Archive: Feb 2011

Coverage of the Egyptian protests this week disproportionately interviewed and photographed male protestors, occasionally using the terms “Egyptian men” and “protestors” interchangeably (excellent example here).  What images we did receive of women depicted them as separate from the demonstrations if not dependent on male guardianship.  The paucity of images or stories about women activists excludes them from the national uprising and silences their protests.

Outside of the mainstream media a widely circulated photo album, available to anyone with Facebook, collected over a hundred pictures of Egyptian women demonstrating. Curation of this album during the internet blackout, when nearly all images were filtered through the media, serves as a testament to the value of diaspora and transnational networks.  Additionally, placing these images side by side becomes a powerful counter to women’s media invisibility and highlights diversity of backgrounds, opinions, and forms of protest undertaken by Egyptian women.

It might be worth nothing that we’re seeing more stories about women since a You Tube video (below) of a woman calling for people to join her in protest on January 25th caught the attention of the media.  Namely this excellent NPR story and an AFP article.  Lastly, anyone interested in social media should visit this Facebook group.

April Crewson is completing her masters in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

“You can’t be taught the skills to model, because first and foremost, skill doesn’t matter.  It’s all in the jeans genes.”

So notes a shirtless man, a self-described “male mannequin” in commercials for Next Top Model in Vietnam:

My sociological knee-jerk reaction is to point to the ways in which models’ labor is deliberately rendered invisible, masking performance as mere appearance, in much the same way social categories are naturalized to appear like states of being instead of products of social organization — think gender, ethnicity, class, and yes, beauty.

As concerns the category of beauty, there is considerable work involved in pulling it off.  Like retail service workers, models do “aesthetic labor,” as documented by sociologists Elizabeth Wissinger and Joanne Entwistle and more recently by Christine Williams and Catherine Connell.  Aesthetic labor is the work of manipulating one’s physique and personality to embody a company brand.  In the modeling market, some people easily have that physique, as the shirtless guy claims to have, but most models have to fight for it, and they’re fighting against the clock of aging.  If they don’t have to work for cut abs and narrow hips, they most likely still feel compelled to work at it, given the rampant uncertainties facing them in their daily grinds of auditions and rejections.  All of this work gets carefully tucked behind the scenes of fashion and beauty images — a clandestine world NTM purports to expose for voyeuristic consumers around the world.

But instead of exposing it, the NTM franchise caricatures it.  In the American version, Tyra Banks insists that effort is everything, and she axes candidates left and right because they didn’t “want it badly enough.”  She just didn’t work hard at it, goes the usual dismissal, or she lacked the determination to keep smiling when Jay Manuel told her that her face is weird.  It’s not that you’ve got the wrong look, the show tells contestants, but that you didn’t put in the work to get the right one.  NTM sticks close to an individualistic ethos:  if you fail, it’s because you lacked the individual effort needed to succeed.

Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the “right” contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season.  Saying that success is “all in the genes” renders the “look” into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production.

Saying it’s all in the jeans is also pretty funny.  Let’s not overlook this guy’s self-deprecating humor:  here’s a man surrendering himself (and his manhood) to the whims and preferences of fashion, an industry widely believed to be controlled by women and gay men.  In other ads he mocks his talent and wryly notes the biggest hazard in his line of work: wearing leopard print g-strings (to say nothing of occupational challenges like the precarious nature of freelance labor, the lack of health and retirement benefits, or the unpaid labor of castings and magazine shoots).  What’s most striking about this guy and his seductive black-and-white commercial is not the sociological back story, it’s his own silliness.  He’s playing on the ironic gap between social expectations of masculinity and the realities of being featured as a passive visual object.  We probably wouldn’t be so charmed if the commercial featured a young woman laughing about her job title: “I’m a professional model!”  We’d probably roll our eyes.  The source of that silliness—unequal cultural expectations about the display value of men and women—is as problematic as it is good fodder for comedy.

Ashley Mears is a former model and current Assistant Professor of sociology at Boston University who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry.  In her book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.

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

The figure below, featured in a paper by political scientist Larry Bartels, maps partisan identification — whether one identifies as a Democrat, an Independent, or a Republican, and how strongly — with opinions as to whether unemployment and inflation had gotten better or worse under Reagan’s presidency (1981-1988).  It shows that partisan beliefs strongly predict people’s opinions about discernable facts.

Via Gin and Tacos.

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.

Elisabeth R., Rebecca H., and Kalani R. all sent in a Volkswagen commercial produced for SuperBowl weekend that they found striking, both for the commercial itself and reactions to it. In the commercial, a child dressed up as Darth Vader tries using The Force on various items around the house. What struck all three of the submitters is the ambiguous gendering of the ad:

At no point is the child’s gender made clear. If we just went with the information in the ad, we might conclude the child is a girl, based on scene in the stereotypically super-pink bedroom. But given the usual clear gendering of toys, Elisabeth, Rebecca, and Kalani all enjoyed seeing an ad in which this didn’t occur.

But the possibility that a girl might dress up as Darth Vader seems difficult for a lot of people to grasp. In the pages and pages of comments on the commercial on YouTube, the child is repeatedly referred to as “he” or “the boy.” In one comment thread, when someone brings up the possibility the child is a girl due to the pink bedroom, someone else says no, it was a boy in his sister’s room.

There’s no particular reason to assume this child is a boy except that we associate Star Wars with boys (and generally see males as the default if gender isn’t otherwise specified). I think the reactions to the video are a good example of the power of gendering: because viewers have pre-existing ideas about gender, kids, and what they’d be interested in, they’re likely to apply those assumptions even in the face of potentially contradictory information and to come up with explanations that leave the pre-existing ideas intact.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention when I was writing the post that none of the commenters who saw the child as a boy seemed to think the pink room was his — I read several different comment threads and when it was brought up, people assume it’s a sister’s room. Also, reader Angie thinks the stuff in the pink room looks too old for the child, since the toys look like the type an older kid would collect. I am clueless about that, which is why I struggle to buy gifts for kids: I no longer have a clear sense of what types of things kids are playing with at what age.

UPDATE 2: This is separate from what the gender of the role of the child in the commercial, but VW has confirmed that the actor who played the child is a boy.

On another note, the fact that VW is using Star Wars nostalgia in its ads as a way to appeal to adult customers makes me feel very old for some reason.

In a previous post I discussed A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz’s suggestion that we play Farmville because we’re polite. Farmville, he argues, is a cooperative game; one needs help from others to get very far.  So you are invited to play by friends, entreated to assist them, and given gifts to encourage your participation.  The game “entangles users in a web of social obligations,” to the point where not playing would be rude or signal an effort to distance oneself from your friends who play.

Well Farmville is old news. Cityville was launched on November 18th, 2010.  Within 24 hours it had 290,000 players.  Within one month it had 84 million players, exceeding the total number playing Farmville, previously the most popular web-based game ever.  Today, more than 100 million people play Cityville.  And I’m one of them.

Well not really.  Bored on a plane flight over the holidays and enjoying free wifi on the plane, I decided to check it out.  And, despite expecting that there was a highly social dimension to the game, I was amazed — ah-mazed — at the pace at which Cityville asked me to publicize my participation and get others to join.  Below are the kinds of entreaties I received every 20 seconds or so.

Each time I achieved a “goal” Cityville suggested that I tell everyone and share coins with friends.  Sometimes Cityville would suggest that I get friends “started” by sending them gifts or help them with a city they’ve already got. It also suggested that I add neighbors and populate my own city with my friends in various roles. You can also visit your friends’ cities, help them out (e.g., harvest for them), or own businesses in their cities.  All of this earns both of you points of various kinds. In fact, Cityville would only let me do certain things if my friends helped me do them. Cityville also told me which of my friends were playing.

Then, despite having at no time clicking on “share” anything, Facebook put the news that I was playing Cityville on my wall (it was probably in the “I agree” contract at the very beginning).  Gwen was predictably surprised:

Finally, after about a week, Cityville got directly into my email inbox to tempt me to play again with FREE CASH!.

So there you have it. Cityville implores, pleads, begs, insists, threatens, and cajoles the user into getting their friends involved. It’s an insidious social network parasite… and it’s contagious…

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.

Sent in by Liz Yockey, who signed it for GroupOn, it is kind of interesting that all the site thinks it needs to know about you is your sex and your age to send you local coupons that suit you.

Are you just like every other n-something f or m you know?  Are we so predictable?  Perhaps marketers know better than we.  What do you think?

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.

Sara P. let us know about a map at National Geographic that shows the distribution of surnames in the U.S.

The names are color coded by region of origin of the name:

A note on methodology: geographers looked at the most common by counting the most common last names in phone books and selecting the most common names in each state. This hides significant diversity in names in large cities that may have had a greater mix of immigrant groups that the state overall; for instance, a map of the most common names just in New York City might look quite a bit different than the most common names in New York state.

Nonetheless, the concentration of last names serves as an echo of immigration and settlement patterns. British-origin names tend to dominate across the U.S., unsurprisingly, particularly Smith, Johnson, and Williams. Because slaves were often given the last names of their owners, a significant proportion of individuals with British last names are African American — for instance, African Americans are about 20% of people named Smith.

Several Irish-origin names stand out in Massachusetts, as well as some French surnames in Maine:

The map of Hawaii reflects the significance of the Asian population there:

Spanish-origin names in the Southwest:

The names common in the Great Lakes/upper plains region reflects the fact that the area was a common destination for immigrations from Germany and Scandinavia:

I looked up the geographers who created the maps (James Cheshire, Paul Longley, and Pablo Mateos at University College London) and that led me to an interesting website sponsored by UCL, the World Names Project. If you type in a surname, it will show where on the globe it is most common. You can also zoom in on individual nations and see the distribution within them. Here’s the global distribution of my last name, Sharp:

You also get some data about the name: its origin, the top 10 regions and individual cities for that name, and the most common first names that go with it (which, in all the names I tried, were overwhelmingly male, so I don’t know what to make of that).

As Sara said of the National Geographic map, many of the results are predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to look at them.

UPDATE: Reader Kristina provides an explanation for why male names dominate the most common first names lists:

My explanation for Gwen’s finding that the most common first names are overly represented by male names is that names for boys are less variable than names for girls.

Interesting post on that here, which notes, “it [natural language geocoder] needs 4200 first names for girls to cover 90% of the population, but it only needs 1200 boy’s names to reach a 90% coverage. The reason for this huge difference is mainly found in the top positions. The ten most popular male names reach 23% whereas the ten most popular female names reach a comparatively meager 10%.”

The Guttmacher Institute reports that the decades long fall in the rate of surgical abortions has plateaued:

Decreasing abortion rates is something that most Americans support.  Sharon Camp, president and CEO of Guttmacher, suggests that greater availability of cheap effective contraception might help jump start the decrease.  That seems like a politically safe recommendation.  What say you?

Via Michelle Chen at Ms.

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.