Archive: Oct 2011

A new submission is a nice addition to this old post.  The newest iteration of this gender-bending game — men in pin-up poses — can be found in the middle of this collection.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in this month’s cover of GQ featuring Sasha Baron Cohen, in Bruno character.  Cohen adopts a pose often used to showcase women’s bodies.  The contrast between the meaning of the pose (sexy and feminine) with the fact that he’s male draws attention to how powerfully gendered the pose is.  His facial expression highlights the ridiculousness of such a powerful gender binary (women look sexy when they pose like this, men look stupid when they do).

Consider:

Commenter MB noted that GQ has some news stands have decided to cover the cover (as if it were porn):

The interesting question might be: When we pose women like men, does it look ridiculous or badass?  And, if it looks badass, what does that say about the way we expect women to look and move?

For a similar project, see Yolanda Dominquez’s photos of “regular” women in “fashion” poses.

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.

Myrianne J. forwarded us an email she received from Dell advertising a laptop that perfectly illustrates the conflation of thinness with beauty. The email, which came with the subject line “Hello beautiful — introducing the new ultra-thin Vostro V131,” included this image, with the line “Thin and powerful never looked so good” centered over a woman’s hand:

Including the subject line, in fact, the words “beautiful” or “beautifully” appear three times in the ad, lest you fail to make the connection.

In this ten-minute video, Feminist Frequency‘s Anita Sarkeesian does a great job of discussing the problem with “straw feminists,” overtly feminist characters who are made to look bitchy, ridiculous, or just plain wrong… even when they’re describing forms of gender inequality that really exist.  More, they’re used to suggest that feminism places men and women in opposition when, in fact, gendered expectations and institutions are oppressive to men as well.

By demonizing these characters, Sarkeesian concludes, the straw feminist leads real women to disassociate from feminism, even when they believe in the equal rights of men and women.

Transcript after the jump:

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A recent Tide commercial featuring gender non-conformity by a girl has really struck a chord, judging by the ten submissions we got of it. In the ad, a mother wearing a pink sweater, sitting in a room accented in pink, nervously bemoans the fact that her daughter, who is wearing a camouflage hoodie and playing with wooden blocks, doesn’t like the trappings of femininity — specifically, she doesn’t like pink and she does like cargo shorts:

The commercial clearly illustrates the emphasis on gender conformity and the way parents may feel discomfort if their child won’t conform. The mother is clearly distressed that the “pink thing” didn’t work with her daughter, and we’re to assume that she worked hard to try to convince her to act more traditionally feminine but has slowly given up in the face of her daughter’s disinterest. The little girl eschews femininity at the cost of disappointing her mom. As someone who absolutely hated dresses as a kid myself, I remember that feeling that hopeful look on my mom’s face when she’d hold up a dress, hoping that somehow this one would win me over, and the knowledge I was somehow hurting her by rejecting it.

Yet as several of the submitters point out, the commercial also undermines this emphasis on gender conformity, even while presenting having an unfeminine girl as an exasperating situation for a mom. Unlike some ads we’ve seen that present the product as helping you raise a child who meets gender norms, here, the product does just the opposite: it saves the little girl’s clothes, which the mother kind of wishes had been ruined. In the end, the mother, though clearly less than thrilled, praises her daughter’s parking garage. As Melissa M. says,

On one hand, we see a child neither conforming nor being forced to conform to styles attributed to their gender role, though on the other hand we see a mother obsessively sticking to her role and being painted in the light of a harrowed mother, desperately trying to help her child fit in.

Thanks to Miss B., George McHenry Jr. (a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah), Tiffany D., Ulysses H., Leiana S., Sarah R., Melissa M., Felice S., Allison C., and Mary Ann C. for the tip!

Transcript after the jump, thanks to Ulysses.

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This week I listened to a Freakonomics podcast featuring Economics PhD-student twins, Alison and Steve Sexton.  They had studied the phenomenon of conspicuous conservation, which I’ve defined elsewhere as “the (often lavish) spending on ‘green’ products designed mainly to advertise one’s environmentally-moral righteousness.”  The Sexton’s studied how much people are willing to pay for the conspiciousness of their conservation.

They found that, in places where being environmentally-friendly is looked upon positively, people will spend more (or gain less) to ensure that their conservation efforts are obvious. For example, people will sometimes have their solar panels mounted on the shady side of their house. Why? It’s the side that faces the street. Why have solar panels if no one in the neighborhood can see that you do?  Likewise, the Prius is so popular in part because it is obviously a hybrid; no other car looks like it, so it can’t be mistaken for a “regular” (person’s) car.

I thought of this willingness to pay to display one’s environmental thoughtfulness while visiting Goldstein’s Bagels in La Cañada, CA this week. They had this photograph proudly displayed:

I just love how not only are they paying to keep the highway clean, they’re being rewarded with a big advertisement for their store alongside the freeway, AND they get to take a picture of that sign and put it up for all to see.  It’s win-win-win; a win for the environment and a double win for Goldstein’s.

The Sexton’s argue that all of this conspicuous conservation is probably good.  Competing to be environmentally-friendly translates into more conservation, no matter what the motivation. (Especially as compared to conspicuous consumption; remember the Hummer?)  Accordingly, they suggest that public policy should focus on incentivizing the types of conservation efforts that aren’t visible, like insulation and weather-proofed windows, and leave the showy stuff to the market.

For another example of conspicuous conservation, see our post on faux-oil slicked shoes purchased to benefit the Gulf; on conspicuous consumption, check out the Louis Vitton mommy diva birthday cake; and see this post on conspicuous intellectual consumption.

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.

A blogger named Aluation posted this graphic showing how the New York Times changed the first line of a story about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  The change subtly shifted the blame for the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge from the police to the protesters.  In the first version of the story, police allowed them onto the bridge and then “cut off and arrested” them.  In the second, there was a “showdown” in which demonstrators “marched onto the bridge.”

Adding interest, the author of the piece was changed from “Colin Moynihan” to “Al Baker and Colin Moynihan.”  Who is Al Baker?  He is the guy in charge of the police bureau at the Times.

This is a great example of how important language is in framing events.  The difference isn’t dramatic, but a close look at the wording reveals a clear difference.

It’s also a great example of the power of certain individuals and institutions to shape how the rest of us understand reality.  We should be especially suspicious of the change in the authorship of the story.  When reporters have “beats,” they have to maintain good relationships with important sources on those beats. They rely on the same sources, over and over, to provide inside scoops.  If they alienate important sources, they have a much more difficult time doing their job.

What I’m trying to say is… there is good sociological theory, based on strong evidence, to suggest that an important person in the New York police department saw this story, called Baker, and told him to change the wording.  In which case, Baker might have done so to avoid alienating a source on which his job depends.  I’m not saying that’s what happened, I’m just saying that these kinds of things do happen.

Thanks to Jay Livingston for the tip.

For another example of framing, see the captions on a slideshow covering survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

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.

While men have always had sex with men and women have always had sex with women, the idea that a person could be of a particular homosexual type (as opposed to someone who did homosexual acts) only emerged in the late 1800s (in Western culture anyway).  Even then, it took a very long time for the idea that gay people might be among us to filter through popular culture.  Only after an active gay liberation movement made homosexuality more visible did people actually start to look for it in people they knew.

Accordingly, things that look very “gay” to us today, didn’t look that way before homosexuality became part of our consciousness. In a previous post on this topic, I discuss a vintage soap ad in which two naked men in a public shower have a conversation about “hard” water and “lathering” up.  It seems to have clear gay undertones today (maybe overtones), but it wasn’t meant to suggest homosexuality then.  Likewise, a series of military recruitment posters, sent in by Katrin, might very well trigger the “specter” of homosexuality today, but likely would not have inspired giggles at the time.

More at Scribd.

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.

What happens after we throw something in a garbage can? From the user’s perspective, it disappears once the trash collectors pick it up (if you live in an area with municipal trash collection, of course; I grew up in a rural area where everyone had to deal with their own trash). Where does it go? Sometimes items are taken to a dump not far from where it was thrown away and either buried, bulldozed into large heaps, or incinerated.

But Carlo Ratti, an architect who works with the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, directed a project to find out just how far garbage can travel, with the goal of helping us understand the “removal chain” that conveniently disappears our trash for us as well as we’ve come to understand the global supply chains that bring us items in the first place. His team asked 500 people in Seattle to tag items they would be throwing out anyway with small tracking chips. They tagged a total of 3,000 objects, everything from tin cans to cell phones to sneakers. And the results showed that some of the items we get rid of can go on a rather dramatic journey, traveling thousands of miles:

The Trash Track website contains information about the methodology and ideas behind the project.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the tip!