Joshua F. sent in this image from the Des Moines Register of an individual protesting the state Supreme Court’s ruling to legalize gay marriage:

The Culver being told to “man up” is Iowa’s Democratic governor. Joshua says,

I just think it’s kind of telling that Culver is being urged to preserve the traditional definition of marriage with the phrase “man up.”  Only by tapping into honest masculinity can Culver fend off effeminate men and mannish women who want to marry each other…

It is a great example of the assumption that masculinity automatically includes homophobia; being a “real man” means not just being straight, but being opposed to gays and gay rights.

Also…same-sex animals do mate and raise young; you can see several examples here.

Toban B. sent in a link to a set of photos from the 1970s gay rights movement. Given that since the anti-gay-marriage Prop 8 passed in California in November, many people have argued that a) the African American community is particularly homophobic and voted against the bill (so it’s Black people’s fault Prop 8 passed) or b) gay rights organizations have failed to reach out to the African American community and win their support (so it’s elitist gay people’s fault Prop 8 passed), both positions that imply that gay rights and African Americans are at odds, I found this photo from Philadelphia (in 1972) particularly striking as a reminder that African Americans often did and do support gay rights, and the gay rights movement has often actively included them…oh yeah, and also there are gay Black people:

Here’s an image of people picketing the White House in the 1960s in support of legislation to ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in federal employment:

There are also quite a few vintage gay movement images mixed in to this set of photos. Thanks, Toban!

Jacob G. sent us a link to this slideshow hosted by Details magazine.  As Jacob noted, not only are the women objectified (their naked bodies serve as furniture on which to display men’s accessories), the title of the slideshow makes a joke of it.  It’s titled “Girl Not Included,” just in case viewers mistook the women for purchaseable products alongside the shoes, bags, and belts.

Not safe for work:

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I came across this great photo at BAGnews NOTES, entitled, “Reflecting on the Meltdown”:

The author describes the photo and its meaning this way:

It captures a two-day anti-capitalist rally protesting the Wall Street bailout. Through the use of reflection (in this photo of a restaurant, as well as this one playing the street off against a corporate lobby), Mario [Mario Tama, Getty Photographer] portrays America’s class schism (note the guy in the lime-colored reflective vest overlapped with the guy in the jacket with the wristwatch); America flip-flopping between awareness and denial; and the strange disconnect these days between crisis and ‘business as usual.

This is a wonderfully telling picture, but perhaps in addition to “America flip-flopping between awareness and denial,” one could also interpret the artistic use of reflection as representative of the ever-widening chasm between the social classes in the United States – one that will most likely not be remedied or even addressed in the near future.

Some ecards via Feministe.

Another example of hair removal and standards of female beauty. Not at all subtle encouragement for women in the new ad from Schick/Wilkinson Sword razors for women.  Shaving apparently makes you happy enough to sing songs with obvious innuendo.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/rfed1DT1PGA[/youtube]

SocProf, from The Global Sociology Blog, has an interesting post about gender in the public sphere. Here is a photo (from Echidne of the Snakes) of the “first spouses” of the G20 nations (that is, the spouses of the political leaders of the G20):

Except…someone’s missing. Two of the G20 countries (Germany and Argentina) have heterosexual, married female leaders, and their husbands aren’t in the photo. I don’t know why–were they not invited to the event? Did they choose not to come? SocProf asks, “Would the husbands have looked out of place here? Would this have been embarrassing to them?”

But SocProf points out that a different disappearing act recently occurred in Israel:

…look what happened in reverse in a group photo of the newly-formed Israeli cabinet. On top is the traditional cabinet group photo, at the bottom is the “touched-up” version that appeared in [the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Yated Neeman]… notice the difference?

Indeed, the two female Cabinet members have been photoshopped out.

SocProf says,

[In the G20 photo]…the men are not visibly absent. It is their presence that would be noticeable. And also note the setting in which the women pose, the soft colors, pink carpet and sofa with pastel background. It looks like a somewhat formal yet a little domestic setting.

The bottom photo is formal, no pink or pastel there! Icy grey with flags and orderly pose…It is a perfect illustration of the gendered domains: where men belong and where women belong.

Taken together, the three images, though taken for different purposes in different places, provide a great illustration of how we often make people who don’t fit cultural gender norms invisible…sometimes very literally.

Also see our post on an ultra-Orthodox newspaper that airbrushed girls out of a photo of children.

UPDATE: Commenter Liz says,

I object to the use of the word ‘airbrushing’, because that’s not what happened: those photos were edited, manipulated, or fabricated, but airbrushing is a specific photoshop tool for minor modification. You can’t completely change the reality of a photograph with an airbrush, unless someone would like to tell me that those two male stand-ins are actually just drawings made with photoshop.

If you use the same word (airbrushing) for taking out a model’s cellulite as well as removing heads of state from photographs, you trivialise what’s been done. Digital editing is only going to become more and more common, and it’s important to find the right words to explain how a photo has been altered.

Good point–thanks for pointing the language issue out. I didn’t know what airbrushing referred to, exactly, and had just heard it used to describe altering an image in general.

I happened upon a list of figures that display lots of information about who majors in science and engineering (S&E), all available at the NSF page on Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. All are for institutions in the U.S. only, as far as I can tell.

Here we see the number of bachelor’s degrees in S&E and non-S&E fields, by sex:

Percent of S&E and non-S&E bachelor’s degrees earned by racial minorities:

Number of doctoral degrees earned by sex:

Percent of female workers in selected occupations in 2007:

Percent of S&E Ph.D.-holding employees at 4-year colleges and universities that are women:

Notice that while women are pretty well represented among “full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty,” they make up barely 15% of “full-time full professors with children,” “married full-time full professors,” and “full-time full professors at research institutions.” Some of this may be a matter of time, in that because being promoted to full professor takes years, an increase in the number of women getting Ph.D.s in a particular field will take a while to show up as a similar increase in number of women as professors in that field, everything else being equal.

But everything else isn’t equal. Women, even highly-educated ones, still do the majority of childcare and housework, and are more likely than men to consider how potential jobs could conflict with future family responsibilities when they are deciding what type of career to choose. So the lower proportion of female full professors at research institutions is likely a combination of some old-school unfriendliness to women in some departments, but also of women opting out of those positions–that is, deciding that the time and energy required to get tenure in a science/engineering department at a research school would conflict too much with family life, so they pursue other career options (for instance, women make up a higher proportion of faculty at community colleges, which are often perceived as being easier to get tenure at, since you don’t necessarily have to do lots of publishing–though anyone who has ever taught 5 courses a semester may question the assumption that it takes less time and work to teach than to publish).

And of course some women try to combine a tenure-track job with their family responsibilities and find it difficult, and either leave academia voluntarily or are turned down for tenure because they have not published enough or are not see as adequately involved and committed. Because of inequalities in the family, men are less likely to face those situations, though certainly some do.

I wish the report had a graph for non-S&E faculty, although it might just depress me.

UPDATE: Commenter Sarah says,

Check out the report “Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes” by Yu Xie and Kimberlee A. Shauman.  They find no evidence to support the hypothesis that women are under-represented at the tenure level due to a lag between getting PhDs and acquiring tenure track positions.  In the life sciences, women have been getting PhDs at the same rate as men for many years now, but inequality persists at the tenure-track level.  Xie and Shauman find that a variety of  social factors are responsible for actively hindering women at the highest levels of academia.