Jessica H. S. sent in this photo:

Not that there is anything wrong with any of these games or careers, per se. It’s just the constant reinforcement of these gendered ideas of appropriate roles/careers/interests that is disheartening. Many of these games focus on roles that emphasize appearances, whether of people or homes; otherwise, you can care for children.

Though I will say, Peggle is awesome. I eventually had to delete it from my laptop for the sake of ever accomplishing anything again.

Jessica G. drew our attention to the promotional material of Panty Raid.  Panty Raid is two guys, Josh Mayer and Marty Folb, who produce dance music.  As you might guess from their name, their materials include a dismissal of women as fans and an endorsement of men’s entitlement to sexual access to women.  Their slogan for their album, Marine Parade, is: “Audio fondling your girlfriend.”

So, “you” are a straight guy.  And, like it or not, these guys are such hegemons that they are makin’ it with your girl, whether she likes it or not.

There is more of this typical misogyny at their website (you can google it), but it was the promo shot below that Jessica felt compelled to send in.

This is a great illustration of what it looks like to embrace both white and male privilege.  We see the bottom half of a black woman sitting with her legs apart and her underwear at her ankles.  Were it not dark between her legs,  you could see her vulva.  Mayer and Folb, both white men, sit in front of her and look at the camera.  Their expression and posture suggest utter disinterest.

This is where I think the privilege is revealed, and embraced, loud and clear.  She is not a human being, she is a vagina and, even as a vagina, she is uninteresting.  She is nothing, really.  Like their sneakers, their trucker hats, and their hoodies, she is only a prop.  What does a sexually available black woman signify?  Urban cred?  Masculine domination of women?  High status in a hierarchy of men?  All of the above?  Congratulations dudes: racist and sexist message sent and received.

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

Last year I posted a table showing the dramatic rise in the birth of twins among women 45-49 (from less than 25 per 1,000 to almost 200 per 1,000 in 2002).  The graphic below, included alongside a New York Times article on the topic, shows the increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight that comes with multiple births and the cost of taking care of premature babies (almost $51,000 versus under $5,000 for a baby born at term):

Given that the U.S. is discussing health care reform at the moment, it might be worth while to consider whether having a biological child is “worth” it.

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

Larry Harnisch of The Daily Mirror sent in this ad, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on September 5, 1969:

Text from the top of the ad:

Does S&A really stand for Sex Appeal?

…and how! Our shoes are so sexy we only allow mature thinking adults to buy them…or young adults accompanied by a parent. When you wear S&A shoes, people will stare at your legs who were never never aware that you had any before.

It’s a great example of how quickly fashion standards can change. Today I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of these shoes would be considered old-fashioned and wouldn’t be marketed as sexy. Our ideas of what constitutes a “sexy” woman’s shoe today includes a higher, thinner heel, meaning they’re also in general less stable, harder to walk in, and worse for your feet than shoes with a chunky heel like these.

In an earlier post I discussed how men, these days, are less likely than women to enroll and graduate from college.  One theory for why involves an anti-intellectualism that is specifically male.  That is, many men learn that to be a real man means rejecting prissy intellectual pursuits.  Thinking is for chicks (and fags).

This commercial for Wrangler, aimed at men specifically, asserts this exactly:

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

In the U.S., when people refer to the “traditional family,” they usually mean a family that they associate with the 1950s.  But the 1950s was a really unusual time in American history.  Elsewhere I’ve written about how the husband breadwinner/wife homemaker model is an American anomaly.  The data below, put together by the New York Times, shows that the 1950s was an unusual time in terms of age of marriage also:

Though the data is rough (five points across 107 years), you can see a distinct dip in the age of marriage that includes the ’50s.

So history isn’t, as we often suppose, a straight line from one point to another.  It’s a complicated story.  And the 1950s… well, to choose that era as “traditional” is no more reasonable than to choose today or the enlightenment or the dark ages or…

Also see: everyone needs a wife and what does “traditional marriage” look like?

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

Hermes sent in a link to a feature in The Morning News titled “Men at Their Most Masculine,” in which men were asked about what made them feel masculine and photographed in situations that reflect their masculine identities. Some quotes from men included in the project:

“I feel masculine when I am home, I can take care of myself. I often feel emasculated when I leave my apartment though, with everyone asking me if I need help. I don’t need any help.”

“To be masculine is to dominate in one’s field of study.”

“I want to show that, despite stereotypes, gay men can be masculine too.”

“I feel most masculine when I am lying in bed naked.”

“I am strong emotionally, have always stood up for myself, and fear nothing. I happen to be physically strong but that isn’t where I derive my masculinity.”

“I am masculine because I abandon women after taking their love. Because when you study Freud, you don’t let him study you. Because I study philosophy, not literature.”

Visit at photographer Chad States’s website. He apparently found all of the featured men via craigslist.

The photos and quotes illustrate some interesting contradictions in definitions of masculinity. Several of the men define masculinity in fairly traditional terms, using words like “dominate” or expressing masculinity as the ability to use women and then leave them. There is also an emphasis on being independent and not needing help from anyone else.

In other cases, the men redefine masculinity to at least some extent, such as the gay man who reclaims masculinity for gays, the guy who focuses on being emotionally strong, and the man shown posed in a way we’re more used to seeing with women.

It’s an interesting look at some of the ways men define masculinity at a time when we expect men to be more emotionally available and involved in family life (as opposed to the 1950s emotionally closed-off model) but provide mixed signals by also still judging men harshly if they seem too emotional or don’t meet ideals of what “real” men should be like.

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

Let’s say that you work in an office with several people, and everyone is expected to meet certain performance standards. You’re an outstanding performer, considered one of the best in the firm. A couple offices down from you is a guy named Wendel, and you feel sorry for Wendel because he’s not quite able to meet the performance standards and is always teetering on the edge of losing his job. Your sense of Wendel is that he’s a good guy who just never gets the right breaks, and if he were given more chances to succeed he could probably pull himself out of his slump.

One day, you’re working on a project team with Wendel and notice that he’s screwed up a major report bigtime—big enough that he’s sure to get fired if anyone else sees it—but so far only you have seen it and you have a brief opportunity to cover up Wendel’s mistakes. If you cover them up, in effect lying by passing off your work as Wendel’s, you’ll probably get away with it and Wendel will go on to work another day. If you don’t, he’s finished.

What will you do?

We normally associate acting dishonestly with causing harm to others, but it’s also quite possible that a dishonest act can help someone, like Wendel.  Under what conditions we’re prone to act dishonestly to hurt or help another is what a new study in the journal Psychological Science investigated.

Researchers created a mock scenario in which study participants were randomly assigned to one of two roles: solver or grader. Each solver was also randomly assigned to a grader. Participants in both roles became either ‘‘wealthy’’ or ‘‘poor’’ through a lottery in which they had a 50% probability of winning $20. This lottery, together with the random pairing of solvers and graders, created four pair types: wealthy grader and wealthy solver; poor grader and poor solver; wealthy grader and poor solver; and poor grader and wealthy solver. After the lottery, solvers solved multiple anagrams. Graders then graded solvers’ work. Graders had the opportunity to dishonestly help or hurt solvers by misreporting their performance. If a grader overstated a solver’s performance, then the solver earned undeserved money. If the grader understated the solver’s performance, then the solver did not earn deserved money.

The results: When a wealthy grader was assigned to a poor solver, the grader overwhelmingly misreported the score to help the solver (about 70% of the time). When a wealthy grader was assigned to a wealthy solver, the grader nearly always reported the score honestly (90%).  On the other side of the coin, when a poor grader was assigned to a poor solver, the grader nearly always misreported the score to help (95%). When a poor grader was assigned to a wealthy solver, however, the grader misreported the score negatively to hurt the solver about 30% of the time. A graph of the results is below.

The reasons for these results, the researchers surmise, are less about financial self interest and more about emotional responses to inequity.  Individuals increase their dishonest hurting behavior and reduce their helping behavior when they are worse off than the other person.  Conversely, they increase dishonest helping behavior when they are better off than the other person.

What we seem to be back to with this study is the realization that we’re not so rational after all.  Dishonesty, in either direction, appears to be motivated by emotional reaction more than rational evaluations of self interest – at least in the context of relatively small sums of money (it would be interesting to see what would happen if we jacked the amount up a few hundred bucks).

So, not to forget about Wendel – how’d he make out in your mind?

Source: Gino, F., & Pierce, L. (2009). Dishonesty in the Name of Equity Psychological Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02421.x

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David DiSalvo is a science and technology writer who regularly blogs at Neuronarrative and Brainspin on the True/Slant network. He is also a freelance writer for Scientific American Mind magazine.

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