Archive: Mar 2013

The hunt for “pink Viagra”—a medical solution to women’s so-called sexual dysfunction, identified as an official disorder in 1999—has so far proven fruitless. Sociologists Cristalle Pronier and Elizabeth Monk-Turner suggest in the Journal of Gender Studies that we stop looking. Instead, we need to consider the relational aspects of sex that many women require for satisfaction.

After surveying more than 300 female students, staff, and faculty in university community, Pronier and Monk-Turner found that social factors such as feeling intimacy, sexual agency, emotional closeness, and low levels of stress were key to women’s self-reported sexual satisfaction. Contrary to the pharmaceutical mantra “a pill for every ill,” these researchers believe female friskiness (or at least arousal) has fairly little to do with rerouting blood flow.

The zoo: a chance to leave the over-regulated world of concrete and bureaucracy behind and reinvigorate the spirit through witnessing exotic animals in their natural splendor. However, as David Grazian reminds us in The Sociological Quarterly, it takes a lot of planning to produce the “natural”.

Drawing on three years and over 500 hours of volunteering at two metropolitan zoos, Grazian provides detailed insights into the tensions that are negotiated on a daily basis by the “nature makers” charged with designing displays that fit how visitors imagine jungles, grasslands, and other untamed settings. This involves creating landscapes that imitate the fauna from far-away lands, while simultaneously enclosing the animals and separating them from human visitors… all without making the zoo look too much like a prison. Audiences must also be convinced that the animals’ activities are unaltered by captivity even as the taboo—sex, killing, and defecating—is censored. Because, hey, even being a wild animal is no excuse for poor manners.

So next time you are strolling your local big cat house, take some time to think about the constant planning and negotiation necessary to create an experience that is wild but not too wild, dangerous but not too dangerous, cute but not too cute, educational but not too educational, civilized but not too civilized, and most important of all, “natural”.

Even alternative media reporting on the housing crisis are using mainstream ways of talking about the problem. While you’d expect publications like BE, The Root, and Colorlines to be more radical (alternatives to, say, Forbes), instead they stick with “neoliberal” and “postracial” themes. That is, these publications believe housing problems are individual problems and have little to do with race, even when banks have admitted in court that race was part of their mortgage decision process. In Catherine Squires’ new study on the disproportionate impact of the subprime mortgage crisis on African Americans, she shows how mainstream rhetoric is rearticulated by even alternative media.

In her content analysis, Squires reveals that both BE and The Root presented stories in which responsibility for the mortgage crisis was shifted from the banks and lenders to the individual borrower. Colorlines was the only publication to address the unequal access of whites and people of color to the American Dream and home ownership, demonstrating greater resistance to the specious appeal of neoliberal rhetoric by placing greater onus on the government and the beneficiaries of its bailout (that is, the banks).

The expectation instilled in alternative media to present a different perspective endures. However, when even the stories they publish look like recycled versions of the mainstream, readers’ trust is sure to wane.

From the proposal to the honeymoon, American weddings have remained relatively unchanged for the better part of the last century. Even unconventional brides and grooms tend to follow a traditional script in planning their weddings; this is especially observable in the ubiquitous white dress/black suit combo. Recently, this gendered pattern has been complicated by the legalization of same-sex marriage in several states. Without the obligatory gender scripts, which traditions will gay men and lesbian women follow and which will they break?

In a recently published article, Katrina Kimport (Gender & Society, August 2012) takes a close look at the marital attire chosen by gay and lesbian couples by studying photographs of same-sex weddings in San Francisco in 2004. She finds that among the formally-dressed male couples, all of them conformed to gender norms–they were all dressed in suits or tuxes–while none conformed to the wedding norm of one bride and one groom. In other words, no men were dressed as brides. On the other hand, among the female couples, seven out of ten conformed to the wedding norm of one bride (in a wedding dress or other feminine wedding attire) and one groom (wearing some type of suit or tuxedo). Of the remaining female couples, half followed gender norms (two brides) and half did not (two grooms).

What might these trends mean for the future of wedding traditions? Might gay and lesbian marriages radically alter traditional heterosexual wedding norms? Or might some of their wedding day choices work to reinforce the gendered tradition of one bride and one groom? Such questions are not easily answered, but one thing is clear: same-sex marriage sweeps both gender norms and wedding norms off their feet.

For those who don’t enjoy dramatic irony, too many books and movies provoke that frustrated question: “Why didn’t they just talk to each other?” Entire plot lines that hinge on only a few words of missed dialogue have been the backbone of classic comedies and dramas for centuries, but now modern technology may be making this literary device just too… unbelievable.

Wellman and Rainie, writing in the first issue of the new journal Mobile Media & Communication, illustrate this shift with a creative new twist on an old classic. What if Romeo and Juliet, those unfortunate teens who just missed each other in the end, had cell phones? Instead of talking through their feuding families, they could have just texted, maybe avoiding (spoiler alert!) the whole suicide mess.

Using research from their book Networked: The New Social Operating System, the authors argue that mobile phones and other portable communication devices have ushered in an era of “networked individualism.” We connect as individuals and share everything, down to our geographical location. The star-crossed lovers couldn’t even dream of satellite technology, but they were still pioneering individual networking by meeting alone, in secret, instead of involving their families to court each other formally. Even a decade ago, you’d have to call your paramour’s “home phone,” and maybe even talk to their parents.

Today a quick text makes individual socializing that much easier and more efficient, but it may also radically shift communication through our closest social groups. In our social lives and our dramatic writing, how much longer will we be able to believe people just didn’t get the message?