(view the slideshow)

Back in the spring, Lisa gave a talk at Franklin and Marshall College about data about the newness, prevalence, and content of “hook ups” on American campuses. Surprise, today’s college students didn’t invent casual sex and there’s no need for their parents to worry about a “bacchanalian orgy” in one dorm after another.  Concluding that the problem isn’t “too much” sex, she argues that the problem is too much bad sex.

In her own research, Lisa has found that students want sex to be pleasurable, empowering, or meaningful.  But, alas, they seem to have difficulty achieving any one of those things in great measure.  The culprit, she concludes, isn’t hooking up, it’s hook up culture.  When a hook up culture dominates, all other ways of being sexual are repressed, and that leaves many students involuntarily celibate or having sex they don’t really want. The solution: an opening up of sexual options that allow students to truly, genuinely explore their own sexualities safely.

Franklin and Marshall College arranged to have the lecture filmed, but Lisa was too shy to post it on Soc Images. But she sent me the link to the talk, and I have no such misgivings. Unfortunately, the camera was set up at an angle where you can’t see the PowerPoint presentation that went along with the lecture, so you’ll have to look through it separately if you’re interested (slideshow and transcript if you’d rather read).  Lisa’s got other talks too, if you’re interested, and I know she loves giving them.

Common Hour: The Promise and Perils of Hook-Up Culture from Franklin & Marshall College on Vimeo.

Common Hour: The Promise and Perils of Hook-Up Culture from Franklin & Marshall College on Vimeo.

We have posted in the past about pre-World War II uses of the swastika as a symbol of good luck, a meaning that the Nazis’ appropriation of the swastika makes nearly inconceivable today. Matthieu S., who teaches anthropology at Vanier College in Montreal, sent in another example, a scan of a postcard he owns that was printed in the 1920s. The postcard, meant for a dad’s birthday, also includes pink-tinted flowers — evidence of a time when pink was considered a perfectly appropriate color for men and boys:

World War II and the atrocities of the Nazi party obviously significantly changed interpretations of both the formerly-benign swastika and the color pink. Pink wasn’t abandoned altogether, as the swastika was, but the Nazi’s use of pink to label gay and lesbian prisoners led pink to be stigmatized as effeminate and, thus, an inappropriate color for men…and over time it instead became the epitome of symbols of femininity.

It’s almost Father’s Day, which means it is time for the greeting card business to make tons of money. It also means it’s time for us to visually see the standard narrative about gender, masculinity, and fatherhood. Looking at mass commercial products like greeting cards is an especially useful venue: the greeting card companies, wanting to make money like good capitalists, will sell products that have the greatest widespread appeal. Thus, they will sell the most popular representations of gender, masculinity, and fatherhood.

From a brief perusal of a NYC chain store greeting card aisle, I found plenty of cards that shed light on these representations. I want to focus, though, on two: middle-aged masculinity and the different representations of daughters and sons.

There were plenty of cards like this one, that capture many of the stereotypical narratives about fatherhood, and middle-aged masculinity more broadly:

(Apologies for the poor picture quality, a nearby employee didn’t seem thrilled with my picture-taking).

Here, we see man/father as: head of the household (twice, and once as dictator – king): cooks, but only on the grill; lawn mowing expert; controller of the remote/TV watcher; and “big guy.” What’s not on there? Anything about love for children, caring, affection, equitable distribution of household duties (if part of a couple), etc.

Almost all of the love and affection, though, was saved for cards specifically marketed as ‘Dad from daughter.” Most of the cards in this picture were love-centric and labeled as such:

There were a few rare cards simply marked as ‘Dad’ that include themes of love and/or affection, such as this one:

The cards marked ‘Dad from son,’ however, mostly consisted of attempts at humor involving sports (especially golf), building things (or the lack of ability to do so), and, well, farts:

Obviously, we can’t draw too much from the greeting cards in one store, but in this store, at least, there was only one card explicitly marked for sons that primarily communicated feelings of love and affection; all of these were either marked for daughters to give or did not specify what gender should give them. Pairing this with the kinds of fatherly masculinity represented by the cards, Father’s Day cards are sold through the use of traditional gender representations.

Note: all photos licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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John McMahon is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he also participates in the Women’s Studies Certificate Program. He is interested in post-structuralism, issues relating to men and feminism, gendered practices in international relations, gender and political theory, and questions of American state identity. John blogs at Facile Gestures, where this post originally appeared.

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Dolores R. sent in a story at about a recently-released internet campaign ad in the CA-36 special election that Talking Points Memo has called “Willie Horton on steroids,” referring to the infamous racial-fear-mongering ad released by George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential campaign. The CA-36 ad was released by a new super-PAC (able to raise unlimited funds), Turn Right USA. (The guy who produced it also produced a striking ad for a candidate for Alabama Agriculture Commissioner in 2010.) It attacks Democratic candidate Janice Hahn over her support for gang intervention programs. And it’s a doozy. It is definitely NSFW:

Aside from the just over-the-top racist and sexist nature of the ad, it’s also interesting because of the issues it brings up about technology and democratization of ad campaign materials. Turn Right USA isn’t directly linked to or affiliated with the campaign of Hahn’s Republican rival in the race, Craig Huey. Huey’s campaign has reacted with dismay, condemning the content and distancing themselves from it. They clearly fear a backlash that will hurt Huey’s chances (and he’s already the underdog in the race). And yet, they didn’t create the ad, there’s no evidence that I’ve seen that they worked with Turn Right USA, and they don’t have any ability to take it down or symbolically fire the producer to show how little they think of it. We saw a similar situation recently in Florida, with a mailer apparently intended to discredit a candidate who had nothing to do with it.

While non-campaign-funded attack ads clearly helps candidates in a lot of situations (for instance, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads against John Kerry in 2004), they can also hurt the candidate they’re meant to help. Campaigns can’t control their content and they can’t retract them if they sense a public backlash. Voters may blame candidates for content they didn’t approve and can’t fix. And the increasing number of third-party advocacy groups, combined with the ability to distribute materials widely over the internet instead of buying TV time, seems likely to increase the danger to campaigns of these types of ads ostensibly meant to “support” them.

A few weeks back, Forbes named Pittsburgh as the most livable city in the U.S. The description of the city talks about its “art scene, job prospects, safety and affordability,” and presents a picture of Pittsburgh as a city that has rebounded from both its industrial past and the current economic crisis to become a cultural and intellectual hotspot:

Forbes ranked cities based on unemployment, rates of income growth in the past 5 years, crime rates, cost of living, and cultural/artistic opportunities (according to Sperling’s Best Places Arts & Leisure Index). The final score is an average of the different elements, each of which are weighted equally, though I can’t help but think a lot of people might think some of those factors are more important in how they evaluate a location than others. Also, I have some reservations about rankings from Sperling’s Best Places, as they have a “manliest cities” ranking commissioned by Combos snacks that includes “sales of salty snacks/crackers” and deductions for “emasculating” criteria like sushi restaurants.

But I digress. As it turns out, this glowing report is only part of the story of Pittsburgh. The city also tops the charts in terms of African American poverty. African Americans in the region haven’t benefited from the economic turnaround Forbes discussed.

In light of this fact, Jasiri X, a rapper from Pittsburgh, wrote “America’s Most Livable City.” In the song (lyrics here) and video he questions who, exactly, the city is livable for, contrasting the image portrayed in the Forbes article with the region’s neglected and under-developed African American neighborhoods:

There are also three videos featuring Jasiri X interviewing residents of poor neighborhoods. All are worth a watch, but I think the best is the 2nd segment. A local resident discusses how what he sees as exaggerated media reports of the crime and danger in some areas — some created by well-meaning people trying to bring attention to the needs of the community by, he believes, playing up the bad aspects — served to justify abandoning Black neighborhoods in desperate need of economic opportunities:

For another discussion of very different experiences of economic crisis and recovery, see our guest post about Forbes ranking Stockton, CA, as the most miserable city in the U.S.

Thanks to Abby Kinchy for the link.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Earlier this week I posted about the Badminton World Federation’s attempts to change the dress code to require women to wear skirts or dresses as an effort to give a more “attractive appearance.” The changes emphasized certain standards of femininity over concerns about how the clothing changes might impact players’ performance. Rodeo queen competitions illustrate this tendency to value feminine appearance over the skill or physical prowess the women are ostensibly there to perform.  A rodeo queen competition is sort of an amalgam of a beauty pageant and rodeo or riding competition; the winners serve as ambassadors, promoting rodeo, riding in parades, and so on. Though the events usually have many of the trappings of a standard beauty pageant — appearance and personality are both judged — the riding elements (which may include barrel racing, reining demonstrations, etc.) provide a sense that this isn’t just about meeting standards of femininity, but also athletic ability.

But a video Lisa sent me about a recent rodeo queen competition in Utah New Mexico makes it clear where the emphasis lies. If you don’t care greatly about horse-related things, you may not know that there has been an outbreak of equine herpes in the western U.S., which is extremely contagious, may be fatal, and spreads through nose-to-nose contact. As a result, many horse-related competitions have been canceled or postponed. But the Davis County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse Junior Queen Contest in Farmington, Utah, found a way to continue with the competition — they had the contestants ride stick horses around the arena, something I can’t imagine being done with, say, roping competitions and other male-dominated rodeo events that could be altered to create a horseless version:

Some images from the story at KSL:

I can’t help but feel this undermines efforts to separate rodeo queen competitions from beauty contests. In fact, the Miss Rodeo USA site says that appearance and personality make up 80% of the competition, and riding skills only 20% — and personality and appearance count when judging the riding, too. And while having women ride children’s toys around an arena may still test the women’s knowledge of the patterns, and requires them to show physical stamina, it also seems infantilizing and silly. It makes it clear that rodeo queen competitions have little to do with horse riding skills, which are entirely dispensable in a pinch.

UPDATE: Well, I stand corrected. Reader Zula did find a video of another competition (cutting) in which the men used stick horses due to a 2001 equine herpes outbreak, with a lot more falling in the dirt than in the clip above:

UPDATE 2: Reader Megan says,

I have zero experience with rodeo, but I do ride hunters and foxhunters on the East coast. I know that there are a lot of technical points that could easily be demonstrated while on a stick horse. Obviously, completing certain movements is a lot easy when you have direct control over your legs rather than asking a 1000 pound animal to step to the side with a careful nudge. Despite the “challenge” being removed, these contestants can still demonstrate a large amount of knowledge and understanding on stick horses. I watch lots of kids playing “horse” when they can’t be riding: cantering around, changing leads, and jumping jumps. Those kids take turns and critique each other’s forms, working on learning cadence, balance, timing, and adjustability.When I was a kid, I did the same thing.

So, I absolutely must state that I understand the idea behind the substitution and it didn’t entirely degrade the competition.

UPDATE 3: Alexandra Hinton wrote a humorous reply over at Fem Pop that’s worth a look.

David Banks, who blogs at Cyborgology, let us know that Gawker has posted an anti-union video Target shows to new hires. Apparently as some Target stores have started carrying groceries, some grocery workers’ unions have made efforts to unionize some stores, a move that Target, along with its larger big-box sibling, Wal-Mart, finds very threatening. The video includes a lot of common arguments — we’re all a family here, the union just wants your dues, etc. — along with some I found more unusual:

Full transcript here.

What I found especially striking was the segment starting at about 3:10, where they argue we don’t need unions because, basically, they were so effective in the past, they already fixed everything! There’s no more child labor, you can get worker’s comp if you’re injured…what more could you need a union for? So on the one hand, today unions are useless, empty organizations that just take your money and give you nothing, but in the past, they were great. Presumably employers only had to be told once to clean up, and then for all time everything is fixed.

I also liked David’s point about the video’s use of the idea of communal vs. individual action. On the one hand, the video repeatedly stresses the rights of the individual and suggests that unions interfere with an individual’s ability to make their own choices (and implying that all union contracts are identical and will be imposed on workers, rather than the outcome of negotiations). But as David points out, the video includes rather contradictory messages about individual and collective action, with the union presented as the bad collective but Target as the good, familial, happy collective:

The video manages to seamlessly contradict itself: the company is a communal entity while simultaneously granting each individual total autonomy. The union does the opposite- it pressures you into collective action while you’re trying to be a neoliberal individual, and it makes you break away from the “Target Family” when they’re trying to be communal.

Target has often avoided the negative publicity aimed at Wal-Mart about labor practices, treatment of workers, and anti-union activity; I know when I was an undergrad back in the ’90s, and anti-Wal-Mart activism was one of the topics of the day, some of my friends and I thought that shopping at Target instead of Wal-Mart meant we were really doing something meaningful in terms of opposing bad labor practices. But as this video illustrates, Target has fairly similar labor policies to Wal-Mart, whatever you think of them, just with less global market power to throw around.

Over at Reuters, Felix Salmon posted a chart I found rather stunning given that we’re hearing new warnings about the dire situation the economy is in and the slow job growth we’re experiencing. Using Bureau of Economic Analysis data, he looked at total U.S. domestic profits, as well as the proportion of all domestic profits earned by the financial sector, between 2001 and the end of 2010. And what we see is that both overall corporate profits, and the finance sector so central to the economic crisis, have bounced back quite well, returning to the levels we saw just before the peak of the boom period:

Now, one caveat here: the data are annualized quarterly figures. That means to get the total profits for the year, you don’t just add them up, as you’d expect — each annualized quarterly data point apparently represents profits for the entire year if the growth rate at that point had continued. If you really care, here’s one explanation of annualizing and why you’d do it. If you want, the BEA website allows you to look at profits annually, instead of quarterly, so you don’t have to worry about it.

Anyway! Point is, it complicates the general perception we might get from news reports that everything in the economy is awful and there are no profits to be made. Ongoing job stagnation and media focus on the negative economic news doesn’t mean all parts of the economy are suffering equally, or that as soon as corporate earnings rebound, the benefits would quickly reach workers in the form of new job opportunities.