Sociological Images

Today I thought we’d do another round-up of gendered children’s stuff, since we’ve gotten a number of submissions. So here we go.

Missy C. noticed that the manufacturer’s product description listed on Amazon for one of the Fisher Price Imaginext Sky Racers took for granted that the toy was for boys, not, say, “kids”:

Monica C., meanwhile, noticed another example of the association of girls with a diva-ish princess center-of-attention persona when looking at onesies for sale at My Habit. Options included “born fabulous,” “high maintenance,” “born to wear diamonds,” and “it’s all about me,” among others:

Similarly, Melanie J. saw some baby booties for sale at retail chain JR’s in North Carolina that reinforce the idea that boys are mischievous while girls are materialistic:

You can buy them gendered vitamins as well. Nathan, who writes at 1115, sent in this photo he took at Target:

Pete & Emily in Norwich, UK, noticed that you can now allow your hamsters to inhabit gendered worlds too, if you’d like; they sent us this photo they took at a pet store:

But we do have two counter-examples this time! Jackie H. took a photo of a kitchen set she saw for sale at Meijer, which shows both a boy and a girl using it:

And Isabeau P.S., Jesse W., and Anne Sofie B. all sent in images from the catalog for Swedish toy maker Leklust (two of the images were discussed at Mommyish):

U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R, Maine) and Representative Carolyn Maloney (D, New York) have both gone on record claiming that having more women employed in the Secret Service would prevent scandals like the one involving Colombian prostitutes.

In classic Daily Show form, Jon Stewart and his “correspondents” respond (thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the link!):

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Last year we posted Anita Sarkeesian’s great discussion of the manic pixie dream girl trope.  The manic pixie is a female side character who, through her whimsical approach to life, “helps the male main character find himself, love life again, or overcome some obstacle.”  Think Natalie Portman in Garden State.

Anyhow, I came across a skit making fun of the trope by taking the manic pixie to its logical conclusion, titled “Welcome to the State Home for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”  Yep, it’s a state-run institution for the charming but totally helpless, perhaps-mentally-challenged not-so-dream girl.  I’m putting it up here because it’s quite funny, but I also like how it deconstructs a version of ideal femininity, revealing it to be rather impractical indeed.

Film by Natural Disastronauts. Found via BoingBoing.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Transcript, by Trellany J. Evans, after the jump:

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In my talk about the value of friendship, I discuss the ways that gender inequality makes it difficult for men and women to be friends with each other, for men to be friends with men, and for women to be friends with each other.  Regarding the latter, I argue that, in a society that values men and masculinity over women and femininity, everyone values men’s opinions more than women’s.  Inevitably, then, women are placed into competition with one another for attention from men.  Meanwhile, women’s opinions of them have less value and can’t substitute for men’s, so women can’t hold each other up; they must all turn to men for self-esteem.

I’ve previously posted an amazing clip that illustrates this fantastically, from a show called Battle of the Bods.  The “Don’t Hate Me ‘Cause I’m Beautiful” trope is also part of this phenomenon.  Bryony W. sent in another example: a cover of Woman’s Day featuring a “bikini war.”  The cover implies complicity, including the supposed quotation, “My beach body’s better than hers!”

The cover reveals that agents of the media — in this case, whoever decides what stories to include at Women’s Day — actively try to pit women against one another.  This idea comes through loud and clear in this compilation of clips, sent to me by Veronica G.  Titled “Divas on Divas,” it features female pop stars being asked to comment about each other and being pushed to say mean things:

Here are some more examples.

“Bathing Suits, Ballgowns, and Bickering,” a story in Marie Claire:

“Physicians Recommend It, Women Fight Over It”:

“90% Best Friend, 10% Bitter Enemy, 100% Genuine”:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Last month the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a series of graphic anti-smoking ads intended to “raise awareness of the human suffering caused by smoking and to encourage smokers to quit.”   The campaign, titled “Tips From Former Smokers,” depicts individuals who have experienced some of the potential effects of tobacco use, including stomas, stroke, lung removal, heart attack, limb amputations, and asthma.  For example, this ad features several former smokers who offer “tips” on how to live with a throat stoma (hole), such as “Crouch, don’t bend over—you don’t want to lose the food in your stomach”:

This ad shows Terrie, a throat cancer survivor, completing the morning routine she performs in order to maintain her appearance after losing her hair and teeth and having a tracheotomy:

Finally, this ad depicts several people who suffered a vascular disease brought on by smoking who had to have limbs amputated:

In addition to the whether these ads will be effective in persuading smokers to quit, we might ask whether fear and stigma are appropriate health promotion strategies.  Is it possible or ethical to scare people into changing their behaviors?  What are the implications of using stigmatized people to serve as a warning label to others?

What’s most striking about these ads is how they use and portray the human body.  Medical sociologist Deborah Lupton suggests that health promotion campaigns such as this one do not simply depict bodies but also produce them; that is, the ways we talk about and create images of certain bodies says something about who or what that body is and what it does. She argues that when the body is seen as uncontrolled, say, with holes or missing limbs, then the self is understood as undisciplined.  For these former smokers, their undisciplined selves resulted in their uncontrolled bodies. Lupton suggests that by producing the body as a site of contamination or catastrophe the rest of us can be kept in line by fear.

In these ads, a group of disabled people and cancer survivors are used as a warning for current smokers to quit.  The ads invite us to feel disgust at their bodies and fear at what could happen to our own.  In particular, Terrie’s ad invokes gendered beauty norms and prompts viewers to imagine themselves without traditional markers of attractiveness such a full head of hair.

Paying attention to how health promotion images use the body is one way to think more critically about bodies, well-being, and how to effectively promote healthy behaviors.

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Christie Barcelos is a doctoral candidate in Public Health/Community Health Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Cross-posted at Ms.

Abby F. and an anonymous reader sent in an Acuvue contact lens commercial aimed at teens that reinforces both gender and racial stereotypes. The teens look forward to their futures. For the boys, these involve future career success — notice the African American teen dreams of being a famous athlete, while the White boy’s future involves moving up the corporate career ladder. And what does the girl’s life hold? A boy who currently ignores her will want to dance with her:

As the submitters said, the boys are future role models and leaders, while the height of the girl’s future is that she gets to be desired.

UPDATE: James McRitchie, who posts at Corporate Governance, linked to our post last week and has spoken to someone in the PR department at Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Acuvue. The company has since pulled this particular ad, and provided this explanation, which James posted:

The Acuvue Brand Contact Lenses 1-Day campaign was designed to portray defining moments in teens’ lives that often involve the desire to wear contact lenses rather than glasses, such as when playing sports, in social situations, and at life events (i.e., moving to a new school).  As the campaign evolved, we continued to ask teens and their parents to share their thoughts about how wearing contact lenses could play a role in helping teens achieve their dreams.  We received thousands of responses that helped us add new ideas to the campaign.

We recently received feedback about one ad in the campaign that regrettably appeared to reinforce stereotypes.  While this was clearly not our intent, we appreciate consumer feedback and have removed this ad.  We are currently reassessing elements of this campaign so that we can continue to share how contact lenses can play a role helping teens’ realize their hopes and aspirations.

I think James makes a very good point in his post as well:

I’m sure kids have all kinds of dreams that play into society’s stereotypes. Many little girls love Barbies and dream of being a princess. Many young black boys hope to be NBA stars. How does J&J reflect the dreams of its customers while ensuring they don’t reinforce stereotyping?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these representations in and of themselves, if they existed among a diverse array images of other dreams boys and girls of all races should aspire to. Unfortunately, however, they don’t exist in a vacuum; they appeared in a cultural context in which young women are told, via a variety of messages that they encounter over and over again, that their primary concern should be their attractiveness to boys and where African American teens often find themselves valued for their athletic ability more than their academic successes. When you live in a society with gender and racial inequality, sometimes messages intersect with existing stereotypes in ways that reinforce negative messages just because of their pervasiveness; figuring out how to negotiate such potential problems is an ongoing challenge for all of us concerned about racial and gender representation.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

You might be surprised to learn that at its inception in the mid-1800s cheerleading was an all-male sport.  Characterized by gymnastics, stunts, and crowd leadership, cheerleading was considered equivalent in prestige to an American flagship of masculinity, football.  As the editors of Nation saw it in 1911:

…the reputation of having been a valiant “cheer-leader” is one of the most valuable things a boy can take away from college.  As a title to promotion in professional or public life, it ranks hardly second to that of having been a quarterback.*

Indeed, cheerleading helped launch the political careers of three U.S. Presidents.  Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan were cheerleaders. Actor Jimmy Stewart was head cheerleader at Princeton. Republican leader Tom DeLay was a noted cheerleader at the University of Mississippi.

Women were mostly excluded from cheerleading until the 1930s. An early opportunity to join squads appeared when large numbers of men were deployed to fight World War I, leaving open spots that women were happy to fill.

When the men returned from war there was an effort to push women back out of cheerleading (some schools even banned female cheerleaders).  The battle over whether women should be cheerleaders would go on for several decades.  Argued one opponent in 1938:

[Women cheerleaders] frequently became too masculine for their own good… we find the development of loud, raucous voices… and the consequent development of slang and profanity by their necessary association with [male] squad members…**

Cheerleading was too masculine for women!  Ultimately the effort to preserve cheer as an man-only activity was unsuccessful.  With a second mass deployment of men during World War II, women cheerleaders were here to stay.

The presence of women changed how people thought about cheering.  Because women were stereotyped as cute instead of “valiant,” the reputation of cheerleaders changed.  Instead of a pursuit that “ranks hardly second” to quarterbacking, cheerleading’s association with women led to its trivialization.  By the 1950s, the ideal cheerleader was no longer a strong athlete with leadership skills, it was someone with “manners, cheerfulness, and good disposition.”  In response, boys pretty much bowed out of cheerleading altogether. By the 1960s, men and megaphones had been mostly replaced by perky co-eds and pom-poms:

Cheerleading in the sixties consisted of cutesy chants, big smiles and revealing uniforms.  There were no gymnastic tumbling runs.  No complicated stunting.  Never any injuries.  About the most athletic thing sixties cheerleaders did was a cartwheel followed by the splits.***

Cheerleading was transformed.

Of course, it’s not this way anymore.  Cultural changes in gender norms continued to affect cheerleading. Now cheerleaders, still mostly women, pride themselves in being both athletic and spirited, a blending of masculine and feminine traits that is now considered ideal for women.

See also race and the changing shape of cheerleading and the amazing disappearing cheerleading outfit.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Citations after the jump:

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