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This is the global Feminist Blogs aggregator. It collects articles from many smaller community hubs within the Feminist Blogs network. For stories from particular places, groups, or other communities within our movement, check out some of these sites.
Gender
My friend Matt M. let me know about this video from The Second City Network that nicely sums up some of the disturbing messages about love, dating, and gender in animated movies such as Beauty and the Beast. Enjoy!
Also watch an earlier on on The Little Mermaid.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
The Daily Kos highlighted an ad for Summer’s Eve in this month’s Woman’s Day magazine. Women’s magazines are peppered with douching advertisements, so why did this one prompt nine people — Tony S., Pharmacopaeia, Frank B., Jason W., Tom M., Jesse W., Sarah P., Ilysse W., and Philippa von Z. — to send it to us? Take a look:
What makes this a remarkable instead of a regular douche ad is the suggestion that Summer’s Eve is interested in women’s empowerment.
This is odd because douching is well understood to be bad for healthy women’s bodies. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, for example, explains:
Most doctors and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommend that women don’t douche. Douching can change the delicate balance of vaginal flora (organisms that live in the vagina) and acidity in a healthy vagina. One way to look at it is in a healthy vagina there are both good and bad bacteria. The balance of the good and bad bacteria help maintain an acidic environment. Any changes can cause an over growth of bad bacteria which can lead to a yeast infection or bacterial vaginosis. Plus, if you have a vaginal infection, douching can push the bacteria causing the infection up into the uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries.
Douching is bad for you, ladies. So the fact that the C.B. Fleet Co., the company that owns Summer’s Eve, tries to convince all women that they need to regularly douche is not only manipulative, it’s harmful. If it wants to maximize its profit, however, the company needs healthy women to feel that their vaginas are disgusting. And so they tell us that it is over and over again.
You see, C.B. Fleet ‘n friends doesn’t give a shit about you. They don’t care if you get that raise; and they certainly don’t care if their product is unnecessary and potentially harmful in most cases. They just want to make money. And if using a feminist-sounding you-go-girl ad will do that, then they’ll slap on a smile and laugh all the way to the bank.
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In our more fledgling days we highlighted quite a few examples of marketing that co-opted feminist messages. See our other examples of ads for bras, cleaning products and contraceptives (see here and here), botox (here and here), diamond rings, moisturizer, makeup, cars, cigarettes, and credit cards, Whirlpool, Philip Morris, Virginia Slims (here and here), and the new Disney princesses. And none of this is new, see this example of a woman’s magazine marketing to suffragettes in 1910.
See also our collection of vintage douche ads.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
At long last, the question we've long wondered here at TGW moves to the New York Times.
Yet more scary fear and loathing of Muslims in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The small uptight college town is 35 miles from Nashville: 
David Mayeda at The Grumpy Sociologist discussed a commercial, for Best Buy, encouraging us (men?) to feel embarrassed if we don’t have the most recent technology:
Mayeda sees this as an example of the making of deviance. He writes:
So, as a male, if you don’t have the financial capital to possess a kick ass phone, you are a deviant male, with a low-end job (sharing a cubicle), without technical prowess (can’t stay on top of your e-mail or access the net), and bottom line, you aren’t an attractive mate.
How far “behind” does a person need to “fall” before they are so “out of the loop” that they are not really part of respectable society anymore?
I have only had a cell phone myself for four short years. Yet, when I learn that someone doesn’t have one, the neurons in my brain short out a bit. How do two people even know each other if one doesn’t have a cell phone? How do you let someone know you’ve hit traffic? Find them in a crowded place? Cell phones have become so ubiquitous that not having one seems deliberately counter-cultural. Like face tattoos or men in skirts, eschewing a cell phone seems deviant indeed. So maybe Best Buy isn’t that far off the mark.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
Miriam H. noticed that the “Plus Size” section of the Frederick’s of Hollywood website uses very thin women to model the clothes, a phenomenon we’ve documented at Woman Within, even as it boasts “SEXY AT EVERY SIZE” and “Styles in sizes up to 3X and 42F”:
I browsed through all of the front pages for the categories at the left and noticed only one photograph of a woman that could pass as a “plus size” model:
This got me to wondering where these photos come from… and I have absolutely no answer to this question. I don’t know if Frederick’s arranges for these photos to be taken, if they hire a company to take these photos, if the manufacturers have the photos taken and give or sell them to Frederick’s. That might explain the single image with a plus-sized woman. It also seems to me that the photos vary quite a bit stylistically, suggesting that they were coming from different places. For example:
I suspect, as well, that the reason all of the products are modeled by thin models is because only one photo of each product is produced (one with a thin model on the assumption that plus-sized models could not be used to sell to non-plus-sized people). That is, it would be twice as expensive to show two differently sized women in the garment, so women searching for plus-sized clothes don’t get to see the garment in their size.
Then again, as I continue to think out loud, almost no women buying any of these clothes has a body that approximates that of the models in these photos. So this is not a non-representation issue for larger women, it’s a non-representation issue for almost all women.
So this seems to me to be an issue of representation, but also an issue of the institutional and financial constraints of the fashion industry. Thoughts? Insights? Answers?
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
OR:
Cross-posted at Jezebel.
Katherine sent us a link to the Vermont Teddy Bear company and pointed out the set of bears listed “for him” and “for her.” Interestingly, a lot of the bears seem to be aimed at adults (there is a separate tag “for kids,” with only 19 options). Here are some of the 51 bears listed on the page for men:
The “distinguished” salt and pepper bear:
A racecar driver:
Desert camouflage bear:
Um…the Red Hot Redneck, whose tattoo gives him “authenticity”:
Doctor:
Business Man bear (also listed as Accountant and Lawyer):
Now let’s look at the bears for women. Beach Babe:
The Do It All bear. I initially thought it was a non-gendered bear, but the description refers to “she,” she’s wearing yoga pants, and the item in her hand is “Mama Bear to Do List”:
They do have a Business Woman bear, described as a “furry sophisticate” (we didn’t get any info on how sophisticated the Business Man bear is):
Nurse (there is no doctor bear in the “for her” section):
The Bear-Foot and Pregnant bear:
Of the 51 bears for men and 50 for women, here are some patterns in the themes:
Occupations/jobs: m = 10 w = 4
Family/housework: m = 2 (including a groom) w = 10
Sexy/romantic: m = 10 w = 6
Sports: m = 4 w = 2
Non-sport leisure activities: m = 5 w = 8 (including yoga)
Shopping/fashion/superstar: m = 0 w = 4
Fitness/beauty: m = 0 w = 3
Other sex presented as romantic interest: m = 0 w = 2
Military: m = 3 w = 0
Other: m = 15 w = 12
We also see gender differences within those categories; for instance, men and women are shown doing different sports and having different jobs (with only one overlap, the businessman and businesswoman, but otherwise pretty gendered occupations). And only men are interested in “computer geek” bears. The kids’ bears section shows a similar pattern.
Just another little example of how gendering permeates our culture, with gendered products both resulting from larger cultural assumptions about gender and reinforcing them in a recurring feedback loop.
As for the fact that most of the company’s bears seem targeted at adults, I don’t know what to make of that. I just don’t get it. My sister gave me a teddy bear a few years back for Christmas and I was entirely confounded, though no more so than when my mom gave me a set of romance novels set among the Amish.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
Gwen and I usually refrain from posting material that seems culturally marginal. There’s a lot of disturbing stuff that pops up on the fringes, but we’re mostly interested in illustrating culturally dominate tropes with particularly influential cases (for example, lessons from music videos by artists like Eminem, Rihanna, and Kanye West). My first instinct, when I received a link to a set of cartoon at The Oatmeal from Sully R., was to skip it for this reason. But when I got to the end of the page, I saw this:
Nearly 2,500 diggs, 743 tweets, over 8,000 people on facebook sharing it, and nearly 8,000 stumbleupons. What was this content that so many people had felt compelled to share?
It’s five cartoons illustrating hilarious ways to “use” a sex worker… eh em, “hooker.” The message is: once you pay for a sex worker, you get to do anything you want with her, including demean her for your own entertainment.
I guess the point of this post is: I thought this was fringe. I thought, “Oh sure, another set of sexist cartoons. They’re everywhere. Whatever.” But then I was shocked by how many people had thought they were hilarious enough to share with their friends and strangers. This is not fringe at all… it’s just everyday LOL.
(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
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