is talking about how the guy in the photo is a philanthropist. Examples of his products to “…improve the quality of life of people who are suffering” include better pacemakers, insulin pumps, a visual prosthesis for the blind (who knew?), and cochlear implants for the deaf. The reason it drew my attention is that while (to my knowledge, anyway) pacemakers and insulin are generally accepted as useful technologies that improve people’s lives, cochlear implants have been the subject of controversy. Many people in the deaf community argue deafness is not a “disease” or a “disability,” but simply a state of being (or a subculture), and that efforts to “correct” deafness are offensive and even culturally oppressive (for an example of this perspective, see this discussion from the Drury University website). Thus, while most people would see efforts to treat diabetes as an unequivocal good, and few diabetics would oppose them, opinions about cochlear implants are much more divided, and those who would presumably be seen as the beneficiaries of this technology are not necessarily convinced they need it or that there is anything “wrong” with them that requires intervention. In fact, within the deaf community individuals may face peer pressure to reject implants and those who get them are sometimes stigmatized as sell-outs, basically.

It might be a useful image for sparking a discussion about the social construction and definition of medical problems. Who gets to decide whether a condition is a disease or is just a human characteristic (that is, perhaps uncommon but not automatically problematic)? What if the individuals who have the characteristic disagree with the wider public (or among themselves) about its interpretation? You might use it to spark a discussion about medical interventions and ethics–what are the implications of the increasing ability to use medical innovations to alter a wide variety of characteristics? Are innovations such as cochlear implants helping improve the lives of those who cannot hear, or are they simply reinforcing the idea that deafness isn’t “normal” and thus should be treated as a medical problem? And why does resistance to medical intervention arise surrounding some issues, such as deafness, but not others (for instance, as far as I know, there isn’t the same level of controversy surrounding blindness)?

One of the preview ads for the Blackberry Storm is shot from the point of view of a guy approaching a Blackberry on a table. We hear his internal monologue, then see his hand reach for the Blackberry. As music wells up and the scene disappears, we’re supposed to assume that he’s been impressed or sucked into an alternate reality or something.

The framing of the ad puts the viewers in the man’s place. assuming that the viewers are heteronormative white bourgeois men and, if they aren’t, imposing this status upon them. It’s a nice example of how modern US middle-class society continues to assume that hetero white men are the default type of people.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbWsQCbqcE0[/youtube]

In this McCain-Palin ad which, I believe, started running yesterday, it is stated that an Obama presidency will bring on international military conflict (at least that’s my reading of the images), while a McCain presidency means no international military conflict.

Sociologically what is interesting about this ad is the way in which danger can be socially constructed. What we fear most is not necessarily what is most likely to cause us harm. Consider, most of us are more afraid of riding in hot air balloons than cars but, even proportionally, your chances of dying in a hot air balloon crash are much smaller than your chances of dying in a car crash. People around us–e.g., our parents and friends, but also politicians–try to shape the degree of fear we have for any given situation. Politicans, especially, are not necessarily doing it out of a concern for our well-being.

What do we really need to fear in the next four years? This McCain ad nicely tries to draw our attention away from the fear of, say an economic depression or climate change, in favor of an international military conflict. Though he doesn’t say so explicitly, it seems obvious to me that he’s implying a terrorist attack. It’s not obvious to me, though, that a military conflict or terrorist attack is more likely to cause extreme and extended suffering than any other potential crisis, but it would useful to McCain if I thought so, because it’s the one sphere in which it is widely agreed that McCain is superior to Obama. Thus, as an extremely powerful figure, he attempts to shape our collective understanding of what is (most) dangerous, what we should (most) fear, and win the presidency through the cultivation of a culture of fear.

Marriage–as a social and legal institution–has not always been what it is today.

In early American history, when families largely lived on farms and worked for sustenance, people didn’t marry because they loved each other.  And they certainly didn’t split up because they did not.  Marriage choices were highly influenced by their families and, once married, husbands and wives formed a working partnership aimed at production.  They teamed up to support themselves and make children who would take care of them when they were old and help them in the meantime.

Today, we still (generally) think of marriage as comprised of a man, a woman, and kids, but mutual love and happiness are now central goals of marriage.  This idea only emerged in the 1900s.  It hasn’t actually been around all that long.

I bring this up in order to shed some light on the pro- and anti- gay marriage rhetoric.

On the one hand, those against gay marriage need to define “marriage” in a way that excludes same-sex couples.  One way to do this is to refer to a “traditional” marriage (image found here).

But there is no such thing as a “traditional” marriage, just a long history of evolving forms of marriage.  For example, few anti-gay marriage types would actually be in favor of returning marriage to one in which women were property that can’t contract, vote, testify in court, own anything, and have no rights to their own bodies or custody of their children (though the idea that women are property is still out there today).  Because there is no such thing as a “traditional” marriage (that is, no reason to privilege one historical form over another), when someone speaks of “traditional” marriage, they actually just mean “the kind of marriage that I like that I am pretending existed throughout all time before this current threat right now.”

On the other hand, to make an argument in favor of gay marriage rights, the movement must either (1) change the collective agreement as to what marriage is (the social construction of marriage) or (2) convince the collective that gay marriage already is what we believe marriage to be.

This ad in favor of gay marriage does the latter. Mobilizing the social construction of marriage as about love, the commercial then defines same-sex relationships as about love. If you accept both premises, then, presto, you are pro-gay marriage.  That is exactly what this commercial is trying to do:

NEW!  This Swedish commercial for Bjorn Borg’s dating website, sent in by Ed L., similarly mobilizes the idea that marriage is for love and that gay men’s marriages are, therefore, beautiful:

Below are two photos — one of Barack Obama as an adult and one of a young Obama and his Grandfather, Stanley Dunham (found here and here).  I tried a little experiment in class. I put up the photo of adult Obama and I had my students make a list of what characteristics made him identifiably Black, in their view. Every one of them put on their list his nose, lips, and hair, and several made comments about his ears or just that “the combination of all his facial features” was “clearly” Black.

Then I brought up the photo of young Obama and his grandfather alongside it:

It led to a really interesting discussion. Because my students think of Obama as Black, they saw all his features through that racial lens. It was obvious to them that he had “Black” facial features. After viewing the photos next to one another, they talked about how the two men look very similar, but their facial features seem “clearly” Black on one person and “clearly” White on the other because we’re used to believing that Blacks and Whites look very different. Because they believe in racial differences, they see them. This activity seemed to really help students grasp what I meant when I talked about the way we identify things as racial differences when they’re really variations that occur in many different groups that we swear are physically distinct from one another.

It’s interesting because I’d halfway expected my students to argue that Obama doesn’t “really” look Black at all — that they would say his skin color and hair, perhaps, were identifiable as African American, but that they would point out that he’s half-White and argue that in fact he doesn’t have stereotypically Black or White features. I mean, that would made sense, right? But I’ve tried this with three classes now, as well as several random individuals I’ve subjected to it to see if it might work as a class activity, and no one has yet failed to identify a number of the facial features Obama and Dunham share as specifically African-American features when they see them on Obama.

What a great example of racialization and the social construction of race.

See also our Pinterest pages: what color is flesh? and the social construction of race.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.