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Southern Feminists vs. Southern Homophobes: Tied, 1-1

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From Feminist Law Professors, here are two stories I’d missed this week – one sad and one happy.

First the happy: It seems that Atlanta, GA will soon be replacing “Men Working” signs along highways with “Workers Ahead” signs. The signs will look like this:

You can read more about the switch, and about the amazing woman who made it happen, over at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The sad story is really discouraging, though: South Carolina has decided to cancel an overseas marketing campaign aimed at drawing gay tourists to their state. That’s right, our friends abroad will not be seeing this ad again any time soon:

According to The State:

Joel Sawyer, spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford, said using tax money to support a social or political agenda is inappropriate.

“Our state tourism dollars should be talking about the beaches and attractions of South Carolina,” Sawyer said.

The campaign, which ends Saturday, planted posters all over a single London subway station. Prosser said the agency has asked the S.C. posters be removed.

Apparently, South Carolina’s politicians feel like promoting their state as a safe place for lesbian and gay tourists is a ‘social agenda’ that they can’t support. As Feminist Law Professors notes:

Once again South Carolina’s homophobes in power have inflicted damage on the economy of this state. In addition to driving away not only gay tourists, but also straight tourists who don’t want to vacation in a climate of bigotry, high tech investors will be alienated by this.

Somehow, the idea that South Carolina will pay for this instance of bigotry by failing to attract a more diverse population doesn’t make me feel any better about this story, though.

15 thoughts on Southern Feminists vs. Southern Homophobes: Tied, 1-1

  2. I work for Maintenance at my school – an interesting experience as it is, from a gender studies perspective – and all of our signs say “Men Working” on them. The first time I saw one I asked my boss, “Hey, so when we put these up, can I quit working?” He just smiled and told me no. I believe there was some talk of getting a little “Wo” sign for my female co-worker and I to stick on there for when we used them, but no one was being serious about it.

    We don’t use the signs much anyway (in fact I don’t think we’ve used them once since I started there), but I still find it awfully telling. And incredibly annoying, especially when taken in with all the other kind of internalized gender coding I run into at work.

    But I’ve always hated those signs, even before I started working here. Glad to see someone’s doing something about them.

  3. I’m here in South Carolina, and will be writing about this story this weekend, if I get time…

    The only GOOD THING to come from this is maybe it will put the kibosh on the constant Mark Sanford-as-Obama-running-mate chatter. This won’t be good for the presidential campaign! (And Obama doesn’t need to alienate gays any more than he did already, earlier in his campaign.)

    Lots of us hate Sanford for reasons JUST LIKE this, and when they started all the “draft Sanford” talk (to help Obama in the south, supposedly), we all felt kinda nauseated.

  4. “Our state tourism dollars should be talking about the beaches and attractions of South Carolina,” Sawyer said.

    Um, that IS what they’re talking about. They’re just talking about it to gays. You know, in an effort to make your state seem like an appealing place to visit.

    Targeted marketing is not supportive of a particular political agenda. It’s good business. Idiots.

  6. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “men working” sign. I’ll have to pay attention next time I go through construction. I think it just says there’s construction and sometimes that speeding fines can be doubled.

  7. I’m pretty sure all the signs I’ve seen (at least in CA) have been “Work Ahead.” No mention of whose doing it, just that there is work ahead.

  8. South Carolina has decided to cancel an overseas marketing campaign aimed at drawing gay tourists to their state

    I live in Tampa and a few years ago the County commission voted to ban reference to gay pride in the County. The City of Tampa still promoted gay pride and there were no major complaints or problems. The good new is the openly gay Kevin Beckner is running for HCC. Beckner is running against Republican anti-gay incumbant Brian Blair. (Pam has blogged about him. For someone that’s anti-gay he sure likes to wear tights and body wax himself.) Beckner has a good shot at winning. Crative Loafing political columnist Wayne Garcia wrote, “removing Republican Hillsborough County Commissioner Brian Blair should be the top priority of progressives throughout Tampa Bay.”

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “men working” sign.

    Lindsay, those signs do exist. I’ve worked on construction sites and sometimes women are on the crews. The “Men Working” signs are usually used when construction is done on or near roads. That’s so drivers will slow down and not run over a construction worker. Usual, two people are at either end of the street. To warn drivers of construction. When I was doing construction, I would have preferred a “Dumb Driver: Slow Down” sign. Road construction can be dangerous.

  9. In Santa Cruz they used to have signs saying “Pardon Our Work.” Which has nothing to do with men or women, but I just always thought it was nicely California mellow.

    And in Palo Alto there was one saying “Left Turn OK” which I also always liked. Not “Left Turn ONLY,” or “NO Left Turn.” Just “If you want to turn left, hey, go ahead, please yourself.”

    God I miss California…

  10. I saw a sign this afternoon that said, simply, “Road Work Ahead”. Informative enough.

    I really like the idea of “Left Turn OK” signs!

  11. Until very recently there was a sign in Portland on one of the bridges that said

    Men Below
    Please Don’t Throw

    The only way we could ever think of getting that sign right is changing it to “Folks below” but that just sounds sad for some reason.

  13. I remember seeing constructions signs once that were like a little kid’s drawing, saying “My mommy works here” or something. I was like, “Yes, that’s right, women DO work construction!”

    Yeah, here’s a link: http://mutcd.pahighways.com/construction.html

    There are both “Mommy” and “Daddy” signs. That link is from Pennsylvania, but I think I’ve seen them somewhere else with like a stick figure drawing of a construction worker.

  14. I remember seeing constructions signs once that were like a little kid’s drawing, saying “My mommy works here” or something.

    You wouldn’t happen to be in PA, would you? We have “Please slow down, my Mommy (or Daddy, depending on the sign) works here,” complete with faux-crayon lettering and backwards r’s. I still haven’t decided yet whether they’re cute or annoying.

    Alternately, we have huge orange signs that say “ROAD WORK” in bold letters

  15. I saw the ‘X state is so gay’ adverts plastered on the walls of the london underground when I visited on a school trip (I should give some background; I’m 16 year old English school girl, from a teeny tiny village. Does that make me sound backwards?). I found them pretty offensive and I thought they were using ‘gay’ as an insult. I thought it was from a different state (other than s. carolina and the other states in those posters), trying to get people to visit them instead of such&such ‘so gay’ state.

    To tell the truth I’m glad they decided to stop the adverts -not for the reasons in your post of course. I’m bloody outraged that they’d stop them because of some silly ‘social agenda’ BS! I’m glad because it just seemed to be using homosexuals as a joke and to be ridiculed, as something bad to be associated with. The posters really werent clear and there was no way to take a closer look at them (they were on the walls next to escalators).

    If they had been better thought out and clearer, I would be a lot sadder to see them go. I just hope that there will be a new ad campaign soon.

    I hope I made sense with this, and please correct me if I said anything bad!

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