Fast-Food and the Feminization of Health

Advertising has long relied on gendered and sexualized images and text.  Advertising uses hyper-gendered images and text to catch our attention and it participates in (re)constructing stereotypes (see here).  The health food craze of the 80s and 90s hit fast food restaurants hard.  The McDonald’s colors (red and yellow) came to signify unhealthy food.  Many chains changed their logos to include blues, purples, and greens to appeal to what they perceived to be a more “health-conscious” set of standards of American fast-food customers.

For instance, as Americans became increasingly conscious of the detrimental effects of fried food, Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to “KFC” and commercials in the early 2000s implied it was an abbreviation for Kitchen Fresh Chicken.  But in 2007, “Kentucky Fried Chicken” was resurrected and this time period marked a change in the way fast food advertising dealt with what they perceived to be a much more health-conscious population.

While initially, fast-food chains tried to disguise their food in more healthy packaging, from the mid-2000s on many chains charted a different route to address this problem.  Perhaps reminded of Bruce Firestein’s 1982 classic satirization of American masculinity, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, fast-food restaurants became emboldened to challenge American men to forgo health concerns in their advertisements.  This theme is probably best illustrated by Burger King’s 2006 commercial, dubbed the “Manthem,” used to promote their newest sandwich to the menu: the Texas Double Whopper.  The commercial rewrote Helen Reddy’s classic “I Am Woman”–a song released in 1971 that was widely held as capturing some of the spirit of feminist activism during that time.

Was Masculinity to Blame for the Space Shuttle Challenger?

Most of my knowledge about NASA, astronauts, and outer-space comes from movies.  When I think of the abstract astronaut in my mind, I picture Tom Hanks in Apollo 13.  I was actually only 4 years old when the Challenger disaster happened, but I remember learning about it in high school.  Thanks to the Challenger, we all know – or think we know – something about “O-rings” and how important they are for space travel.

For the uninitiated, here are the facts:

On January 28, 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger for the last time.  One minute and 13 seconds into the flight the shuttle broke apart, and the pieces of the shuttle spread out over the Atlantic Ocean.  Where the crew of the shuttle were was eventually recovered from the bottom of the ocean, but all seven crew members were killed in the crash.  What happened was the subject of intense debate, legal action, and investigation.  What is known is that the O-rings failed.  At a very basic level, O-rings are a part of the shuttle designed to seal the shuttle from the outside.  They have to be flexible and able to withstand intense temperature changes.  It is now known that the O-rings failed to seal the Challenger Shuttle and as a result, pressurized hot gas reached the external fuel tanks and led to the explosion.

James Messerschmidt – a criminologist and scholar of masculinity – investigated this debate and wrote a fascinating article on NASA as a workplace.  Much of the literature on gender in the workplace focuses on relations between men and women.  Joan Acker famously argued that it was not only workers that were gendered, but that the workplace itself and the jobs they were claiming were gendered before they got there.  Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Christine Williams, Patricia Yancey Martin, and more have discussed gender in the workplace.  But the typical conversation addresses relations between men and women.

Bachelor…ETTE Pads?

If you take a look at the changes in family living arrangements since the 1970s, a few things seem to jump off the graph.  First, you can’t help but miss the drop in the proportion of married couples with children households (a percentage almost halved in just under 40 years).  What’s more interesting, however, are the family forms (defined by the Census as “nonfamily households” – which has the feel of a pointed term) that have picked up those stray percentage points.

Living arrangements that fall into the categories that the Census designates as “family households” really don’t show enormous change aside from the huge decline in married couples with children.  A great deal of attention has been paid to the “other nonfamily households” as interest in cohabitation and it’s alleged effects are heavily scrutinized.  The other categories (women living alone and men living alone) receive a bit less attention, but together, all three categories account for a great deal of the decline in married couple with children households.