In this minute-and-a-half, sociologist Nikki Jones talks about the way that the idea of the ghetto has been commodified — especially in rap and hip hop — in ways that informs Americans who don’t live in inner-city urban areas, but potentially mystifies the reality of that life as well:
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Fraulion sent in this screenshot from the Amazon.com homepage. In case you needed help buying gifts, dads like history and politics, moms like to smell nice and look shiny, girlfriends and wives like chick flicks and cute stuff, boyfriends and husbands like classic rock and knowing what time it is, grandpas like to watch documentaries (probably about “the war”), and grandmas just want to look at pictures of their grandchildren.
Last but not least, Rob W. sent in another Amazon.com gift guide that suggests that women want a masculine-looking watch and men want a wine aerator (I don’t know what that is, but wine is woman-y right?). So… counter-stereotypical push back against the gender machine? Or a typo? I’m going with typo. Funny typo.
More after the jump:
Cross-posted at Ms.
Maybelline’s brand of lip gloss, “baby lips,” is a straightforward example of the infantilization of adult women:
We should be worried about the infantilization of women for two reasons:
First, it’s directly related to the sexualization of young girls. The two phenomena, when considered together, clearly point to the convergence of female children and adult sexuality. As I wrote in a previous post:
…on the one hand, women are portrayed as little girls, as coyly innocent, as lacking in power and maturity. On the other hand, child-likeness is sexy, and girls are portrayed as Lolitas whose innocence is questionable.
Second, the need for women to look like babies to be beautiful (and the requirement for women to be beautiful), turns aging into a trauma for women. Susan Sontag, in her (truly beautiful) essay The Double Standard of Aging, put it this way:
The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man… A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another…
There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.
A very lucrative defeat for Maybelline, if we buy into it.
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More of the quote at a previous post. And, for more on the infantilization of women, see our posts on baby teeth, lady spanking, Glee, this collection of examples, a vintage example, and the Halloween edition.
Link via BagNewsNotes.
Sonita M. sent in a report from the Movement Advancement Project about the state of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) families.
LGBT families are more likely to be poor than non-LGBT families. Nine percent of married cis-gender different-sex couples live in poverty, compared to 21% of gay male couples and 20% of lesbian couples:
LGBT couples may be more likely to be in poverty in part because of wage differentials between gays, lesbians, and their heterosexual counterparts. Research shows that gay and bisexual men earn significantly less money than heterosexual men, whereas lesbians make somewhat more money than straight women. Gay men would be more likely than heterosexual men to be in poverty, then. But what about women? Women in same-sex couples face the same wage disadvantage that all women face, but also are not married to the heterosexual men that are making so much money (making it so that heterosexual women can make less money than gay women, but still be less likely to live in poverty). Make sense? I hope so.
The second reason that LGBT couples with children are more likely than cis-gendered different-sex couples with children to live in poverty is that Black and Latino LGBT people are more likely than White LGBT people to be parents, and Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poor to begin with:
Among same-sex couples, being a parent is also correlated with immigration status, which also correlates with class. Non-citizens are more likely to be parents than citizens:
The two million children in America being raised by LGBT parents, then, are more likely to suffer from class disadvantage. The authors of the report go on to discuss the ways in which formal policy and informal discrimination contribute to this state of affairs.
Via Andrew Sullivan.
Cross-posted on Reports from the Economic Front.
The Occupy Movement has clearly transformed conversations about the economy. It is now inequality — in particular, the gap between the top 1% and everyone else — rather than the national debt that dominates the news.
To review, this gap is real, as the following charts from the Economic Policy Institute make clear. This chart shows the percentage increase in household income over the period 1979 to 2007 by income group. While the top 1% enjoyed income gains of 224% over the period, the gains enjoyed by the bottom 90% were far more modest: 5%. Equally striking is the fact that the household income of top 0.01% shot up an astounding 390%.
Unfortunately, there is another income gap that has not received nearly as much attention. It is the white-nonwhite gap. The Portland, Oregon based Coalition of Communities of Color recently published a report on the socioeconomic situation of people of color in Multnomah Country (which includes Portland).
As the chart below reveals, the mean income of families of color in the top decile (10%) actually declined by $6,002 over the years 1979 to 2007. By contrast, the mean income of white families in the top 10% rose by $122,591. White families and families of color in the bottom half of the distribution all suffered losses.
The following two charts show the mean earnings of each group by decile and their change between 1979 and 2007.
Portrait in 1979:
This last chart shows poverty rates by color. Clearly, as we work to create a more equitable society, our efforts must also be guided by awareness of the existence of serious racial and ethnic inequities.
Two additional cases of a boy being subject to schools rules that don’t apply to girls prompts a re-post. I’ve added the new instances to the end.
Tara C. sent us a link to a story about a 4-year-old boy who has been given in-school suspension (and was threatened with expulsion) for having hair that breaks the dress code for the Dallas, TX, school system:
Dmitriy T.M. sent in another story, this one featuring a 6-year-old named Gareth who was being placed into in-school suspension (i.e., spending all day each day in the principal’s office) because of his long hair and earring.
So, this still you see of him below… that’s what counts as long hair. And, can you spot the earring in his left ear? It’s there.
In another case, 16-year-old Kasey Landrum was suspended for wearing eye-liner on school grounds (after classes were out):
Of course, these aren’t just about enforcing a dress code. It’s a gendered code; girls aren’t required to have short hair cuts, because on girls, longer hair isn’t “distracting,” it’s “normal.” As is make-up and earrings. Implicit in the idea of what counts as an appropriate appearance, then, is the gender of the person wearing it. These cases reveal, further, that girls are allowed more choices than boys because we are more accepting of girls acting boyish than boys acting girlish (in what sociologists call “androcentrism“).
The final case also reveals the importance of intersectionality, or the way that different identities come together in complicated ways. Landrum claims that an ostensibly heterosexual boy was allowed to wear punk-style make-up to school on the same day. So breaking gender rules is apparently okay if you affirm that you’re heterosexual, and maybe being gay is okay if you don’t break any gender rules, but doing both is going too far.
Enjoy our collection of Halloween posts from years past:
Race and Ethnicity
Gender
The intersection of Race, Class, and Gender
Halloween and Politics
And, for no conceivable reason…
I often find myself bemused at our insistence on using sex (i.e., male or female) as the defining thing that describes our sexual orientation. We are homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, right? These words supposedly mean that we are sexually attracted to the same sex, the other sex, or both. Right?
No! Not by a long shot! Essentially no one is attracted to men, for example, no matter what their sexual orientation. I’m straight and female, but I am attracted to a very, very, very small subset of men. I’m generally only attracted to men within a certain age range, with kind faces (I find the chiseled look a bit intimidating); also, I prefer them to be relatively clean. If I can add non-physical characteristics, then being aggressive with buddies or rude to waitstaff or prone to jealousy are all turn-offs, as are certain politics. I’ll stop here. Suffice to say, suggesting that I’m attracted to men is a vast overstatement. Sexual orientation, as we think of it, simply doesn’t describe my proclivities. I suppose this is true for most of us.
I was reminded of this idea when I came across an OK Cupid post. Christian Rudder drew on the profiles of over 250,000 heterosexual users, discovering that a large percentage of them had (positive) sexual experiences with people of the same sex, or wanted to (source).
Thirteen percent of self-identified straight men have had a sexual encounter with another man. Seven percent of them enjoyed it. Another 5% haven’t had the pleasure, but they would like to.
Significantly more self-identified straight women, 33%, have had a sexual encounter with another woman. Twenty-six percent of them enjoyed it. Another 18% haven’t, but they would like to. Less than half reported that they hadn’t and figured they never would.
Reported sexual orientation, then, simply doesn’t map perfectly onto desires or behaviors, in addition to failing to capture the full complexity of our sexualities.
For more of OK Cupid’s data, see our posts on the racial politics of dating, what women want, how attractiveness matters, age, gender, and the shape of the dating pool, older women want more sex, and the lies love-seekers tell.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
© 2012 Sociological Images
