Politics has long been considered a masculine domain.  After all, there are issues, and there are “women’s issues.”  However, in this election season, The View has delved deeply into politics.  Reactions to this reveal the assumption that politics are for men.

First, Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on The View can be described as nothing if not sexist.  Essentially, his message was “Don’t worry your pretty, little emotional heads about politics, ladies!” The View is just “entertainment,” according to O’Reilly, because it’s for women.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6rR2OwaY1c[/youtube]

Second, soon after Joy Behar appeared on Larry King, King asked her “When did ‘The View’ become this?  When did it go off-track?”  King’s question reveals his assumption that women’s media is for women’s issues, and those are, simply, not real politics (read the transcript here).

Ironically (awesomely), after 12 years on the air, this election season marks the first time that The View has been the #1 watched daytime show, “…garnering its biggest aud[ience] ever (6.2 million) on Nov. 5, the Wednesday after the election” (source).

So, it turns out, women are interested in politics after all.

(Thanks to Gwen for help on this post.)

I found this two page article in a travel magazine aimed at extremely, excessively, egregiously rich people. There is a long history of exploration tourism in which locals are positioned as subservient–see, for example, this colonial era travel poster–and this history immediately came to mind when I saw these two pages.

There is nothing overt here, but I did notice that the author tells us the name of the elephant, but not the guide.  It may not seem like a big thing, but this erasure of the African guides as subjects is troubling to me given the history.  Text below the images.

Text:

We were about 100 feet from a herd of Cape buffalo. They stood perfectly still, their curly horns giving them a comical George Washington-wig look. Even though they are one of the deadliest of the big six animals, from where we stood they looked almost cuddly. My elephant handler stayed just long enough for me to get several great photos before urging Lundi, the elephant we were riding, to move forward. My guide saw several giraffes up ahead and wanted to get there before they galloped away.

Motrin shows ads on the sides of bus shelters in the Boston metro area. Here’s one, which says, “High heels…when you strut, we feel your pain.”

Another ad in the series says, “30-pound stroller…when you lift, we feel your pain.” I can only find these 2 examples so far, and it seems they are both gendered feminine, associated with a shoe style worn almost exclusively by women and with an activity [stroller use = child care] connoted as feminine.

Burk brought my attention to the video game Battle Raper. I found a Battle Raper website, but it was all in Japanese, and I couldn’t find an English version, so I will provide you a short description from Wikipedia:

Battle Raper is a 3D fighting game in which the objective is to strip, grope, and sometimes actively rape the female characters, including a special move by the boss character and only male fighter where the female opponent is forced to perform fellatio as the camera zooms in. Like in most Hentai games, however, the penis is rendered invisible or transparent. There is also a feature in the game which allows the player to have sex with the female characters.

Here is a screenshot (found at Something Awful) of a female character crying because she is being forced to perform oral sex on the male character:

You can also damage your opponent by molesting their breasts or crotch. Once you win the game playing each of the different characters, you open a function where you can look at all the rape scenes. Here’s a shot of a female character’s face as she’s being raped:

Apparently in Battle Raper 2, they took out the rape function.

A simple description of this game will have to do, because I just can’t bring myself to write any commentary about it.

UPDATE: For the record, I’m not saying a) the Japanese are more sexist than other cultures, b) this game is (or isn’t) representative of video games in general or hentai games in particular, c) that video games lead to any particular behaviors or make people act violently, or d) that people shouldn’t be able to play these games in the privacy of their own homes.

It was sent to me as a possible post, I thought it was interesting, and I thought the discussion by some gamers I found on different websites was also fascinating: lots of people saying “Oh, I play violent stuff, but this was unacceptable even for me!” and saying how they put rape in a different category than any other type of violence, so these types of games are worse than “regular” violent video games. I thought of it as a case that might be useful for discussions of cultural representations of rape, and particularly how we often treat rape as a “special” type of crime that is somehow worse than any other type, possibly even murder. Why we do that, and what it means (particularly, how does it impact the stigmatizing of rape victims, who are often treated as though they are permanently broken and defiled?), are sociologically interesting questions.

NEW (Apr. ’10)! Dmitriy T.M., Beth W., Tom M., Abby D., and Jillian Y. all sent in another game with the same theme. The narrative for this one, called Rapelay, is as follows:

The player plays as a chikan (a perverted man who frequently fondles women) in crowded subway trains. A young woman named Aoi has the player arrested for molesting her. Afterwards, the player plans to exact revenge by molesting and raping her entire family (source).

This is the cover:

A still from the game:

Most media coverage won’t offer images, saying that they are too graphic to show.

Kristin W. sent in this image of a Bed, Bath, & Beyond catalog cover, which concisely captures the way in which we are often encouraged to indulge by eating lots of high-calorie, high-fat foods, but also get cultural messages (often from the same source) that we shouldn’t gain weight:

Notice how the scale tells you “Uh-oh” to let you know you’ve eaten too many treats. So this company provides us with the means to indulge, and to literally warn us when we’ve done so. How helpful.

For other examples, see here.

Thanks, Kristin W.!

A main source of the wage gap between men and women is job segregation.  Men and women are sorted into different jobs and jobs associated with women are paid less.

Below is a list of occupations and their average wages for 2007 from The Bureau of Labor Statistics.  I picked out occupations that were rather straightforward (not a random sample, just an illustrative one), put them in order from lowest to highest, and colored them according to whether they are feminine (pink) or masculine (blue) occupations.  Comments below.

Parking Lot Attendants:  $8.82
Child care workers:    $8.82
Coatroom attendants:   $9.18
Bellhops:  $9.25
Sewing machine operators:   $9.31
Manicurists and pedicurists:   $9.60
Home health care aid:  $9.62
Stock clerks:   $9.85           
Janitors:   $10.00
Hairdressers:  $10.68
Security Guards:  $10.85
File clerks:  $11.06
Pre-school teachers:  $11.12
Barbers:  $11.31
Receptionist:  $11.40
Bus Driver (school):   $12.43
Construction workers:   $13.13
Butchers:   $13.87
Dental Assistants:   $15.17
Bus Driver (city):   $15.94
Roofers:   $15.98
Car mechanics:   $16.43
Truck drivers:   $17.41
Electricians:   $21.53

1. Notice that feminized occupations, occupations that are disproportionately female, cluster towards the lower wage end of this hierarchy.  

2. Notice also that, were we to rank these occupations in order of importance or difficulty, we might come out with a very different ranking.  Importance and difficulty does not necessarily translate into wages. 

For example, child care workers and home health care workers are paid only a bit more or no more than parking lot attendants. And coatroom attendants are paid more. So coats and cars are, I guess, pretty important.

Car mechanics are paid more than dental assistants.  They require a similar amount of training, yet we still pay those taking care of our cars more than those taking care of our teeth.

And pre-school teachers are paid less than butchers and bus drivers.  Is preparing our children for school less important than getting them there?  Do we value the man preparing our meat more than we value the woman tending to our child?

3. Finally, notice that some jobs come in gender specific forms and the feminized form is paid less. For example, maids are paid less than janitors and hairdressers are paid less than barbers.

This Halloween, in Maryland, sex offenders who had been released from prison were required to put this sticker in a front window (news story here).

I can’t say it better than Gwen, so I quote her from this post:

I find the intense stigmatization of child sexual abuse, compared to other crimes, fascinating. With other crimes, once you finish the terms of probation, you’re pretty much done with the criminal justice system. Only with sex crimes (and generally only if they were against children) is there a requirement that the ex-felon register with law enforcement every time s/he moves even once probation is over, sometimes for a certain number of years, sometimes forever, depending on the state. I mean, you don’t have to do this if you murder someone, or even lots of people (or even if the victims were kids). Our culture currently defines child sexual abusers as unique, particularly horrific criminal who can never really be rehabilitated or reintegrated into society.

I wonder, though, to what degree this law makes children safer. It seems like a false sense of security–if you just know who the convicted sex abusers in your neighborhood are, you can protect your kids. Yet most child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child and his/her family, not a stranger who just moved in to the neighborhood, and very often they have no criminal record, so these types of programs would be useless.

Marc sent in a link to some sexist vintage ads found at Blog of Hilarity [note: I had an actual link to Blog of Hilarity, but commenter LillyB pointed out that when she clicked on it, she got warnings from her AntiVirus about the site; I just had the same thing happen, so I decided for safety’s sake to remove the link]. Some of them I’ll be adding to other posts, but I thought these deserved their own post.

This one, for Love’s Baby Soft, is so creepy I can hardly stand to look at it:

The shape of the bottles, the sexualization of young girls…ick. A teddy bear? Really? The text below the bottles:

Love’s Baby Soft is that irresistible, clean-baby smell, grown-up enough to be sexy. It’s soft-smelling. Pure and innocent. It may well be the sexist fragrance around.

Notice it’s not grown up…it’s grown up enough. Jean Kilbourne uses this, or a similar Love’s Baby Soft, ad in her documentary Killing Us Softly 3 when she discusses how young girls are sexualized and adult women are encouraged to infantilize themselves.

Here’s an ad for Kellogg’s PEP vitamins:

I know I always look super cute when I’m scrubbing the kitchen.

Finally, this Trix ad seems sort of creepy to me, and I’m not even sure why. Maybe it’s the way the girl is staring at the camera, or that her pupils seem fixed and dilated:

The text isn’t exceptionally interesting, but it does use the word “gay” in the original sense of “happy,” something a company would certainly not do today.

Thanks, Marc!