In my Sociology of Gender course I talk about how gender conformity isn’t simply a matter of socialization, but often a response to active policing by others. Single women usually avoid having too many cats, for example, not only because they’ve been taught that too many cats sends the wrong signal, but because they may be called a “cat lady” by their friends (a joke-y slur suggesting that she is or will be a batty old spinster). Or her best friend, with her best interests in mind, may discourage her from adopting another cat because she knows what people think of “cat ladies.”
People who find community in subcultures that are seen as “alternative” to the “mainstream” often feel like they are freed of such rules. But these subcultures often simply have different rules that turn out to be equally restrictive and are just as rigidly policed.
A recent submission to PostSecret, a site where people anonymously tell their secrets, reminded me of this. In it a lesbian confesses that she hates cats. Because of the stereotype that women love cats, the “cat lady” stigma may be lifted in lesbian communities. This lesbian, however, doesn’t feel freed by the lifting of this rule, but instead burdened by its opposite: everyone has to like cats. So she feels compelled to lie and say that she’s allergic.
Cross-posted at Scientopia. A polished version of this post was published in Contexts. You can download it here.
Mustangs are powerful symbols of the American West. The modern mustang is the descendant of various breeds of horses taken by everyone from Spanish conquistadors to pioneers in wagon trains into the Western U.S., where some inevitably escaped over time and formed herds of feral horses (wild herds in the eastern part of the U.S. were generally either driven west or recaptured over time as the frontier moved ever westward, the wild ponies of Assateague Island off the coast of Virginia being a famous exception). Over time, they became inextricably entwined with perceptions of the West as still wild and free, not yet fully domesticated. The image of a herd of beautiful horses against a gorgeous but austere Western landscape is a striking one, perhaps something like this (via):
So how do we get from that to this next image of mustangs running…after a feed truck in Oklahoma?
It’s a complicated story involving conflicts surrounding federal land management, public attitudes toward mustangs, and unintended consequences of public policies.
Wild horses fall under the purview of the federal Bureau of Land Management, since most live on public range (particularly in Nevada, California, and Idaho, as well as Washington, Wyoming, and other Western states). Mustangs have no natural predators in the West; mountain lions, bears, wolves, and so on certainly kill some horses each year, but their numbers simply aren’t large enough to be a systematic form of population control for wild horse herds, especially given that horses aren’t necessarily their first choice for a meal. So wild horse herds can grow fairly rapidly, despite die-offs due to disease, droughts, and so on. Currently the BLM estimates there are about 33,000 wild horses and 5,500 wild burros on BLM land in the West.
Of course, managing wild horses is one small part of the BLM’s mission. The agency is tasked with balancing various uses of federal lands, including everything from resource extraction (such as mining and logging), recreational uses for the public, grazing range for cattle ranchers, wildlife habitat conservation, preservation of archeological and historical sites, providing water for irrigation as well as residential use, and many, many more. And many of these uses conflict to some degree. Setting priorities among various potential uses of BLM land has, over time, become a very contentious process, as different groups battle, often through the courts, to have their preferred use of BLM land prioritized over others.
I’m not going to go into a history of these conflicts or arguments for or against different uses of public lands. The important point here is that managing wild horse numbers is part, but only a small part, of the BLM’s job. They decide on the carrying capacity of rangeland — that is, how many wild horses it can sustainably handle — by taking into account competing uses, like how many cattle will be allowed on the same land, its use as wildlife habitat, possible logging or mining activities, and so on. And much of the time, the BLM concludes that given their balance of intended uses, there are too many horses.
So what does the BLM do when they’ve decided there are too many horses? For many years, the BLM had simply allowed them to be killed; private citizens had a more or less free pass to kill them. There wasn’t a lot of oversight regarding how many could be killed or the treatment of the horses during the process. Starting in the late 1950s, the BLM began to get negative press, and a movement to protect wild horses emerged. It culminated in the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, passed in 1971. The law didn’t ban killing wild horses, but it provided some protection for them and required the BLM to ensure humane treatment, guarantee the presence of wild horses on public lands, and encourage other methods of disposing of excess horses.
One such method is making such horses (and burros) available to the general public for adoption. The BLM holds periodic adoption events. However, currently the demand for these animals isn’t nearly large enough to absorb the supply. For instance, in 2010, 9,715 wild horses were removed from public lands, while 2,742 were adopted.
So the BLM is removing more horses than the public adopts individually. Killing them has become increasingly unpopular. Controlling herd populations through some form of birth control hasn’t been widely implemented and has led to lawsuits.
This is how thousands of wild horses ended up on private land in Oklahoma and other states. The BLM began paying private citizens to care for mustangs removed from public lands. Here’s a news segment about one of these operations near where I grew up:
The ranch in that video is owned by the Drummond family…a name that might ring a bell if you’re familiar with the incredibly popular website The Pioneer Woman, by Ree Drummond. They are just one of several ranching families in the area that have received contracts to care for wild horses.
But this brings a whole new set of controversies, as well as unintended consequences for the region. Federal payments for the wild horse and burro maintenance program are public information. A quick look at the federal contracts database shows that in just the first three financial quarters of 2009, the Drummonds (a large, multi-generational ranching family) received over $1.6 million. Overall, 57% of the BLM budget for managing wild horses goes to paying for holding animals that have been removed from public lands, either in short-term situations before adoptions or in long-term contracts like the ones in Oklahoma. There are increasing complaints about the amount of federal money being spent to care for horses on private land.
At the local level, these contracts have impacted surrounding communities in often unanticipated ways. This is an enormous source of income, one that hasn’t been subject to the same risks as raising cattle. The price is guaranteed in advance. While there are certainly start-up costs involved, this area of Oklahoma is used for cattle ranching and so pastures are already fenced, corrals exist (though perhaps not to the specifications of the BLM), and the contracting families generally continue to run cattle while setting some acreage aside for the wild horses.
But this income-generating opportunity isn’t available to everyone; generally only the very largest landowners get a chance. From the BLM’s perspective, it’s much easier and more efficient to contract with one operation to take 2,000 horses than to contract with 20 separate people to take 100 each. So almost all small and mid-size operations are shut out of the contracts. This has led to an inflow of federal money to operations that were already quite prosperous by local standards. These landowners then have a significant advantage when it comes to trying to buy or lease pastures that become available in the area; other ranchers have almost no chance of competing with the price they can pay. The result is more concentration of land ownership as small and medium-sized ranchers, or those hoping to start up a ranch from scratch, are priced out of the market.
The future of this program isn’t certain. It is coming under increasing criticism because of the costs. There are ongoing criticisms of the process of rounding up horses to have them shipped to Oklahoma and other states. Billionaire Madeleine Pickens wants her Nevada ranch to become a mustang sanctuary, but it could hold only a tiny proportion of animals removed from BLM land. And so the conflicts about how to manage the wild horse population in the Western states, and what to do with those that are removed, continue, with no resolution in sight.
The West has a long history in which Black and African people were stereotyped as more in touch with nature and more like animals than White and European people. This elision still haunts us, and Sasha H. sent in a link to an example. To be fair, I went through several pages of Google search results and found only two instances of this particular mistake, but I thought it was worth pointing out as a cautionary tale.
Sasha’s link was to an amusement-focused website called Silly Village. They posted a series of photographs of a little girl, named Tippi Degré, who was born to wildlife photographers in Namibia, where she grew up. The photos are of her with lots of animals and the set of photos is titled “Young Girl Life with Wild Animals.” The thing is, though, two of the photos do not include animals, but include only her and local Africans, no animals at all:
I found this same mistake at a more serious source, one that should have editors who are more careful than this, The Telegraph. The story, titled “The Real-Life Mowgli who Grew Up with Africa’s Wild Animals,” includes a slideshow introduced with this language:
A remarkable range of pictures in a new book show Tippi Degre — a French girl labelled the ‘real-life Mowgli’ — growing up with wild animals.
But the slideshow includes the following three images, again conflating African animals with African people:
When someone gave us this chunky dinosaur puzzle, I did a double-take. Yes, that’s a caveman there with the dinosaurs:
The blurb on the company’s website says that, along with the puzzle, “ The accompanying board book teaches young learners about dinosaurs.” Teaches, that is, with lessons like this:
A little harmless fun, or a little creationist indoctrination? (Do sociologists even believe in “harmless fun”?)
According to the Shure company, they deliver these “common threads” in all their products: “Originality and inventiveness; Excellence in design; Attention to detail; Exceptional quality; Educational merit.” So, not just entertainment.
A quick perusal suggests the rest of their products are not creationist — just the usual toy-gendering. They do have a Noah’s Ark puzzle, but it doesn’t claim to be educational. In that Shure is just keeping up Melissa & Doug (whose puzzle is at least Genesis-correct in not naming Noah’s wife):
And anyway, the story of Noah’s Ark is actually not a bad way to talk about reproduction.
But back to dinosaurs and people. Dinosaurs are not really more problematic for creationism than any other creatures that pre-date humans. But maybe because kids love dinosaurs so much, creationists spend inordinate energy trying to place them chronologically with people. Writes one such site:
The idea of millions of years of evolution is just the evolutionists’ story about the past. No scientist was there to see the dinosaurs live through this supposed dinosaur age. In fact, there is no proof whatsoever that the world and its fossil layers are millions of years old. No scientist observed dinosaurs die. Scientists only find the bones in the here and now, and because many of them are evolutionists, they try to fit the story of the dinosaurs into their view.
Up against this kind of propaganda, it is tempting to bring the hammer down on “harmless fun” featuring humans and dinosaurs playing together. That would mean none of these, either:
That is basically the argument of James Wilson, a University of Sussex lecturer, who has a talk on the subject here on Youtube.
In any case, we may be so used to seeing toys or other products like this — with humans and dinosaurs side-by-side — that we forget to ask whether they’re teaching kids a lesson, one that is at odds with science.
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By the way, for non-biologists, like me, who like evolution and want some ammunition to defend it, I recommend Richard Dawkins’ recent book The Greatest Show on Earth. Some do find it a little dogmatic, and in the grand scheme I prefer Stephen Jay Gould, but it’s good for this purpose. Because rather than block access to dinosaur cartoons, I would rather arm myself – and the surrounding children – with the tools they need to handle them with confidence.
Sully is not only a superior human being, he is also a superior Na’vi. After being briefly ostracized for his participation in the land grab, he tames the most violent creature in the sky, thereby proving himself to be the highest quality warrior imaginable per the Na’vi mythology. He gives them hope, works out their strategy, and is their most-valuable-weapon in the war. In the end, with all Na’vi contenders for leadership conveniently dead, he assumes the role of chief… and gets the-most-valuable-girl for good measure. Throngs of Na’vi bow to him.
Avatar was heralded as a break-through movie for its technological achievements, but its theme is tired. With the aim of pointing to how Avatar simply regurgitated a strong history of white, Western self-congratulation, Craig Saddlemire and Ryan Conrad re-mixed the movie with other similar movies, including Blind Side, Dancing with Wolves, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Out of Africa, Stargate, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
They go through several features of these narratives: awe at the “native” landanimalspeople, the decision that they are helpless and doomed without White, Western intervention, the designation of a White savior who devotes him or herself to their rescue, native self-subordination, and more. It’s pretty powerful. Thanks to Lizzy Furth for sending the video along!
In the 1940s and ’50s dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a synthetic pesticide better known as DDT, was used to kill bugs that spread malaria and typhus in several parts of the world. DDT was argued to be toxic to humans and the environment in the famous environmental opus, Silent Spring. It was banned by the U.S. government in 1972.
Before all that, though, it was sprayed in American neighborhoods to suppress insect populations. The new movie Tree of Life has a great scene re-enacting the way that children would frolick in the spray as the DDT trucks went by. Here are two screen shots from the trailer:
Searching around, I also found some vintage footage (the person who uploaded the clip doesn’t specify the documentary):
The scene reminded me of an old post we’d written, below, featuring advertisements for the pesticide, one with the ironic slogan “DDT is good for Me-e-e!”
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DDT was a pesticide marketed to housewives (and many others). We later discovered it to be an environmental toxin. Below are three of the advertisements (via Mindfully and KnowDrama and noticed thanks to John L.):
Suicide Food is a blog featuring “depiction[s] of animals that act as though they wish to be consumed.’” The blog authors argue that the images say:
“Hey! Come on! Eating meat is without any ethical ramifications! See, Mr. Greenjeans? The animals aren’t complaining! So what’s your problem?”
The assertion is that these images trivialize meat eating. The cartoon characters — endorsing their own status as food, sometimes even enjoying eating themselves — make eating meat fun and funny, instead of a serious moral decision. In doing so, they contribute to a lax attitude towards eating meat. What do you think?
A mural from a restaurant in West Roxbury, Mass.:
An image from a restaurant, Au Pied de Cochon, in Montreal:
A French poster that reads: ”You’ll eat with pleasure, and… without fatigue: the good sausages of the BOUNTEOUS PIG!
Inspired by Mother’s Day, a re-post from our archives…
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Stephen W. sent in this clip of an Iowa news story about interspecies mothering. Always cute, of course. But the narration towards the end contributes to the social construction of mothers as born-to-nurture-and-nurture-only.
The narrator asks: “Why would an animal show such grace?” And the answer is “obvious.” He continues:
For most mothers, it’s just what they do. An instinct so deeply wired into them, that often all they know is to love and care for life.
So “most” mothers “just” mother. They do so instinctively. ”All they know” is mothering. In fact, hang onto your kiddies people because they might just mother your kids too!
Interesting how this narrative leaves invisible all of the female animals that kill and eat other animals, including other animals’ babies.
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