Archive: Jun 2009

Teresa C. sent in a link to a benefit in Raleigh, NC, for a women’s center. The benefit was called Walk for Women and included a mile-long walk in high heels (though apparently the high heels are optional):

I get what they’re trying to do. Really, I do: an attention-getting way of raising money for what I’m sure is a worthy cause. And having worked or volunteered in many social-service jobs, I know fundraising can be hard (especially in an economic downturn) and you can end up doing some sort of weird stuff if you think it will bring in donations. (I once helped out at a dog blessing at an animal shelter. People brought in their dogs and had them blessed by an Episcopalian preacher [priest? I’m not sure of the terminology] and received a little medal with the image of some saint who apparently is the patron saint of animals, and who I am too lazy to look up right now, to hang on the dog’s collar. Also, there was wine, which in small-town Kansas was the source of some controversy.)

[NOTE: When I originally wrote this post, I had no idea that blessing animals is something some Episcopalians and Catholics do fairly often. I thought it was just something a sweet but kind of flaky volunteer thought up. I apologize if the comments about the animal blessing ceremony seemed disrespectful–I truly didn’t know that it’s a common religious ceremony. I decided to leave that section in but cross through it rather than delete it entirely, as it seemed dishonest to just erase it and pretend it hadn’t happened. I messed up, and I know it.]

So I know where people are coming from when they organize such things. But it still kind of bugs me that organizing walks in high heels has become a common fundraising technique for organizations that serve (primarily) women–women’s centers, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and so on. And I can’t help but think that walking around in heels is, ultimately, an odd way to help women. At least in this case, participants are apparently raising money. But several times I’ve seen high-heeled walks that are simply to “raise awareness,” with no particular emphasis on donations. The ones I saw all had men wearing high heels. And the thing is, I can’t figure out what on earth the point is. What type of awareness is it raising? Is walking around in high heels supposed to increase a person’s understanding of some of the problems women face? What are bystanders supposed to get out of it?

The Raleigh Walk for Women organizers also had a Beauty Blitz at a local salon, where people could drop in, register for the walk, and get discounts on salon services from a person who was a contestant on “Biggest Loser.” And also have a cocktail. So the event is this strange mixture of helping women by using the trappings of femininity (high heels, beauty care). And I just find it kind of odd.

Amy D. sent us this really fascinating South African commercial for a light truck:

Contextualizing the commercial, Amy remarks that, given race relations in South Africa, many companies probably do operate as this team does at the first job with the white home owner. Yet, the commercial presents the black and white men as partners, switching roles so as to maximize their customer base. There’s an irony, though: While the partners seem to be cooperating, their cooperation naturalizes an (in this case symmetrical) preference for those within one’s own race.

Amy is optimistic about the impact of the ad:

The tagline “the bakkie that helps build the nation” is a great play on words. Literally, it refers to the fact that many small contractors – builders, pavers, electricians, plumbers – use this small truck as it is cheap and reliable. Figuratively, the need for nation-building in South Africa is crucial. Although we are 15 years into democracy, there are still huge social and economic gaps between racial groupings, and there is a tendency for people to segregate themselves. The way I see it, the two men in this advert are therefore achieving this nation-building by firstly, breaking racial barriers by running a business as partners, and secondly, in the meta-context, by subverting our racial stereotypes through humour.

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

As an exercise I sometimes ask the students in my gender class to try on the pants of their friends of the opposite sex. That is, I ask women to try on men’s pants and men to try on women’s pants. They often react with surprise at how effectively the jeans make their bodies look like the bodies of their opposite sex friends. (Women often complain that their guy friends look “better” in their jeans than they do!) This starts a discussion of the many ways that our choices about what to wear make it appear as if our bodies are in fact “opposite” when, in fact, they’re not quite as different as we often believe.

We dress ourselves to emphasize certain beliefs about what men’s and women’s bodies should look like by choice, because not doing so carries some negative consequences, and because doing so is institutionalized. It’s institutionalized insofar as department stores have separate men’s and women’s sections (and no unisex section) and jeans are made for and marketed as men’s and women’s.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and wasn’t always. Check out these ads from the 1960s and ’70s:

Found at Vintage Ads and the Torontoist.

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

Reminiscent of work by Anna Lappé and the Small Planet Institute‘s “Take a Bite out of Climate Change” initiative, I stumbled across  Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews in Environmental Science and Technology. Looking past the fancy equations you see data presented like this snippet of Figure 1, documenting the green house gas emissions associated with household food consumption, allowing for a comparison of impacts between food groups.

The article presents data that systematically compares the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles,” finding that the production cycle accounts for the majority of emissions. In other words, changing the type of food you eat (e.g., less red meat) does more good for the environment than buying local.

The new National Review depicts Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor as a Buddha:

Many commentators have criticized the cover for using racial stereotypes.   They write as if the people at the National Review are ignorant (e.g., can’t tell the different between different races).   But it’s not an accident, it’s a purposefully racist joke.  Of all the commentary I’ve seen so far, Neil Sinhababu said it the most clearly (via):

…the joke actually depends on incongruities between the stereotypes of the nonwhite ethnicities involved. The Buddha-like pose and Asian features are tied to lofty pretensions of sagelike wisdom. And what sort of person is it who’s pretending to be some kind of sage? A Hispanic woman! As if.

The in-joke in this cover is for people who have already internalized a stereotype of Hispanic women as hotheaded and not that bright. Put one of them in the Buddha suit, and if you’ve absorbed the right racist stereotypes, the incongruity is hilarious.

I think the larger story here is not that the cover is racist, but that race-based criticism is fair game in contemporary U.S. politics.  The last election should have made this abundantly clear (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and herefor examples).

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

Matthew Ygelsias posted a graph showing that, for those 25 and older, education-level is correlated with rates of unemployment: the more educated you are, the less likely you are to find yourself unemployed. This relationship appears to be uninterrupted by the current recession.

Red = less than a high school diploma
Purple = high school graduate, no college
Green = some college
Blue = bachelors degree or higher

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

Nadya L. sent in a video, embedded below, produced by a Christian anti-pornography initiative. It uses the logic that all women involved in sex work are “somebody’s daughter” and, thus, men should not consume pornography.

Ross Rosenberg at Coilhouse points out that the video erases the possibility that participating in the production of porn does not, inherently, ruin women foreverandever (and, thus, dads and moms should not necessarily be disappointed when their daughter participates in sex work). More provocatively, he asks:

[Why is] the idea of that the object of ones lustful desires is ‘somebody’s daughter’… a functional deterrent…[?]… Really, what is this video talking about here? Is it a serenade to the sanctity of our children’s innocence; the preciousness of their safety or merely the thinking that, if someone masturbates to images of my daughter, she has embarrassed me. If this was your daughter, what shame would it bring down upon you, her father? [Why would it] …be terrible for you and your family if it was discovered that your daughter was a pornstar or a stripper?

In my Power and Sexuality course, I discuss sex work and empowerment. Instead of essentializing both femininity and sex work and arguing that all sex work is inherently oppressive to women, I suggest that social conditions (such as patriarchy) and institutional features (such as pro- versus anti-unionization measures) shape the work environment of sex workers in positive and negative ways. Instead of asking: “Is sex work oppressive to women?” I ask: “What makes sex work more and less oppressive to women?” I think the latter leads to a much more interesting conversation.

For more posts trying to think through the topic of sex work, see here, here, here, here, and here.

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

The contact hypothesis postulates that being near people of a different social group (e.g., race, class, sexual orientation, etc) translates into greater tolerance for that type of person. In other words, it’s harder to hate all Latinos (for example) when your neighbor is Latino and, damn it, you kind of like him.  Andrew Sullivan posted this figure:

Jose at Thick Culture suggests that this could be evidence for the contact hypothesis.  But he also asks whether it might also be true that less homophobic people are more likely to come into contact with gays and lesbians because of a third variable that correlates with both (like choosing to live in a big city), making the relationship spurious.

(What’s a spurious relationship?  Here’s one:  People who eat ice cream are more likely to drown.  Both incidence of ice cream eating and rates of drowning are related to summertime.  The relationship between ice cream and drowning is spurious.  That is, there is no relationship.  Yet they appear related because they are both related to a third variable.)

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