For more historical U.S. representations of blacks, see these posts: one, twp, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen.

And for examples of modern reproductions of these stereotypes (literally), see these: one, two, three, four, and five.

Interested in the decision to remove the iconic bull’s scrotum in advertisements? Go here.

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Xavier M. sent in this German commercial for a line of lingerie that seems to capitalize on the idea that preparing oneself for the male gaze is, in fact, liberating (even if no man will see you):

The woman dresses up in lingerie, admiring herself, only to cover up in a burka.  But she is still “hot” underneath, affirming the idea that looking “hot” is what makes women both happy and liberated.  The idea that a woman might want to be FREE from capitulating to the male gaze (even if just an imagined one) is left unexplored.

See also our posts that feature fetish-type photos of women, highly sexualized, wearing burkas (sort of; NSFW) here and, especially, here.

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Deepa says,

Ishan Tankha, photographer…sitting in casually imperial isolation on one of the many historical monuments peppering Delhi…

Meanwhile every other shot? The gaudy, public, and exotically poor street life of Delhi. At most we get some middle class women shopping, some Metro commuters, and Ishan riding his bike in front of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

But even as he is saying climate change spans all classes, there are no other young, upper class people like him, no rich people, no half-naked-out-of-fashion-rather-than-poverty women, no fat cat industrialists or cavalcade-riding politicians, no indication that there are any of the Westernised English speaking people on the streets, even though Ishan has been chosen spokesperson.

I’m calling this the Slumdog Shooting technique – use English because you don’t want to alienate your Western audience with subtitles, but keep the local colour full of attractive yet needy children, crowds that look struggling, and picturesque poverty.

Also check out our posts on “starving African kids,” juxtaposing wealth and poverty, the white woman’s burden, the “we are all African” campaign, making charity recipients look gross, tourism in Brazil, us and them, Burger King’s Whopper Virgin campaign, India needs western technology, and de-racializing the modern/traditional binary.

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Because how could we possibly market internet access without sexualizing a woman (and as Mary points out, it looks like she may be braless)?

Also see our post on what the internet is for.

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I always thought Diet Coke Plus (with vitamins!) was kind of silly (image source).  Lo and behold, there was a time that Schlitz beer tried to market itself as vitamin beer!

Another great example of how times change.

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The Birth Whisperer (and just about everyplace else in the birthosphere) has published a sign posted in the Aspen Women’s Center in Utah, USA.

Description: A teal sign on an office wall, reading:

Because the physicians at Aspen Women’s Center care about the quality of their patient’s[sic] deliveries and are very concerned about the welfare and health of your unborn child, we will not participate in: a “Birth Contract”, a Doulah[sic] Assisted, or a Bradley Method of delivery.

For those patients who are interested in such methods, please notify the nurse so that we may arrange transfer of your care.

What struck me first about this sign was, somehow, not the illegality of refusing the presence of a doula at a birth and refusing informed consent for obstetric procedures, but the massive, glaring, deliberate omission of the woman in that opening clause.

These doctors are not concerned with women. These doctors are not concerned with women’s welfare. These doctors are not concerned with women’s health. These doctors see “delivery” (not “birth”, note) as a transaction between fetus and doctor, in which a woman is no more than an annoying, obstructive, hostile incubator. These doctors insist, explicitly, upon their dominion over women’s bodies.

They demand that their power be absolute – to the point of forbidding women to educate themselves, to the point of isolating women from sources of support, to the point of refusing women the right to decline them free access to their vaginas. This is the very definition of “abuse”.

Sadly, as so many have noted, all they’re doing is making it explicit. They’re not the only doctors with this attitude, with these rules. The only difference between them and many others is that they declare their hatred for you up front, instead of springing it on you later.

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See also Lauredhel’s follow up post on the science (or lack thereof) behind the refusal to have a doula present.

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So we move from a fully-clothed manga character to a cover with a photo of a naked woman with her head cut out of the image, removing all subjectivity. The publisher says they did so in order to try to draw in a wider audience than people who are already interested in manga, and apparently they decided that a naked woman is the way to draw the interest of U.S. readers.

I wish I could say they’re totally wrong and it would never work. But clearly Evony also thought it would be effective. I wish I knew how their sales have changed as their advertising became more boob-centric.

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You can also look at the data via a list.  This data is the percentage of the budget spent on the military:

Via Look At This.

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I have to agree with FOX News here.  Sexualizing a woman is a way to make her seem less important.  It’s, literally, to disempower her.  This magazine cover tells us that we shouldn’t take Palin seriously.   With her short shorts, sexy legs, pigtails, and friendly smile, it turns her into a political joke.

But this is about more than gender; it’s about the relationship between power and sex in our society.  Because we so frequently see sex as a power struggle, to be presented as a sexual object is to be presented as passive, consumable, inert (remember, only one person gets “fucked”).  While both men and women can be presented as sexual objects, because of sexism, this particular tool can be used more effectively against women than men.  (And when it is used against a man, it often has the effect of feminizing him, making an association with femininity/sexual subordination the very thing that disempowers him.  Ah the tangled web of sex, sexuality, gender, and power.)

Whether you think Palin should or shouldn’t be taken seriously is irrelevant here.  What is interesting is just how much Newsweek can do to influence the public one way or another, even if all they do is see the cover.

Images matter.

For comparison, I did a quick search for Newsweek covers featuring the last election’s Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates for comparison.  Compare:

For more examples of the sexualization of Palin, see here, here, and here.

And for more on the relationship between sex and power, see these posts: power one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,and, eleven.

(Sources: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

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So guys are made up of, among other things, obnoxium, machisium, bragnausium, and larcenic.

If you go to the Sociology section you can take two quizzes. The first is about getting dressed (take the quiz here). If at the first step you answer that you are male you are taken to a second step that asks “model or guy?” If you answer model, you are directed to the female category. Once on the female track, you get to go through a series of questions playing on stereotypes of women and, apparently, men who don’t qualify as “guys”:

The second one is on being comfortable (quiz is here). In the second step you have to choose between “sensitive type”  or “guy,” and if you choose “sensitive type,” you go to the female section:

In both cases, at the end of the female path, the last question is “Wouldn’t you rather just be a guy?”

It’s a great example of the association of “real” manliness with obnoxious characteristics, while men who don’t meet the requirements for being real men are feminized. While real guys are stereotyped (they’re self-centered, obnoxious, and braggy), those characteristics are still preferable to being a “sensitive” guy with “feelings” and “needs.” And of course, it also denigrates women when being associated with femininity is a way of ridiculing men.

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Our tech wizard, Jon S., and reader Katie C. sent in a link to a Danish campaign by the organization Children Exposed to Violence at Home to raise awareness of domestic violence. The campaign is called “Hit the Bitch!” and features a game where you can smack a woman around using either a mouse or your own hand if you have a web cam:

The game has now been limited to Danish users only.

The woman gets increasingly bruised and bloodied as you hit her.  I forced myself to try the site and hit her twice, and it was honestly sickening to watch her head jerk backward or to the side and hear the sound of the slap and her reacting.  At the top, a counter keeps track; you start out as 100% Pussy, 0% Gangsta, but your Gangsta rating goes up every time you hit her:

Apparently, though, when you get up to where you’d be at 100% Gangsta, it instead says 100% Idiot, as though this is a real put-down that is going to make you think really seriously about domestic violence.  I am trying to think of any context that would make this seem like a good idea, or an effective way to combat domestic violence.  I mean, ok, yeah, I guess people might be made more aware of it after hearing about or playing the game, but is it likely to have any positive effect?

It seems more likely that people who don’t already take domestic violence seriously would either be uncomfortable, leave the site, and never think about it again, or find it funny to play for a few minutes just to see what would happen…and somehow encouraging people to slap around an image of a woman for fun seems like a really weird way to get people to think more seriously about domestic violence.

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The Daily Show calls itself “a fake news show,” but it often does what the “real” news shows won’t. It documents how what people on news shows try to pass off as “spontaneous and unrehearsed” (as the opening of Meet the Press used to put it) is really planned and scripted at Talking Points Central. The Daily Show will give a quick montage of clips in which different people on different shows all use the same unusual word or phrase.

Last night it was “dithering.” A series of right-wingers, culminating in Dick Cheney, all accuse President Obama of “dithering” on Afghanistan.

Slide to 3:37:

It was just like the old days, when The Daily Show would string together clips from Bush Administration figures and right-wing commentators all using the same key words. But then, the statements all came on the same day, so the central direction was obvious. (I mean, it was obvious to Daily Show viewers, not to viewers of “real” news programs.)

The popularity of dithering may be more a case of contagion than planning. Note the dates of the O’Reilly and Cheney clips, more than two weeks apart.

Dithering is not a frequently used word. Lexis-Nexis shows only 27 instances in TV news transcripts for the first nine months of the year. The first use in connection with Afghanistan comes on September 24 – on Australian ABC, but the speaker was from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. So it’s likely that dithering represented one idea of how to attack Obama. That idea took hold.

Over the course of the next month, dithering begins to reverberate. Republican senators use it in hearings in early October, TV news people bounce it back, and right-wing commentators start yodeling it loudly.

They are changing the rationale for why we are in Afghanistan. What’s really going on here is a dither, a big dither, indecisiveness. (William Bennett on CNN, Oct. 18)

And finally the Cheney quote on Oct. 21 that is echoed in every news story about that speech.

The White House must stop dithering while America’s forces are in danger.

Quite possibly, Cheney’s speech was written by someone at the American Enterprise Institute or someone else in that neo-con circle. Still, I don’t see the dithering as a matter of “talking points” distributed by the RNC. Instead, it’s an example of what I mentioned in another post – a word (dithering, issues) that spreads because it just sounds “right,” at least to certain people.

I expect that the dithering life cycle will be mayfly brief. Issues to mean problems was slower to catch on, and it may hang around for a good while.

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For more on gender and responsibility for the home:

First, check out this longitudinal data on how much housework wives and husbands do.

Then, for more examples of how women are responsible for the home, see this KFC advertisement offering moms a night off, this a commercial montage, Italian dye ad with a twist, women love to clean, homes of the future, what’s for dinner, honey?, liberation through quick meals, and my husband’s an ass.

See also these humorous illustrations: I love it when you talk clean to me, men do housework fantasy calendar, the househusbands of Hollywood, and porn for new moms.

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If only I could say, “Oh, ha ha, academics could never be so self-indulgent and clueless!”

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Highly recommended (or read the transcript here):

Via Stuff White People Do.

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Close up:

So, the list is heteronormative (no “Mr. and Mr.” or “Ms. and Ms.”).

Further, because no write-ins are allowed, it also forces people who aren’t gender-typical to choose a gender if they want to send McCain a note.

And it bizarrely erases women doctors (no “Mr. and Dr.” or “Dr. and Mr.”).

Nice catch, Amanda!

UPDATE: After seeing this, Danielle F. sent in a screenshot of the honorifics choices that came up when she ordered tickets to “The Nutcracker” at the Detroit Opera House:

So you could theoretically be a single female Rev., Col., Capt., and so on, but the married versions of those all assume a female spouse. Notice they also have a listing for King, but not Queen.  I guess they get a lot of male royalty at the Detroit Opera House.

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Notice the clear decrease in the % of men in each group in good jobs between 1979 to 2008. The racial pattern is also striking, if not surprising, with Black and Hispanic men being significantly less likely to have a good job than White men in both 1979 and 2008. Notice the particularly large gap between White and Hispanic men in 2008–over 20 percentage points.

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Of course, having the “best room on campus” is only partly about creativity.  A person with money would have a significant advantage in this competition, as you can clearly see in the flyer itself (extra pillows, a rug, two extra lamps, extra furniture, etc).

I am sure that the people behind this had no intention of reinforcing a class hierarchy on campus.  But I’d bet my extra money that they were middle class or better.  Part of class privilege is the ability to forget that some people do not have the resources to put together a bangin’ room.   And part of being an economically disadvantaged student at a private college sometimes means being alienated from many of your peers for just that reason.

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In two others, however, Reebok dispensed with any pretense and just focused on body parts:

Notice with that one that the point of looking hot is to both make men want you and to make other women feel bad about themselves.

And finally we end up with just talking boobs:

Reminds me a bit of how the Evony video game ads changed over time.

(View original at http://contexts.org/socimages)