Archive: Oct 2011

People seem to love to draw distinctions between social categories. Gender, race, age, class, sexual orientation, religion… you name it; difference is something that we all tend to be a bit obsessed with. But even when there is difference, there is overlap. Often, lots and lots of overlap.

Case in point, sent in by Christie W. and Jordan G.: reactions to the super scary bit at Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls. These photos suggest that no matter who you are, scary is scary! There are lots and they are just as awesome.

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.

Bemoaning how Halloween has turned into an opportunity/requirement for women and girls to dress sexy is nothing new.  The trend isn’t just about Halloween, however, it reflects an everyday expectation for women.  Women are expected to dress in ways that reveal their body and please a hypothetical male gaze daily.  Men just aren’t.

University of Akron sociology graduate student Will LeSuer took some great photographs illustrating the different expectations for men and women.  The same idea for a costume is sexualized when it’s a woman in it and not-at-all sexualized when it’s a man.  Notice, too, that the sizing is different.  The costumes for women come in three sizes, while the men’s is usually just one size.  This is because women are expected to wear clothes that reveal the shape of her body, so the exact size is more important.

You might have observed, also, that the costumes aren’t called “men’s” and “women’s.”  They’re all just “adult.”  So women could, if they wanted to, buy and wear the non-sexy version of the costume, and vice versa for men.   And we might imagine a woman doing that.  But would a guy do that?  Probably only as a joke (unless they’re in a queer-safe space).

This pattern — women can dress like men, but men don’t dress like women — suggests that there is, in fact, something demeaning, ridiculous, or subordinating about presenting oneself to the male gaze.  Most men feel stupid, gross, or vulnerable when they do it.  This isn’t just about conformity to different gendered expectations.  If it were just about difference women would feel equally weird dressing in men’s clothes.  Instead, when women adopt masculine ways of dressing and moving, they often feel empowered.

So, when men do femininity they feel ridiculous and when women do masculinity they feel awesome. This is what gender inequality looks like.

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.

At the intersection of the trivializing of horrific violence aimed at ethnic/religious groups and the pornification of American culture, comes this “Anne Skank” costume:

[APOLOGIES: We were asked to remove the photograph and complied.]

Yes that is, indeed, a woman dressed up like Anne Frank, the Jewish child who hid from the Nazis for two years, only to be discovered and moved to a concentration camp where she died from Typhus.  Her companions are dressed up like Nazi soldiers.  The Halloween revelers who made the choice to sexualize and laugh at this 15-year-old victim of the holocaust are graduate students in a Creative Writing program.

UPDATE: Comments thread closed.

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 Economist posted a graph, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, that shows how U.S. consumer spending changed between 2007 and 2010. The results provide a good snapshot of the economic trade-offs Americans are making (i.e., we’re buying more canned veggies and eating out less), as well as which industries are taking the biggest hit as consumers redefine their products as less essential.

The “nominal” numbers refer to the unadjusted overall changes in spending; the “real” numbers are adjusted for the fact that prices rose by about 5.2% on average, so consumers are getting less for what they spend. So the light blue bars tell you the absolute change in what we’re spending; the dark blue bars, the change in spending relative to how much we’re buying. When adjusted for price inflation, consumer spending fell by about 8%:

Via Talking Points Memo.

Okay so I did a google search one day and I stumbled across two images that… well, I just have to show them to you:

(Victoria’s Secret models, found here)

(Disney fairies, found here)

I seriously don’t want to make too big of a deal out of this. I really don’t.  I highly doubt that one of these images was modeled after the other or that there was some deliberate attempt to link Victoria’s Secret with Disney or sexy models with little girls.

That said, the two images point to a common visual trope. In this trope, a group of sexy women get lined up (often touching each other).  They look almost identical, with the exception of a tiny bit of variation in skin color and hair.  And they’re costumed in such a way as to make them look both alike and different (e.g., all in underwear of different colors).

The effect is to erase their individuality, but multiply the impact of the image. We don’t see a five or six women, we see Woman with a capital “W” (or Fairies in the second case).  It’s like seeing a buffet from afar, you see Food, but not necessarily macaroni and cheese, little tuna sandwich triangles, fried okra, and fruit salad.

Let’s call it the there’s-no-such-thing-as-too-much-conformity-to-the-male-gaze trope.  Or, I-like-my-women-like-I-like-my-collectibles (lots of ’em, all of a type, and on display).  Or, women-come-in-a-rainbow-of-colors-just-kidding.

Do you have a better name for it?

UPDATE: Here’s another one, sent in by Ann T. (says Ann’s boyfriend, “I know it makes ME think of cancer”):

And here’s one I found on the Ms. blog:

Caroline Heldman counts this as a form of sexual objectification.  In these cases, women are shown as interchangeable, like objects.  And, she writes, “like objects, ‘more is better,’ a market sentiment that erases the worth of individual women.”

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.

In his book Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, Doug McAdam discussed the combination of social and political factors that facilitated the emergence, and significant successes of, the Civil Rights Movement. One of his arguments is that discussions of the movement often overlook the way that non-violent civil rights protesters were able to strategically use violent responses by white supremacists as a resource. While in some cases violent responses were unexpected, most of the time activists understood that they were likely to be met by violence. In fact, McAdam argues, many activists counted on that public brutality. Images such as Sheriff Bull Connor’s officers turning fire hoses and police dogs on non-violent protesters galvanized public opinion in support of the civil rights movement and produced the political pressure necessary to push an often-reluctant federal government to intervene. Thus, McAdam argues that public use of violence by state authorities against protesters can provide essential tools for social movements: a visible, concrete sign of repression, evidence of the vulnerability of citizens in the face of a brutal, intransigent state, and dramatic images that draw media and public attention.

I thought of McAdam’s book when Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link from Five Thirty Eight about how police actions affected media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests. The article was written on October 7th, so it doesn’t include the impacts of the most recent clashes with police, particularly the Oakland PD’s tear gassing of OWS protesters a couple of nights ago. But already, a noteworthy pattern was emerging. Nate Silver looked at OWS coverage in a database of about 4,000 U.S. news sources. He found that media coverage was basically nonexistent until NYPD pepper sprayed some protesters. Coverage shot up again after NYPD arrested a few hundred protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1st and after more incidents on Oct. 5th:

As Silver points out, we can’t discern any clear causality here; perhaps media coverage would have gone up over time anyway. But coverage of OWS doesn’t show a smooth, slowly-increasing trend; coverage jumped after each of these instances of violence, and after the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, remained much higher than it had been before. At the very least, it appears that violence by the police drew media attention, providing an opening for the concerns of OWS protesters — and the persistence and growth of OWS protests around the country — to be defined as legitimate news stories in their own right.

UPDATE: For more on the persistence of the OWS movement and protesters’ tactical and organizational skill, check out Steven Vallas’s post at Organizations, Occupations and Work.

[Full Cite: Doug McAdam. 1999. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.]

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Newspapers report facts – thing that actually happened.  They run photos of things that actually happened.  They don’t make stuff up.  But they do choose which facts to report, and they do choose which photos to run.    Usually the two are congruent.

But not always.  Wonkette ran this photo of a page from the Washington Post:

Wonkette and other sites have contrasted the photo with this video of a cop deliberately firing a tear gas canister at close range directly at a group of demonstrators who had come to aid of someone who had been hit in the head with a tear gas canister.

But what’s also noteworthy is the contrast between the photo (nice cop, nice kitty, nothing violent happening here) and the Post’s own lede:   “Police fired tear gas and beanbags. . . .”

A confession to PostSecret this week inspired me to add to and revise this post from 2009.

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I have posted before on the way that black people are fetishized in the U.S.  It is as if they are, literally, more colorful, more interesting, cooler, hipper, even spicier than white people.  Whites, in contrast, can seem bland, boring, vanilla, even whitebread.  From this perspective, being a “boring white” person can seem, well, boring.  Both of these confessions can be read as suggesting as much (though there are surely other readings as well):

It’s important to remember that this projection of soulfulness and other positive characteristics onto black people specifically is problematic, even if it’s not derogatory (for posts on the “magic negro,” see here, here, and here).   People of color often report that they feel like white folks are friends with or date them specifically because they aren’t white.  This is no compliment.  Most of us desire to be friends with people who see us as individuals and not stereotypes.

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.