Sociological Images

Please welcome Guest Blogger Irin Carmon. Carmon is a reporter at Jezebel.com, from where we’re super pleased to have borrowed the post below.  Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Village Voice, and others; more information is at www.irincarmon.com.  Her evaluation of Jersey Shore is very different from one we posted recently, so we thought we’d add it to the mix.

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Jersey Shore has come to end, we’re (genuinely) sad to say. We know we had fun. But is it possible we also saw something, dare I say it, subversive about beauty, gender and sexuality? I think so.

A panel discussion on the show and “Guido culture” at Queens College yesterday (you read that right), included New York State Senator and Jezebel heroine Diane Savino, who knows from stinging cultural analysis.

[Savino] explained, “‘guido’ was never a pejorative.” It grew out of the greaser look and became a way for Italian-Americans who did not fit the standard of beauty to take pride in their own heritage and define cool for themselves.

When she was growing up, everybody listened to rock; girls were supposed to be skinny with straight blonde hair (like Marcia Brady on “The Brady Bunch”); guys wore ripped jeans, sneakers and straggly hair.

The 1977 film “Saturday Night Fever” marked a turning point. “It changed the image for all of us,” Ms. Savino said. As Tony Manero, John Travolta wore a white suit, had slicked short hair, liked disco music and was hot. “It was a way we could develop our own standard of beauty,” she added.

In the same way, Virginia Heffernan writes in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Italian-Americans in the Northeast originally disdained their own accents until movies like “Mean Streets, Saturday Night Fever, Working Girl and, of course, Taxi Driver.” Those representations, she says, led to a “hammy” reclamation of an identity that had been mirrored back to them through Hollywood. These were second and third generation immigrants, who had mostly reached the middle class but maybe didn’t feel wholly a part of the mainstream, who telegraphed their identity through stylized symbols like Italian flags and red sauce that felt potent but no longer limited their social mobility.

That goes for the ladies too. Female beauty that took on a showily “ethnic cast” was distinct from what was already being sold. As Regina Nigro recently put it on The Awl:

We (I) laugh at bon mots like “You don’t even look Italian!” (the insult that Sammi “Sweetheart” flings at the blonde blue-eyed “grenade” …) but, ridiculous as it is, that assessment betrays a value system: Skinny blonde pale WASP princesses are deemed not attractive when measured by the JS aesthetic. And this seems curious and laughable to us.

“You don’t even look Italian!” is crazy funny but is the underlying judgment (dark hair/olive skin/Italian-looking = pretty; the inverse = not pretty) any worse than any other standard of beauty? It’s an alternative perspective, one that I suspect is so funny partly because it is so unfamiliar.

Of course, there is plenty about the Jersey Shore sexual aesthetic that is broadly familiar. The worst insult is to call a woman fat (or a “hippo”); big, exposed boobs are a baseline requirement, and the men are judged by the attractiveness of the women they acquire. (The other guys repeatedly mock The Situation about the looks of the women he brings home; Ronnie taunts him that he hasn’t brought home a girl anywhere near as pretty as Sammi).

And yet it’s oddly refreshing how much artifice itself is celebrated, with everyone participating mightily, and openly, in becoming the ideal Guido. No one is just born one, or supposed to make it look effortless. There are communal visits to tanning salons and unblinking references to fake breasts, and everyone takes hours to get ready. Vinny describes a girl admiringly: “Fake boobs, nice butt, said she was a model.”

Heffernan, writing about regional accents being reinforced by the show, uses Sammi as an example: “Every part of Sweetheart’s identity – including her skin color, which on the show is not an inborn marker of ethnicity but a badge of achievement (in the tanning bed) – is the product of intense calculation.” And Heffernan didn’t even get to Sammi’s hair extensions, which are brandished for emphasis.

No character more desperately self-produces than The Situation and his third-person pronouncements. Men are not inscluded [sic] from all this ritual artifice. In the last episode, J-Woww practically goes into heat when she sees some “juicehead gorillas” on the beach, and she lists “Human Growth Hormone” among the attractions. This, by the way, leads The Situation to mumble defensively, “Big is out and lean is in.”

That’s because on The Jersey Shore, men’s bodies are just as scrutinized as women’s, and their beauty rituals are as elaborate, expensive, and time-consuming as those of the women. Maybe even more so — in addition to blowouts, tanning sessions, and agonizing over which appliqued shirt will set them apart from the gelled masses, they spend hours at the gym, something we never see the girls do.

As much as the cast performed all this around the clock during the show’s taping, the audition tapes seen here and in the video below are even more extreme, mixing ethnic calculation with the general famewhoring savviness reality producers have become accustomed to.

Looking at this through what we know now: Sammi calls herself a “hookup slut” but aside from a few flirtations, turned out to be conventionally monogamous on the show. Vinny, in straight-up costume, claims he has to take off his pants “to really show you the magic,” but turned out to be the mildest-mannered cast member, one who unashamedly adores his doting mother. Underneath playing to the producers, though, is a more personal kind of construction, and a more particular one. And ironically, although the cast members’ self-creation was one of the most entertaining parts of the show, some underlying sense of unembarrassed authenticity, even wholesomeness, made it most worth watching.

Back in August I posted about an article in Glamour that showed a “normal” woman’s body–that is, a woman who wasn’t stick-skinny and whose abs weren’t rock hard. Apparently the article was extremely popular and Glamour got a lot of positive feedback about it. The editor promised more images of “normal” looking women in the future.

I have to admit, I wasn’t entirely convinced. Many magazines have articles about the dangers of eating disorders or crash diets right next to photos of extremely thin models. And the Glamour article was specifically about the woman’s body and unrealistic beauty standards.

The article is about wearing “nude” colored clothing–which is in itself an assumption of whose skin is neutral, much like the AP story about Michelle Obama’s “flesh” colored dress. The model is Crystal Renn, one of the best-known “plus-size” models (at a size 12, which wouldn’t usually be considered plus-size to most of us in our daily lives). What struck me is that she is used, without comment, in a regular fashion spread, not one specifically about body image, loving yourself no matter what size you are, or clothes that look good on plus-size women. Here are the first two pages of the article:

By no means is she what most of us would consider plus-sized. When I saw the photos, I suspected she’d been airbrushed in any number of ways, including to look smaller than she actually is (the shape of her top leg in that first photo looks particularly suspicious).

In this photo, her arm looks thinner than it might actually be, and her collar bones are prominent, as is so popular for models these days. But she also clearly has thighs and calves that have not been airbrushed completely out of existence and that look like those of some actual women I know: 

In this photo she even has a little bulge around her stomach, and her arms aren’t tiny:

On the one hand we have a model in Glamour who is clearly larger than most models we see in magazines, and her weight isn’t the point of the article–the article is targeted at all readers (except non-White ones, of course) and her body is not remarked on at all. She’s normalized, just another model in the magazine. I can’t help but be happy about that.

But…here is a photo of Renn from the May 2009 issue of the Australian version of Harper’s Bazaar (found at Corpulent):

She’s clearly larger than in the Glamour article. I don’t know if the article was specifically about her body size and accentuating her curves, or just presenting her as a regular model in an article about fashion meant for everyone.

And here’s an un-retouched photo from the Harper’s Bazaar shoot that did not run in the magazine:

Now we see cellulite, which was clearly airbrushed out of both the Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour photos.

So what to make of all this? A “plus-size” model used in a fashion shoot without comment on her size–yay! But it turns out Glamour still touched her up to look smaller than she actually is (unless she’s lost quite a bit of weight)–boo! Images of a body that actual women could aspire to–woo hoo! Except she’s still airbrushed to present a level of perfection we can aspire to, but never attain–drat!

And while readers clearly welcomed Glamour’s portrayal of a “real” woman’s body in the September issue, would they regularly want to see non-airbrushed models, cellulite and all? I have no idea.

So what do you all make of this? A step forward? Step back? Doing the splits with one step forward and the other foot staying in place? No movement at all?

Please welcome Guest Blogger James Morrison.  Morrison (jrsmorrison@yahoo.com.au) is a writer, editor and graphic designer who lives in Adelaide, Australia. He writes about book covers and book design at causticcovercritic.blogspot.com, and used to write about novellas at Book Slut.  The post below was borrowed from his blog, Caustic Cover Critic, at the suggestion of Lisabee.

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If you’re designing a cover for a book by a Chinese or Japanese writer, or with a Chinese or Japanese setting, it seems that there are some compulsory elements which must be included. For variety’s sake, there are four elements, but you MUST use at least one of them. Advanced designers, of course, may use two or more.

Element 1: Blossoms (preferably cherry, but anything red or pink will do)

Element 2: Fans (preferably held so as to partly obscure a woman’s face (or genitals), and if you can get blossoms on the fan, you get bonus points)

Element 3: Dragons (for use only on crime novels, or other exciting tales)

Element 4: Female Necks (preferably that of a geisha, but any female neck will do in a pinch)

For more on this trend, see this article from Hyphen Magazine, which features a brief interview with ace designer Henry Sene Yee. It was that article which also drew my attention to two covers featured above, those for On a Bed of Rice and The Street of a Thousand Blossoms.

(To be fair, I ought to note that several of these covers are actually very nice–it’s just that they lose rather a lot of their impact because of the familiarity of the elements used.)

Z at It’s The Thought That Counts asked us to submit for commentary a product called the BeBand on sale at Target.  The Band is designed for pregnant women and women who’ve recently given birth:

(Note the carefully placed rings!  This model is no unwed mother!)

The box says that it will “cover unbuttoned pre-pregnancy jeans,” “hold up too-big maternity pants,” and allow you to “fit into pre-pregnancy pants sooner after giving birth”:

But it’s interesting that that’s the fine print.  The large print emphasizes beauty (“Be Belly Beautiful”) and the product is also sold under the name BellaBand.

Questions:

I’ve never been pregnant, is this a new product?  If so, is it a useful product or an invented need?

Even if this is a useful product, what do you think of the emphasis on beauty on the part of the marketers?

Is this not just another part of a demand for women to be freakin’ gorgeous at every part of their lifecycle?

Many sociologists argue that gender, as we know it, is not innate, but put on and performed.  Certain moments of our lives, like weddings, are opportunities to really emphasize femininity and masculinity; but gender is also performed in mundane ways every day in the ways that we talk, move, dress, and adorn ourselves.

These photographs of child beauty pageant participants, taken by Susan Anderson and published in her book High Glitz, illustrate how much of feminine sexual allure is put on and performed.  These kids are adultified with make-up and they also often wear false teeth and hair extensions.

If adult femininity (which is what these kids are trying to mimic) came naturally, then adult women wouldn’t need these strategies.  But they do, even going so far as to get veneers and hair extensions.  The fact that these kids can use the same strategies as adult women (with stunning/horrifying success) reveals the extent to which adult women are, no less than those kids, performing femininity.

To take it one step further, as The Spinster Aunt does, if you react to the idea of child beauty pageants with horror, then than horror should be applied to the project of femininity itself, not just the fact that children are participants:

…as far as the participants themselves are concerned, this kiddie burlesque has at least the same (if not greater) philosophic value as playing soccer or performing at a piano recital… she’s merely coloring with the available crayons, and plainly having pretty high time doing it.

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I submit that anyone who is uncomfortable with [the] Little Miss Perfect [pageant] is ethically obliged to be just as uncomfortable with femininity in general. Little Miss Perfect is merely one of a gazillion equally nauseating points on the Porno-Feminine Continuum within which all female citizens of the globe are confined by a culture of oppression.

So, if it’s troubling when girls do it (and, for that matter, also troubling to many when  men do it), then why isn’t it troubling when women do it?  (Anyone watch the Golden Globes this past weekend?)

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Also in gender transgression, see our posts on the third gender in Oaxaca, the pregnant man, the threatening transsexual, the female body builder, a makeover for the manly athlete, and women who dare to be fat.

The uproar in the blogosphere pales only in comparison to the uproar in our email inbox about My New Pink Button.

Penny R., Eden H., Alicia T., Shannon H., Nils G., Shiquanda S., Mickey C., and Bob C. have all sent in links to a new product designed to bring back the “fresh” to your lady parts. For 30 bucks you can get 3 days of pretty-in-pink. That’s right, genital dye to pinkify your private parts. In case you weren’t worried about this particular repulsivity, now you know. (It apparently works on men as well as women, and nipples too).

As they say at Jezebel: “Anti-aging mania and marketing: Not just for your face anymore!”

Shiquanda and Mickey brought our attention to this particular Q&A in the FAQ section:

Q. “Help! I’ve noticed I am turning a more brown color down there on my inside lips, is this normal”?

A. Yes, it’s perfectly normal and there are many factors that can contribute to this.  Ethnicity is a big factor, also age, hormone change, surgeries, childbirth, sickness, health, diet and medications can all contribute to a change from “Pink” to “Brown” in a woman’s genital area.

So this is kind of fascinating: browner coloring is “normal,” but you should change it anyway.  The message is that normal is not ideal.  We are normal (or at least white people are), and we still need fixing.

The FAQ makes plain the two ways in which marketing tries to convince us to change our bodies: both by telling us that our bodies are abnormal and by telling us that they are normal.  Normal bodies are icky, we’re told, your body should appear, as much as possible, as if it is not a body at all.  I mean, isn’t that part of what shaving our legs, chests, and genitals (both male and female) are about?

I think the ubiquitousness of breast implants in the media also sends the message that beautiful breasts have the look of breast implants (in terms of shape, size, and the position of the nipple).  I recently saw mannequins in a store window who were built to look as if they had breast implants.  Do you get how crazy that is?  If a mannequin is supposed to represent the ideal body, then the ideal body isn’t one with naturally large breasts, it’s one with fake breasts!  Nuts.  This world is nuts. (Kristi reminds me that this is insensitive to those with mental illness… and she’s right.)   Weird!  This world is weird!

(I looked this up on Snopes, but no word yet as to whether it’s a hoax. I have no idea whether this product is for real or whether it’s a big-enough-seller to get my panties in a bunch over.  Though it appears that you can order it, but it is of questionable efficacy.  Scam-status and efficacy aside, I think it still reveals something interesting about how we are told that our bodies aren’t good enough.)

This is the lead to an article in the Daily Mail, sent in by Chris W., about the small victories accomplished in 2009 by one “fifty-something” Linda Kelsey.  In addition to letting a man see her naked, she lists putting together home-assembly furniture and singing happy birthday in tune:

But back to the stripping.  The message she is trying to send is that she feels happy that she’s become more comfortable with her body.  She writes:

My fifty-something body, I believed, just wasn’t up to naked scrutiny. And if I couldn’t take my clothes off, that meant sex was also off the agenda.

But then she met someone she liked and yadda yadda yadda.

This is all fine and good, but the image they used to illustrate this particular victory is this:

So the image they used to illustrate her comfort with her body and the fact that “sex is about how we connect, not what we look like” suggests just the opposite.  The picture includes two mostly naked models (who are models because they have ideal bodies already); there’s no bodily connection at all and the man’s pose doesn’t suggest emotional connection either. 

So women are being told how liberating it is to take their clothes off for men (how convenient for the dudes) and that they should feel comfortable with their bodies, like those young, thin, white, properly-gendered, able-bodied models do. 

Now, if good ol’ “fifty-something” Linda Kelsey had posed displaying her newfound body comfort, like she does with her cardboard boxes, it would have sent the message she intended.  Instead, it makes us feel bad for feeling icky about our bodies AND reminds us that they are (probably) icky indeed.

P.S.: I just have to say, do you see that picture of her?!  She looks fine!  What fifty-something woman wouldn’t be pleased with that body?!  What woman of any age shouldn’t be pleased with that body? What kind of message does it send when she trashes her body.  She must think most of the population is hideous.  We all need to stop trashing our bodies in front of one another, there’s just-about-always someone who ends up feeling worse because they compare their own body to the self-trasher and feel like they don’t measure up even to the body being disparaged.  Enough.

Via Vintage Ads.

The Adipositivity Project is a website featuring photographs by Substantia Jones.  The site features 324 beautiful pictures of fat women’s bodies.  Below are a few safe-for-work selections (click here to see them all [NSFW]).

UPDATE: I just want to note that the commenters on this post are bringing up great questions!

A while back we posted before and after pictures of an eyelid surgery designed to give people of Asian descent an eyelid fold more characteristic of non-Asians (see also this post on eyelid glueing) with the idea that such an eye seemed more “awake.”

I recently came across a website advertising “Asian Rhinoplasty” by Dr. Younai.  The surgeon argues that “there are many fine differences between an Asian nose and that of other ethnicities” and claims expertise in this area.

He makes the following observations about what is “wrong” with “Asian” noses.  Notice how he uses a language of deficiency that is completely contrived (“underdeveloped,” “poor,” “lack”) (all emphases are his):

…most Asians from Korea, China, Philippines, Japan, Hawaii, and Malaysia have underdeveloped nasal bridge. This makes their eyes appear to be far apart.

The nasal tip in Asians is often round, wide, bulbous, and of poor definition. The thickness of Asian nasal skin also contributes to the lack of nasal tip sharpness.

Nostrils in Asians can be flared and wide.

Lack of nasal bridge height can give the appearance of a short nose.

His language is negative, but also inherently comparative to an unspoken norm.  “Underdeveloped” compared to what?  Of “poor definition” compared to what?  “Wide” compared to what?  “Short” compared to what?  Of course, in this context, the implicit ideal is a white ideal.

Here are some of his before and after photos:

Jen Phillips, at Mother Jones, wrote a great essay on a new product called Linger, an “internal feminine flavoring.”   Literally, a breath mint for your vagina.  How literally?  Literally.

Here’s a couple screen shots from the website:

The company is, of course, trying to convince women that their vaginas need a breath mint.  The mint “improves the length and quality of oral sex” because the person performing it is disgusted by the taste of you.  Otherwise, why would a mint help?

And that’s problematic enough, but at least the product is actually a real product designed for vaginas, right?  Right?

Nope.

Phillips, curious, ordered some.  Suspiciously, the tin of vagina mints looked a lot like tins of, well, mints:

“And guess what?” she writes, “That’s what it is.”

A little digging revealed that Linger is made/distributed by a company called Admints, which just happens to make trade show mints.  And the Linger samples just happen to have have the exact same shape, taste, and ingredients as Admint’s sample mints. So how does Linger manage to pass off breath mints as vaginal Tic Tacs in $7.99 packs?  Despite the salacious creation story and testimonials on its site (“It gets a little warm as it starts to dissolve which took just under an hour. Then, it is SO good!!”), the mint is labeled “for novelty use only.”  This is a common practice in the sex-products industry, explains Charlie Glickman, the education program manager at Good Vibrations.  It gives manufacturers some cover if something goes awry, he explains. “They could say, ‘It’s just a novelty toy. You weren’t actually expecting to use this were you?’”  And if you actually do expect to use Linger to “flavor the woman in a manner that is safe and effective,” be warned: its primary ingredient is sugar, which is not safe for the vagina.  It messes up the pH and can lead to a really painful yeast infection, a condition that definitely doesn’t make someone want to “linger.”

The Associated Press, a news service subscribed to by news outlets all over the world, distributed a story about the first Obama Administration State Dinner. In the story, sent in by Elisabeth R., Samantha Critchell describes Michelle Obama’s dress as “flesh-colored.”

[Thanks to Madeline T., Anne Marie, Therese S., and Drugmnky for the screencap!]

Gee, what could possibly be wrong with calling this dress “flesh-colored”?

This is what happens when white people are considered people and black people are considered a special kind of people, black people.  “Flesh-colored” becomes the skin color associated with whites and darker-skinned peoples are left out of the picture altogether.  We see this all the time.  Bandaids, for example, are typically light beige (though they rarely call them “flesh-colored” anymore), as are things like ace bandages.

See our post on “flesh-colored” for these examples and more.  See also this post on lotion for “normal to darker skin.”

For contrast, see this post about how the generic human in Russian cartoons is colored black instead of white.

Kate M. sent us a link to a story in the Times Online about the recent suicide of model Daul Kim. Kim had worked for a number of high-fashion companies, including Chanel. Her blog contained many posts about the pressure and loneliness of being a model. Kate points out that the links surrounding the story undermine any message that we should actually care about this topic:

Notice on the side the “Lingerie for Christmas” feature on the side, with a scantily clothed, very thin woman; it lets you “make your missus a pin-up.” Below that you can “dress her in exquisite baubles.” Women are sexy, thin, mostly naked playthings for you to dress up and play with at will. How could that possibly have anything to do with the thinness ideals models and other women are pressured to meet?

The “Ralph Lauren model dropped for being too fat” story refers to the woman we wrote about in this post, where her body had been photoshopped beyond recognition.

I saw this ad for permanent makeup last week in a Las Vegas regional magazine:

What struck me is the way that permanent makeup–that is, tattooing your face so you appear to have makeup on all the time–is being marketed as “natural.”

The phrase “permanent makeup” serves a lot like “cosmetic surgery” does–to obscure what’s really going on. “Cosmetic” surgery sounds harmless, superficial, not like “real” surgery. “Permanent makeup” probably sounds less frightening and invasive to many people than “face tattooing” or “makeup tattoos.” Permanent makeup procedures are now widely available, and in a lot of states there’s not much training required to start doing them (I knew one cosmetologist who had no tattooing experience but took a weekend-long seminar and then was certified to do permanent makeup; I presume in some areas it requires more than that to be certified.). Anyway, I’m just generally fascinated by the way we use language to try to make the often extreme things we do to our bodies seem non-invasive, simple, and harmless.

For another interesting example of how language is used to marketing cosmetic procedures, see our post on Botox as “freedom of expression.”