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Welcome back to another episode of Bitch Radio. I’m Kjerstin Johnson, the web content manager at Bitch media. This podcast is part of Bitch Media’s Mad World series: Gender and advertising in a mediated world. Coming up you’ll hear an interview with Jean Kilbourne, creator of the Killing Us Softly films, a talk with the women behind the blog Sociological Images, and voices from the Bitch community about advertising.
From population maps to toy packaging, no cultural object or message is safe from the critical eyes of Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp, who run the blog Sociological Images. Providing expert analysis in an accessible format, the blog interprets a variety of images for their social significance. I spoke with Lisa, from Occidental College and Gwen, from Nevada State College, on the phone about the power of advertising.
Lisa Wade: Hi, hello, this is Lisa Wade.
Gwen Sharp: And this is Gwen Sharp.
LW: So we are Sociological Images.
KJ: So where did the idea for Sociological Images come from?
LW: I initially thought that I would put together a website where sociology instructors all around the country could put up images that helped them get across sociological ideas in class. And Gwen and I were really the only two that enthusiastically did it. And as we were sharing these images with each other, it became clear that more and more people were reading the site—people of course that we didn’t know—and we were really surprised to see such huge numbers of people participating. So as we kept writing we started doing a little bit better at explaining what the images were, and what they illustrated, and that has sort of blossomed into the blog that it is now…which is of course widely read, by sociology professors but also by average Americans, some of whom have a sociology background and some of whom don’t. So it’s been—so it sort of was an accident, that we stumbled across this wonderful idea.
KJ: The tagline for your website is “Inspiring sociological imaginations everywhere.” Can you explain what that means?
LW: C. Wright Mills is a famous sort of founding father of sociology, and he coined that term, “sociological imagination”—so almost all sociologists are familiar with that phrase, and what it means for me is, sociology is different than other fields in the sense that sociology is designed to try to explain social patterns by looking outside of the individual. So you might imagine that both biology and psychology are trying to explain social patterns by, say for example, how many people get pregnant when they’re not married, you know. Some sort of social pattern like that—a biologist or a psychologist might try to explain it by looking inside the body, or mind, or the sort of combination of the body/mind; sociology tries to look at culture and institutions and the way that institutions link up together to explain those social patterns. So we’re trying to get people to start thinking more about how things in their own lives are shaped by things outside of their control.
KJ: Well, that’s kind of a good segue to talk about advertising, because we don’t really think about it as an institution, but it still shapes and is shaped by cultural attitudes. For example, Gwen, I thought your recent post on how the beer Pabst Blue Ribbon is now actually made by Miller, and how the authenticity that people ascribe to PBR is actually kind of just a fallacy now; it’s just a label. Can you talk about that a little bit?
GS: The story about Pabst Blue Ribbon I drew from Rob Walker’s book. And he talks about what he calls “murketing”—you know, “marketing” with a U—and what he’s talking about… if I watch a commercial on TV, I know it’s a commercial, right? I’m aware of that. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect me. But at least I know what it is. But he talks about how increasingly we don’t necessarily even know we’re being marketed to, or what it is that we’re buying: so, for instance, maybe you want to buy a beer that’s made locally, something of that sort. You live in Milwaukee, you buy PBR. It says it’s made in Milwaukee, you know, it’s got the P.O. box in Milwaukee…it no longer has anything to do with Milwaukee! You know, how hard would you have to search to make sure you were buying a product that really was local? And how much can you expect a consumer to be able to track down that information?
You know, you have things now where you have people paid to pretend, just act like normal people who happen to love a product, except they’re getting paid, or they’re getting free product, or things of that sort. I think part of the thing about the sociological imagination, part of it is that people can learn about it, but they can also learn that it’s a useful way to look at their own lives. You know, why is it that they and their friends like the same brands?
LW: One of the most insidious things about marketing is that most Americans will say that they are not particularly influenced by commercials. So everyone seems to think that they’re exempt; and that’s exactly why marketing is so effective. Because we aren’t trying to fight it, we just assume that it’s not affecting us. And so I think one of the advantages of our blog is, we’re able to try to pull back the curtain a little bit, and start talking about what these ads are and aren’t doing, and make people start thinking about them. And thinking about marketing in our lives is the only way we are gonna have any sort of independence from the sort of cultural assault that comes from marketing.
KJ: Do you see consumers using the internet to become more savvy to advertisers?
LW: Yes, we are becoming more marketing-savvy, I think, as a culture. I think that’s true. But marketers are coming back, and they are using that against us. For example, there’s the recent hugely popular Old Spice guy campaign:
[Ad excerpt]
LW: …Many many commercials, and people who are copying them, and people who are sending them to their friends cause it was so funny, to see this man essentially mocking this hypermasculine or ideally … ideal manly man in these commercials. But Old Spice, no matter how mocking they were, no matter how ironically they put together these commercials—they were still selling something. And I think people forgot that. Old Spice is using our savvy and turning it back on top of us.
GS: Absolutely. There’s sort of a sense that the fact that you get the joke is how you’re being marketed to. You also have situations where companies, you know, kind of set up a shell-company or a little group and you produce viral videos—what appear to be, you know, somebody made this cool video, but it’s really produced by the company. You know, but it appears to be just like a really cool thing that you would find on YouTube. And so they’re finding ways to also slip into this apparent, you know, grassroots creation of fun things on the Internet, but it’s still part of their marketing strategy.
LW: And another thing that all this media allows companies to do is target us in more and more carefully crafted groups, where our demographics are more and more predictable. So the same company will advertise a product in one venue—say in a men’s magazine—and in another venue, say in a women’s magazine, or in a gay men’s magazine. And they’re wildly different types of advertising, sometimes advertising that the other groups, were they to ever see them, would be offended by. But the creating of all these communities online—that’s all money to advertisers, because they can very carefully craft messages that work, and don’t risk pissing people off or turning people off their brand. There’s a very very good example, very early on in SocImages, where we found the same ad for vodka in a men’s magazine and a women’s magazine. It was the identical ad, except for in the men’s magazine you could see her nipples … [laughter] and in the women’s magazine they had been carefully airbrushed out. And it’s just a really great example of exactly how carefully they are thinking about these ads.
KJ: You post a variety of images, not all of which are contemporary, and you post ads from not just decades but centuries ago. Recently I was really blown away by the connection you made to a colonial period advertisement for soap, and a contemporary commercial for diapers. They were both basically playing off of the idea of the white man’s burden. With that in mind, what other trends or changes have you seen in advertising through your work?
LW: It’s certainly true that we see a lot of continuity; we put up a lot of things, for example, where people of color are portrayed as primitive. There’s that same sort of colonial message, still being—it’s still out there. But I think that advertising, it will use whatever cultural resources are at hand to get us to buy a product. We have a bunch of stuff on this site—we haven’t posted about this recently, but we did for a while—a lot of examples of advertising co-opting feminism.
KJ: Mm-hmm.
LW: So it would be, like, “Make your choice!” It would be all about choice, and “choice” is tapping into this message of abortion rights and so on … but it would be an ad about makeup, you know. Or it would be “Reach the glass ceiling”—and “glass ceiling” is a metaphor for the boundary that keeps women out of the top spots in companies—so the ad would be, “Break the glass ceiling” and it would show a woman driving an SUV up a mountain. Or using Rosie the Riveter but putting a cleaning product in her hand. “You have the power: to clean your bathtub!”
GS: And I will say, you know, I try to steer away from “Oh, things are so much worse today,” so on and so forth. But there definitely is an increase in very blatant sexualization, particularly sexualization of women; it’s not that that never happened before, but it’s gotten much more constant. I have to say, I’m shocked, even though I’ve been doing SocImages for several years now—I am shocked by how often we get submissions that are just these really blatant examples of women being shown looking pained, looking dead, in situations that clearly look uncomfortable, and which often hint at sexual violence. And I keep thinking one of these days I’m gonna be used to it; and yet the fact that this is repeated so often—especially in high fashion, how often women, there seems to be an appetite for images of women in expensive clothing looking like they’ve been hurt. And I find that trend fascinating in a very disturbing way.
KJ: You mention the sociological imagination, but what do you think are some other ways that people can become more critical of advertising?
LW: Well, I think looking at how companies are related to one another, as in Gwen’s example of PBR, is a really good example. Another great example of that is the fact that Dove is owned by the same company as Axe. So Dove marketing, for several years now, has been focused on trying to tell women that Dove thinks that all women are wonderful and beautiful exactly as they are. So we could take that apart if we wanted to; but on top of that, we have the fact that Dove is owned by Unilever and so is Axe. So Axe, of course, is putting out all of this advertising that is some of the most objectifying advertising that we see, objectifying women. So I think a lot of people think, “Oh, look at what Dove is doing! This is such a wonderful message!” And they forget that Dove is also trying to sell something to us, and that it’s not just that companies do or don’t have nice messages, but they don’t care what their messages are … so they’re just doing this strategically, and that becomes extremely clear when we realize that the same company is producing all of this Axe advertising, in which women are trivialized, objectified, and men are seen as sort of basically just trying to have sex with them all the time.
GS: I mean, you have to already have realized there’s an issue; but, for instance, I posted recently on the pushback about the Pretzel Thins ads that said, you know, “You can never be too thin” … and some people just took action, right? I mean they basically used ridicule to get the company to change the ads. And I think access to the online media—you’ve got Facebook, you’ve got YouTube—you can distribute it pretty widely, and people can pretty quickly, you know, respond. So we think of companies as these huge institutions, and they are. You know, I can’t individually make Coca-Cola change its business practices. But there are these moments where we can inject ourselves as a public, and actually lead to some form of change. But we have to continually insert ourselves, and then by doing that—by, for instance, Lisa and I having SocImages—we’ve drawn more people into thinking about that.
KW: A sociology major myself, I totally geeked out talking to Lisa and Gwen. Listen to our full conversation, which covers the blog, and the fascinating trope of the so-called mediocre male, visit bitchmedia.org/audio! Visit sociological images at contexts.org/socimages.
Kjerstin Johnson: So in this special Mad World Vox Populi, I asked folks what they thought were the worst stereotypes found in commercials.
Aziza: Hi, my name’s Aziza. I guess “Men are the ones that are excited about sex and sexuality, and women are not.” And that bigger women aren’t sexy [laughs]. I guess everybody knows about it, but the Lane Bryant commercial, and how they didn’t want to play it, blah blah blah … it was a pretty hot commercial. [laughs] And I guess there’s the—the woman in a relationship, in a heterosexual relationship, is the homemaker. And that men like sports [laughs] … cause I know plenty of men that don’t like sports.
Alex: I’m Alex Berg! I think probably the most egregious ads for women are the ones with housewives doing any sort of cleaning—like, dishes, laundry, housecleaning, anything where they put a lot of, like, work into it, or at least a lot of thought into it, and then their husbands come home and don’t notice. But then it’s clean and the wives are really happy. That’s really sad to me.