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.
In lieu of commentary, I am just going to transcribe the text of this ad, sent in by The Sexual Buzz:
Question: Why won’t your wife let you buy this wagon?
“It looks like a bus.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead in it.”
Do these sound familiar? Your wife is not alone. It is hard to convince some women what sense the VW Station Wagon makes.
It’s chunky shape, for instance, allows it to hold more than the biggest conventional wagon. (Yet it is a good four feet shorter, and a lot less exasperating to park.)
She might like the easy way it loads. The side doors give her almost 16 sq. ft. for big supermarket bags, a baby carriage, etc.
The Volkswagen Station Wagon does not have to take anything lying down. She can cart home an antique chest, standing up. Or delicate trees from the nursery. (Wide things, too. It will hold an open playpen.)
She can comfortably pack in eight or more Scouts, with all their cook-out gear.
She can give the family some extra sun on the way to the beach. (Why no other station wagon has a sun-roof is a mystery.)
Even if the traffic is bumper to bumper on hot days, she will not have to worry about the radiator boiling over. There is no radiator, no water. (The Volkswagen engine is air cooled.)
She may get a kick out of beeping to the other women who drive VW Station Wagons. (They have a kind of private club.)
Or maybe she likes to see where she is going. (The VW wagon has incredible visibility on hills and curves.)
If these facts don’t convince her, tell her it’s only $2655 and you aren’t made of money.
UPDATE! Commenter jfruh had a nice observation:
Interesting in that vans (and the VW Bus pretty much was the first van) are now fully feminized in the US, associated with “soccer moms.” I’m guessing a gendered van ad today would involve a wife extolling just these sorts of practical features to convince her husband to buy a “wimpy” van instead of the sports car that he wants.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
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.
I love this 1981 Lego ad, sent in by Nora R. (found at Flikr):
This is what I looked like as a kid. Except that I have naturally curly hair that my mom couldn’t control, so add a halo of frizz sticking out everywhere. And it’s been a while since I’ve seen an ad that shows a girl like this–wearing clothes and playing with a toy that aren’t meant to be specifically “feminine” in our current version of that. She’s playing with regular Legos–not some special version for girls that makes a shopping mall or purse or tube of lipstick! And she’s beautiful!
I’ve seen other ads from the ’70s and ’80s, particularly for Tonka trucks, that show girls like this–in clothes that look like they’re actually made for playing instead of making a fashion statement, and playing with toys in the same way boys would, even if it means getting dirty (gasp!). When we see ads that always show girls in pink, playing with “girl” versions of toys, or engaged in passive activities, that’s a particular marketing choice, not some inevitable, obvious way girls need to be depicted to sell products.
[Note: In the comments, we’re getting a lot of love for the Legos. That’s fine and all, but I must speak up for Lincoln Logs, which were way more awesome if you wanted to build corrals to hold your Breyer horses.]
[Note 2: Holy crap! Someone remade the “Thriller” video with Lego people! I have to admit, Legos probably work better for this purpose than Lincoln Logs would.]
NEW! Nov ’09 I found three more examples of ads that seem devoid of gender differentiation (here, here, and here):
Remember the hymen? The hymen is that flap of skin that “seals” the vagina until a woman has sexual intercourse for the first time. Supposedly one could tell whether a girl/woman was a virgin by whether her hymen was “intact.” (It bears repeating that neither of these things are true: it doesn’t “seal” the vagina and is not a sign of virginity at all.)
Because an intact hymen signaled virginity, and virginity has been considered very important, preserving and protecting the hymen was, at one time, an important task for girls and women. You can imagine how tricky this made the marketing of that brand new product: the tampon. Early marketing made an effort to dispel the idea that sticking just anything up there de-virginized you. It worked. (In fact, some partially credit tampon manufacturers for the de-fetishization of the hymen that’s occurred over the last 60 years.)
We still see tampon marketing addressing the question. Here’s a link to a website where it’s a FAQ and here’s an example of an advertisement from the ’70s ’90s:
Selected text:
I really wanted to use tampons, but I’d heard you had to be, you know, ‘experienced.’ So I asked my friend Lisa. Her mom is a nurse so I figured she’d know. Lisa told me she’d been using Petal Soft Plastic Applicator Tampax tampons since her very first period and she’s a virgin. In fact, you can use them at any age and still be a virgin.
See this post, too, on the marketing of tampon to women in the workforce (wearing pants!) during World War II.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
These Virginia Slims ads from 1969, sent in by Fred H., show how the idea of “progress” was as useful then as it is now (see also this post on the subject). The commercials suggests that the right to smoke is part and parcel of women’s liberation.
Fred also notes the suggestion that “petite things are meant for women.” Notice that the last commercial, on a different theme, uses not only the “slim” analogy, but also calls the cigarette “beautiful.”
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXUbkIkwn2Y[/youtube]
For other examples of co-optation, see these posts using feminism to sell guns (here and here), beauty products (here and here), botox, diamond rings, cars and credit cards, cars and bras, pornography, cleaning products, panties, and eyeglasses, washing machines, and, of course, cigarettes (here and here).
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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.
Toban B. sent in a link to a clip of a 1935 Department of the Interior movie that includes a scene with African American conservation workers. I couldn’t find an embed code, so you have to click over, but the clip clearly illustrates the “happy-go-lucky,” dancing and singing stereotype of Blacks common to the era. The person who posted the clip says,
The racial stereotyping in this clip is appalling, but not surprising for a 1935 production. Hollywood films of that era also portrayed African-Americans purely for laughs. It was a rare film that showed black people as more than two-dimensional, and when they did – as Hattie McDaniel demonstrated in Gone With The Wind – Hollywood was ready to pat itself on the back.
Of course, Spike Lee’s movie “Bamboozled” implied that this type of stereotypical Black-man-as-happy-man-child-entertainer trope is still alive and well. He’s been criticized for his portrayal, of course, but it’s food for thought.
Oh, man. As if we needed another reminder as to why cartoon art is a medium that can be used for evil as easily as good, comes now the next installment in a series of racist National Review covers trafficking in Asian stereotypical imagery.
You’ll remember, of course, that back in March 1997, the National Review released the infamous “Manchurian Candidates” cover seen here (which, due to the fact that the Internet was just a tot when that slice of tripe hit the newsstands, I was only able to find in embedded in a journal article written by Darrell Hamamoto, w00t!).
Asian Americans understandably reacted with stunned rage at the depiction of then-President Bill Clinton, First Lady Hillary Clinton, and Vice-President Al Gore in stereotypical Chinese garb, their features warped into exaggerated Asian caricatures (slanted eyes, buck teeth).
The National Review was unrepentant in the face of charges that the cartoon was offensive and inflammatory, responding, in part, that:
Caricatures and cartoons …require exaggerated features and, where a social type is portrayed, a recognizable stereotype. Thus, a cartoonist who wants to depict an Englishman will show him wearing a monocle and bowler hat, a Frenchman in beret and striped jersey, a Russian in fur hat, dancing the gopak, etc.
The first point can’t entirely be disputed: The cartoon medium often uses simplified, exaggerated features for emphasis, for satirical purpose and for ease in depicting broad emotion.
But it’s one thing to exaggerate features — Obama’s protruding ears invariably become giant jug-handles when he’s rendered, for instance. The Mike Ramirez cartoon below actually essentializes Obama’s appearance down to his ears — and still manages to make its point clear.
It’s another to incorporate racialized features that weren’t there to begin with: For instance, consider these images — a caricature of Obama from an “Obama Waffles” package, as gleefully sold during the right-wing ” Values Voters Summit,” and a close-up of Obama’s official portrait from his days as Senator from Illinois.
Apart from being overtly racist, the caricature on the box doesn’t remotely resemble Obama — with its pop-eyed expression, darkened skin, enormous, toothy grin and thick lips, it looks a lot more like…well, the picture below can speak for itself, I guess.
Going back to the National Review “Manchurian Candidates” cover now, what you see is that there’s more going on in the images of the Clintons and Gore than the typical flamboyant exaggeration used in cartooning. In addition to Bill’s bulbous nose and Gore’s pursed, almost sneering lips (both typical of their respective caricatures), you see…hmm…narrowed eyes… oversized, bucked teeth… a Fu Manchu moustache– hey, just about every racist synecdoche in the anti-Asian propaganda library! (At least the stuff that belongs above the waist.)
Just to be clear here: It’s one thing if they were simply drawn in Chinese clothing or doing quaint folkdances, as suggested by the National Review in its disgenuous response. That would arguably be in-bounds satirically (regardless of whether you find the political point being made to be fair or accurate).
But layering yellowface-propaganda memes into the picture transforms the caricature from an act of humor into an act of war. The images to the right are examples of what I’m talking about.
Even if you’re insensitive enough to racial propriety to want to give white people Asian features in order to prove a political point, that simply isn’t what Asian people look like, and never has been. The squinty, buck-toothed Asian person with bright yellow skin and eyes angled at ten minutes to two does not exist in nature. However much you soften it, those false features are in fact weapons of mass destruction, artifacts of an era where it was used to dehumanize the enemy enough so they could be killed without compunction.
For that reason, there’s no acceptable way they should be invoked in a casual popular context, any more than minstrel stereotypes or anti-semitic “Elders of Zion” caricatures have a place in everyday culture. Discouragingly, they remain persistent in media today — from entertainment (see left: Rob Schneider in 2007’s “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry“) to news and commentary. Well, actually not most news and commentary — it’s really only the profoundly racist right-wing organs that still blithely fart out the yellowface imagery. Like, for instance…the National Review.
This cover to the right is the current issue of the magazine, on stands now. As you can see, it depicts Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor as the Buddha. Despite the fact that Sotomayor is Catholic and a Latina woman. While the historical Buddha, Siddhārtha Gautama, was Hindu (before the whole Bodhi tree thing), and an Asian man.
The caption, “The Wise Latina,” frankly offers no real f*cking explanation for the image. I suppose it’s because the Buddha was wise, although you could just as easily have depicted Sotomayor as King Solomon if you’re looking for a legendary figure of wisdom; maybe it’s because to the raving radical Right, Buddha is seen as a proto-hippie and probably a pansy too, while King Solomon, that guy threatened to cut babies in half — not very pro-life, but not “empathetic” either. Badass!
But seriously: If they wanted a figure of wisdom and empathy, why not caricature Sotomayor as someone who’s of the right gender and a coreligionist, at least: Mother Teresa? That would have preserved the necessary level of corrosive offensiveness, right? Too close to home?
Whatever. As it is, the cover is just stupid and meaningless, as well as offensive — to women, to Latinas, to Buddhists of all backgrounds (note: The National Review guys are of the same ilk that went ballistic when Rolling Stone depicted Kanye as Jesus)…
…and yes, to Asians. But it bears mentioning that it registers as EPIC FAIL even in the offending Asians category.
Because, unlike their “Manchurian Candidates” cover, where at least they picked the correct racist stereotypes to parade, the “Wise Latina” cover puts the hideously slanted eyes and bucked teeth of East Asian yellowface stereotype onto an image inspired by a Northern Indian man of Brahmin descent.
In fact…. you can see the original image of Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha that the artist used as a reference (it’s actually quite a popular icon). Notice any differences?
As usual, National Review has been quick with a completely absurd and totally disingenuous retort to the appalled reactions they’ve been getting from, you know, everyone. From editor-in-chief Rich Lowry:
I take it the theory is that we don’t think Latinas can be wise so we had to make her look somewhat Asian. Or something like that. What these people don’t understand is the entire concept of caricature (or of a joke). Caricature always involves exaggerating someone’s distinctive features, which is all that our artist Roman Genn did with Sotomayor. Oh, well. Keep it humorless, guys, keep it humorless.
No, Rich, the theory is that you took a Latina woman and turned her into a North Indian man with horribly racist East Asian-stereotypical features because you guys are clueless morons. And actually, that’s kind of funny, in that Lowry and the National Review don’t quite get that the joke, ultimately, is on them.
NEW! Kate M. pointed out an image similar to the one of Sotomayor as the “wise Latina.” This one is of Newt Gingrich as a “guru” and ran in the liberal magazine Mother Jones:
Is this more or less offensive than the Sotomayor example cover? The thing that I think distinguishes the two is that Gingrich’s features are not exaggerated into a warped stereotype of Asian features, possible the most offensive element of the Sotomayor caricature.
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Jeff Yang is the editor-in-chief at Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Blog and the Asian Pop columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. You can follow him on Twitter and friend him on Facebook.
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