nation: Britain/the U.K.


The ad below is the first-ever British TV commercial advertising abortion services family planning options, including abortion.  It is being shown late at night and says:

If you’re late for your period, you could be pregnant. If you’re pregnant and not sure what to do, Marie Stopes International can help.

I don’t remember ever seeing such a commercial. Condoms, birth control pills, pregnancy tests, herpes medication, HPV vaccines, tampons, Viagra, and sex, sex, sex, YES. Abortion, NEVER. Salon seems to claim that it’s the first of its kind anywhere.

Have you ever seen such a thing where you live? What do you imagine are the politics around the airing of a commercial advertising abortion services?

Via Feministing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dmitriy T.M. sent us a link to a story at Slate about (mostly European) “national personifications” — that is, human figures used to represent particular countries, their citizens, or ideas of the national character.  Personification is contentious in that it aims to represent a diverse society with a single person, often representing a simple idea.  Accordingly, we sometimes see divergent, or even conflicting, personifications.

Many personifications in Europe and areas once colonized by them connect the nation to noble ideas and values through the use of Latin-derived names and the use of robes, poses, and other elements of classic statues and paintings to adorn a female figure. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Britannia (an emblem that first emerged when Britain was still ruled by Rome) is a goddess-like figure wearing a Roman-style helmet who has, over time, come to represent the nation and the idea of liberty:

The U.S. has a similar figure, Columbia:

More popular characterizations also emerge, often representing the national character not through goddess-like imagery but as an Average Citizen.  For instance, much more familiar in the U.S. than Columbia is Uncle Sam. He differs from many other national personifications in that he doesn’t represent the U.S. citizenry or the idea of the nation in general; he specifically represents the U.S. government and is best known for wanting “you” to join the military, buy war bonds, and such:

And in addition to Brittania, the U.K. is also personified by John Bull:

According to the Slate article, John Bull presents the British people as middle-class, smart in a common-sense way, and also somewhat suspicious of authority — that is, John Bull is a personification that separates the citizenry from government (the source of authority) to some extent, and thus has been used in many political cartoons to question government policies (whereas Uncle Sam has often been used to advocate them, since he represents the government itself).

Going a step further, Portugal’s Zé Povinho, a working-class personification, actively mocks the powerful, including political elites:

Competing personifications may be used by different political factions. For instance, those in favor of and opposed to Irish independence used female emblems of Ireland. Opponents of Irish nationalism used the figure of Hibernia, represented as the younger sister of Brittania and in need of her sister’s protection from the brutish (male) nationalist forces:

Nationalists responded with Kathleen Ni Houlihan, “generally depicted as an old woman who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die to free Ireland from colonial rule, usually resulting in the young men becoming martyrs for this cause”:

The gender element in these competing personifications is interesting: in both cases Ireland is a woman in need of protection, but who see needs protected by (a stronger sister or men) and from (men in both cases) differs.

So here we have just a small handful of national personifications that may coexist fairly harmoniously while serving different purposes (say, Brittania and John Bull) or actively conflict (representations of Ireland). Various groups in a nation (political elites, different social classes, rebels, etc.) are unlikely to identify equally with a single personification; thus, the figures used to represent a country or its citizens can become sites of political or cultural contention, defining who has the most legitimate claim to being the backbone of the nation (the middle-class John Bull, the working-class Zé Povinho) or framing independence or other political movements.

Vintage ad?

Nope. This ad for Virgin Active Health Clubs arrived in D’s mailbox this very month.

Credit: “D & T” of “Wish I Were Baking” at Flickr.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.


How have adults and young people weathered the worldwide economic downturn? This two-minute 12-second video shows that young people have been harder hit by joblessness in almost all OECD countries:

From the OECD Factblog.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The American Anthropological Association website on race has a great collection of the racial and ethnic categories included on Censuses throughout the world, showing how different countries formalize different racial categories.  They illustrate just how diverse ideas about race are and challenge the notion that there is one “correct” question or set of questions.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Ada A., Katrin, Filip S., and Missives from Marx all let us know about PinkStinks, a campaign in the UK that “challenges the culture of pink which invades every aspect of girls’ lives”.

The aim is a worthy one: the webpage discusses concerns about girls’ body image, self esteem issues, the sexualization of young women, and so on.

They link to this video, which I thought was neat:

While I totally get the idea and support the effort to provide girls with a wider set of images of what they can aspire to do or be like, the “pink stinks” name, and some of the t-shirts on the site, give me a some pause.

If you read different parts of the site, it’s clear that pink is a stand-in for the socialization of girls into a particular type of femininity, and the campaign is attempting to combat the narrowing of girls’ aspirations and role models. But it brings up an issue I face whenever I’m trying to pick out clothes for my 3-year-old niece: how do you reject the trappings of that socially-approved version of femininity without devaluing femininity, girls, and women themselves? All things equal, I’ll usually pick a green t-shirt instead of a pink t-shirt for my niece because I feel like giving her a pink t-shirt signals to her an approval of all the things we associate with “pink culture”–valuing looks over smarts, worrying about boys, and so on, and because I know she is frequently encouraged to declare pink her “favorite” color by those buying her gifts.

But we often see that in the attempt to provide girls with more options, those who accept elements of mainstream femininity are devalued. My students who are trying to distance themselves from ideas of passive femininity often disparage “girly-girls,” those they see as unambiguously accepting pink culture. Thus, wearing a sparkly barrette or painting your nails pink becomes inherently problematic, a sign that you must be boy-obsessed, dumb, superficial, and so on.

I don’t think this campaign overall is doing that–if you read through it, the message is more complex and clearly about giving girls a wider array of options to choose from as they construct their identities. But much of the online discussion of it seems to miss the nuance and veer more into the simplistic interpretation of “pink stinks” as “empowering girls means rejecting and devaluing everything currently associated with femininity, as well as those who do it,” and the t-shirts seem to play into that a little.

Many of the things associated with femininity–being nurturing, say, or liking to cook–are, in fact, quite lovely, and problematic only when we say that only girls can/should like them, that all girls ought to, and that they’re less worthwhile than things boys do. Adding to the devaluing of women and femininity in an attempt to resist gender norms is, ultimately, counter-productive.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Katrin noticed something interesting about the coverage of the Farmer’s Weekly competition for Britain’s sexist male and female farmer, Pete Mortimore and Anna Simpson.

The coverage focused almost exclusively on Simpson.

She writes:

Of the (so far) 12 newspapers mentioning this, 11 focus solely on Anna Simpson: She’s the only one mentioned in the article’s title, there are huge pictures of her, videos of her and there is NO picture of Pete Mortimore, he is barely mentioned at all, never in the title (in some of the texts there is a half sentence in the middle of the article mentioning him: “Pete Mortimore, 25, has been voted Britain’s sexiest male farmer”, but that’s ALL).

For example, the Telegraph:

More examples of the focus on Simpson include the following headlines:

Blonde is UK’s Sexiest Farmer (the Sun)

Blonde Named Sexiest Female Farmer (UPI)

Welly-Wearing Blonde Named UK’s Hottest Farmer (GardenXL)

The Barnyard Beauty… UK’s Sexiest Farmer (Express)

Katrin continues:

The single exception, which has a tiny picture of him, is his own local newspaper.

Katrin thinks this is a great example of the way that the straight, male gaze shapes news coverage.  The coverage in these newspapers, ostensibly for both male and female, gay and straight readers, nevertheless covered the competition as if all of the readers are primarily, or only, interested in the hot chick.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Katrin sent us a great figure comparing the rate of socioeconomic mobility across several OECD nations.  Using educational attainment and income as measures, the value (between zero and one) indicates how strongly parental socioeconomic status predicts a child’s socioeconomic status (a 1 is a perfect correlation and a zero would be no correlation).

The figure shows that Great Britain, the U.S., and Italy have a near 50% correlation rate.  So, in these countries, parents status predicts about 50% of the variance in children’s outcomes.  In contrast, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Canada have much lower correlations.  People born in the countries on the left of this distribution, then, have higher socioeconomic mobility than people born in the countries on the right.  Merit, presumably, plays a greater role in your educational and class attainment in these cases.

Source:  The New York Times.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.