Archive: Jan 2011

“For decades, Barbie has remained torpedo-titted, open-mouthed, tippy-toed and vagina-less in her cellophane coffin—and, ever since I was little, she threatened me,” writes Susan Jane Gilman in her article “Klaus Barbie.”

This sentiment towards Barbie, one Gilman describes as “heady, full-blown hatred,” is familiar to many females (myself included) – but, so too, is a love of Barbie and a nostalgia for Barbie-filled memories.

Feelings towards Barbie often lie along a continuum that shifts with life’s passages –as children, many love her, then as tween and teendom sets in, she is tossed aside, forgotten about for many years, and then later, when children come into one’s life – through mothering or aunty-ing, Barbie once again enters the picture. For feminist women, the question of whether or not Barbie is a “suitable” plaything for the children in their lives often looms large as they navigate the toy-fueled world of early childhood.

Daena Title’s “Drown the Dolls,” an art exhibit premiering this weekend at the Koplin Del Reio art gallery in Culver City, California, continues the feminist tradition of analyzing Barbie, this time with an eye towards “drowning” (or at least submerging) the ideals of femininity Barbie embodies. In the video below, the artist explains her fascination with Barbie as “grotesque” and how her distorted reflections under water mirror the distorted messages culture sends to girls and women about feminine bodily perfection.

Title’s project and the surrounding media campaign (which asks people to share their Barbie Stories in 2 to 3 minute clips at You Tube), has garnered a lot of commentary. Much of the surrounding commentary and many of the threads have focused on the issue of drowning as perpetuating or normalizing violence against women. For example, this blogger at The Feminist Agenda writes,

“When I look at the images… I don’t so much get the message that the beauty standard is being drowned as that images of violence against women – especially attractive women – are both acceptable and visually appealing in our culture.”

Threads at the Ms. blog as well as on Facebook include many similar sentiments. While I have not seen the exhibit yet, the paintings featured in the above clip are decidedly non-violent – they do not actively “drown” Barbie so much as showcase her underwater with her distorted image reflected on the water’s surface – as well as often surrounded by smiling young girls. As Title indicates in her discussion of her work, it is the DISTORTED REFLECTIONS of Barbie that captivate her – as well as the way she is linked to girl’s happiness and playfulness – a happiness that will be “drown” as girls grow into the adult bodies Barbie’s plastic body is meant to represent.

The reactions thus far of “drowning” as violent focus on the project’s title alone, failing to take the content (and context) of the paintings into account – they are not a glorification of violence but a critique of the violence done to girls and women (and their bodies and self esteem) by what Barbie represents.

To me, Title’s work is in keeping with the earlier aims of the Barbie Liberation Organization who infamously toyed with Barbie’s voicebox to have her say GI Joe’s line “vengeance is mine” rather than her original “math is hard!” Her work adds to the tradition of feminist work on toys, gendering, and girls studies – a tradition that is thriving and continues to examine new and old toys alike (as here and here).

The negative commentary regarding Title’s work as perpetuating violence seems to me a knee-jerk reaction – one not based in critical reading of her work. While maybe Barbie (and the bodily perfection her grotesquely ABNORMAL body represents) SHOULD sink, Title’s work – and the critiques of Barbie it is fostering, deserves to swim…

When men have children they start earning more—it’s the “daddy bonus.” The size of the bonus? About 11 percent of average earnings across a wide variety of educational, racial and ethnic characteristics. It begs some good questions, and sociologists Melissa Hodges and Michelle Budig at UMass Amherst have answered a lot of them in their recent Gender & Society article, “Who Gets the Daddy Bonus? Organizational Hegemonic Masculinity and the Impact of Fatherhood on Earnings” (abstract).

For example, you might ask, is the daddy bonus because men who are better at earning are also more likely to have kids? This is called the selection hypothesis, and Hodges and Budig’s analysis says “no.” In fact, having children creates a reversal of fortunes, a case of “negative selection.” The dudes who have kids have characteristics that suggest lower earning, not higher earning. But they end up turning it around when the babies arrive.

Is it because dads start to work more? When men become fathers they do work more. But that doesn’t produce the daddy bonus. Instead, the authors found that being married to a woman (a marriage bonus) accounted for about one-half of the increased earnings. Unmarried dads? No daddy bonus.

Is it because dads benefit from the breadwiner/caregiver model? Research sometimes shows that when wives de-emphasize market work (part time work or staying home) this is associated with men’s higher earnings (you can see a case of it here). Not so for whites and African Americans in this study, though it was true for Latinos. The “marriage bonus” for all groups, however, may relate to having the benefits of the extra share of domestic work that wives tend to do regardless of labor market participation.

Does everyone get the daddy bonus? Yes and no. All fathers, regardless of race and ethnicity, gain a wage advantage. But look at this: white dads received an 8.3 percent bonus, black dads a 7.3 percent bonus, and Latino dads a 9.2 percent bonus.

The authors explain: “Most men experience gendered advantages in the labor market, but not all men are equally privileged…. Men’s ability to capture the ‘patriarchal dividend’–privileges and rewards accruing to men by virtue of living in a gender-unequal society–varies by their other status characteristics….” What they are talking about is “hegemonic masculinity.” Think of it as the “war within the sexes” – you can read more about it here.

Hegemonic masculinity is a big term for a concept that we all know intuitively: that being a good man gets blended together with other cultural norms to amplify male privilege for some men more than others. As Joan Williams has explained so well, we think the “ideal worker” (you can find a discussion of here) is gender neutral. But work is organized so that people who don’t have competing responsibilities–for example, for the kids–fit in better than people who have work-family conflicts. And those people, overwhelmingly (though not always) are men. Indeed, many of the cultural norms relate to work, others relate to heterosexuality. The effect is that it just seems obvious who has “earned” their rewards.

Hodges and Budig found that the fatherhood bonus is bigger for white men in professional/managerial positions, for white men and Latinos with college degrees, white men in occupations that emphasized mental activity more than physical activity, white men and Latinos in jobs that de-emphasized strength, and (as mentioned above) Latino men with more economically dependent spouses.

So, all men benefit from college education (though the benefits aren’t so great for everybody, as you can read here), and all men benefit from fatherhood. But fatherhood benefits for college educated white men is about 21 percent, Latino men 19 percent, and African American men is 7.3 percent (no different from the benefit for non-college educated African American dads).

The authors sum it up: “…the effect of becoming a father is another source of privilege for privileged men, but less so for men who are in more socially disadvantaged positions.” So, if you were looking for an example of “hegemonic masculinity,” now you have one.

-Virginia Rutter