Archive: 2011

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.

Cross-posted at Adios Barbie.

Today I had the pleasure of reading a 1978 essay by Susan Sontag titled The Double Standard of Aging.  I was struck by how plainly and convincingly she described the role of attractiveness in men’s and women’s lives:

[For women, o]nly one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.

The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age.

There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat.  No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.

These words reminded me of an idea for a post submitted by Tom Hudson.  Tom was searching for faces to help him draw and was struck by the differences in the results for “woman face” and “man face”:

The wide variety of men’s faces, compared to the overwhelming homogeneity of the women’s faces, nicely illustrates Sontag’s point. Women’s faces are important and valorized for only one thing: girlish beauty. Men’s faces, on the other hand, are notable for being interesting, weird, wizened, humorous, and more.

On another note, the invisible but near total dominance of whiteness is worth acknowledging.

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.

We’ve discussed American Indian mascots, advertising featuring anachronistic caricatures of American Indians, the ice skater who appropriated aboriginal culture, the lie at the heart of the famous crying Indian PSA, and the stunning irony that is Avatar, but we’ve never directly addressed the use and appropriation of the idea of the Eskimo.  The term refers to the Inuit and Yupik people in Eastern Russia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

Russell Potter, a professor of English at Rhode Island College, collected a few vintage advertisements featuring the idea of the Eskimo.  He argues that they fall roughly into two camps: cheerful adorable Eskimo and the Eskimo as primitive and backwards.

These first two for apples and ginger ale fall into the first category:

But this ad presents the “Esquimaux” as “dull” and Grape Nuts as civilized:

Building on Potter’s collection, Adrienne at Native Appropriations posted some more contemporary uses of the Eskimo.

Eskimo Joe’s (Stillwater, OK) uses an image of an Eskimo looking downright ridiculous and very much like his dog:

Any child of the ’80s probably remembers the Lisa Frank Eskimo girl (which Adrienne points out looks decidely anglo):

And this ad seems to suggest that even decapitated walruses speak better English than Eskimos:

Here’s another example of the childlike Eskimo, tweeted to us by @Matthew_Kneale:

All of these ads turn Eskimos into (cute but inferior) childlike figures or (deficient and inferior) backwards adults, or some combination of the two.  For a population with essentially no contact with the Inuit or the Yupik, the idea that they are real human beings can become lost.  When real members of a group are invisible, imaginary representatives can be demonized or romanticized as we see fit.

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 Ms., Amy Williams posted about the pre-conception care movement.  Pre-conception care is health care aimed at making the bodies of fertile women most conducive to a healthy pregnancy.  The movement asserts that women of childbearing age should be receiving care with pregnancy in mind, whether or not the woman intends to get pregnant.  The Preconception Care webpage at Healthy Beginnings, for example, reads as follows:

In a presentation on the topic, Rebecca Kukla,  Professor of Philosophy and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of South Florida, explains that preconception care is an “official priority” for the Center for Disease Control and the US Office of Minority Health.   So what’s to be concerned about here?

First, the approach reduces women to their potential to make babies. Concern for women’s health is motivated not by concern for the woman herself, but her “merely imaginary future children.”   What is the value of old women, transgender women, involuntarily infertile women, and women who have been voluntarily sterilized?  What principles guide their health?

Second, treating women as potential fetus carriers sometimes interferes with the best practices for treating women. Kukla explains that doctors driven by this approach may be inclined to choose drugs that are known to improve fertility and enhance pregnancy outcomes, instead of the most effective drugs for whatever condition is at hand.  As an extreme example, consider a woman diagnosed with cancer for whom a hysterectomy is the most aggressive treatment?  Whose interests should the doctor consider?  Hers?  Those of her “merely imaginary future children”?

Third, treating women as potential fetus carriers encourages doctors and others to police women’s behaviors more stringently than men’s. Anything she does that doesn’t maximize her fertility and baby-making condition can be seen as a problem needing fixing.  Men’s life choices are simply not subjected to this sort of social scrutiny.  We already see this sort of intervention against women who are told to avoid alcohol even if they are unaware of being pregnant and have no intention of getting pregnant.

Fourth, Kukla points out that the approach skews women’s health towards those things that we think affect fetal outcomes. Should these conditions necessarily take priority over others?

Finally, this approach makes women, like myself, invisible. I am a fertile woman in my 30s who has chosen not to have children.  I truly hope that my health care is not being compromised by my doctor’s concern for the babies I am never going to have.  Nor do I think it’s cute that her concern for me is driven by my reproductive potential.

UPDATE: Heather Leila, in the comments, critiqued this post.  “Having participating in the Office of Minority Health´s preconception campaign,” she writes, “I can attest that none of the above 5 points speak to the reality of the program.”  She continues:

It´s easy for women commenting on this blog to be offended when it is suggested they are not in full control of their fertility. But the truth is that many women are not. They don´t have the access or the education about contaception. 50% OF ALL US PREGNANCIES ARE UNPLANNED.

OMH´s campaign addresses contraception and avoiding unwanted pregnancy. OMH recognizes that many women don´t want to become pregnant, now and later. The campaign seeks to reduce unwanted pregnancy alongside improving preconception health as a way to reduce infant mortality. The campaign also speaks directly to men – taking some of the pressure off women.

This post failed to mention that the OMH campaign is based on the very racial disparity in infant mortality that SI posted on just a few weeks ago.

Lastly, the campaign is geared towards women, not to their doctors. In no way would this campaign promote doctors valuing fertility over a woman´s life. Never would it suggest witholding a hysterectomy to protect fertility. The campaign is NOT about increasing fertility. It is about decreasing infant mortality. Two very different things.

It seems like neither Dr. Kukla nor Sociological Images has taken the time to fully understand this campaign before criticizing it. I think there is a lot to analyze and criticize within the campaign, but Dr. Kukla´s 5 points do not address true aspects of the program. They are invented.

Heather has posted about pre-conception care at her own blog, A Minha Vida.

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.