Tag Archives: men

Skin-whitening cream in India

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Yahoo reports on a controversy in India over an ad for Vaseline from Unilever. The campaign was based around having men lighten their Facebook profile pictures.

The ad campaign has drawn attention from around the world as people have both attacked and defended it. The issue is a long-running one in India as it is tied to the caste system and lighter skin people sitting at the top. Skin color has social consequences:

A 2009 poll by an online dating company of 12,000 participants living in Northern India found that they rate skin tone the most important factor in choosing a romantic partner. “Fair skin is generally associated with beauty, greater affluence and increased employability,” writes Riddhi Shah at Salon, who copped to using the creams herself even while criticizing the country’s racist ideas about beauty in her work.

It is interesting that this campaign is targeted toward men as the article suggests this is a recent development in the skin-whitening market in India.

Modern careers more amenable to women?

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Hanna Rosin writes in the July/August 2010 issue of The Atlantic about the rise of women in many career fields and the consequences for society. Rosin argues that in addition to women holding “a majority of the nation’s jobs,” dominating higher education, and having a majority in 13 of the 15 job categories predicted to grow the most in the next ten years, more and more jobs today seem suited to women and men have not yet adapted:

The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true.

The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits.

Some of this has been more visible lately with the effects of the recent economic trouble, dubbed by some a “man-cession” or “he-pression” due to a disproportionate loss of jobs in male-dominated fields. The loss of manufacturing and manual labor jobs in the last five decades has been severe and men, unlike women, have not yet jumped on the higher education bandwagon.