When American figure skater Evan Lysacek won the gold medal at the 2010 Olympics, he was the only man on the podium who had not attempted a quadruple jump in either of his two skating programs. The silver medalist, 2006 Olympic Champion Evgeni Plushenko of Russia, was quick to point out that “a quad is a quad. If an Olympic champion doesn’t do a quad, well I don’t know… Now it’s not men’s figure skating, it’s dancing.” Plushenko’s website later proclaimed (though the claim was soon redacted) that his superior performance had earned him a “platinum” medal. Figure skaters and others who heard his comment understood this wasn’t just sour grapes; by questioning Lysacek’s jumping ability, Plushenko was also questioning his manhood.

As Daniel, a former singles and pairs skater, knows from personal experience, when you look below the surface of figure skating, a coded gendering of the sport emerges. Figure skating has both athletic and artistic components, and traditionally these have been apportioned to men and women, respectively. Men are expected to be able to land enormous jumps. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to grab one of their feet and pull it up behind their heads, sometimes while spinning fast enough to set off a nose-bleed, as Mirai Nagasu did in Vancouver. Women’s programs also emphasize a great deal of emotion when they skate, while men are expected to display their athletic strength and power.

This is not to say that women are not expected to jump or that men can be soulless automata, but there are lower expectations for each in the other gender’s territory. A male skater who doesn’t emote passionately can be forgiven if he has a fantastic triple axel, and a woman can even win the Olympics with jumps that aren’t fully rotated. Artistry and flexibility are where women are expected to excel, while boys strive to jump higher and rotate more. To this day, only one woman (Japan’s Miki Ando) has landed a clean quadruple jump in competition, while it has become a mainstay of men’s event. This video shows Ando’s jump, at a 2002 competition:

In the aftermath of his silver platinum silver medal finish in Vancouver, Plushenko questioned the qualifications of Evan Lysacek to win gold without a quad. Aside from being poor sportsmanship, his approach highlighted the deep association of jumps with male figure skating. Though, in the women’s event, Mao Asada completed the technically difficult triple axel on three separate occasions, no fuss was made over her second-place finish behind the ethereal Kim Yu-Na. Kim has strong jumps, to be sure, but what sets her apart from her competitors is that she skates in a way that is graceful, balletic and undeniably feminine.

Ironically, one of the most promising things about a young Evgeni Plushenko when he arrived on the international skating scene in 1997 was his blending of artistry and athleticism. His style was avant-garde and overwrought, and his jumps were magnificent; he had, in skating parlance,”the whole package.” It might seem excessive to map gender onto his performances, but he is famous for being one of the only men to perform the Biellmann spin, in which the skater grabs the blade of one skate and pulls it up behind the top of his or her head.

This was a clear and unabashed case of gender-bending, as the spin had previously been the province of women. The figure skating world, after being sufficiently impressed by the flexibility of his hips, shrugged and moved on. No one thought any less of him for doing a “girly” spin.

Compare this to the skating world’s reaction to two-time Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt, who was often said to skate “like a man.” Witt had big jumps (and big thighs to go with them), and skated to the soundtracks of epic movies, a practice that was usually reserved for men, while other women tended to skate to classical ballet suites. Witt’s artistic style was also not typical of women skaters: while her competitors demonstrated flowing, balletic arm movements to match their floaty chiffon skating dresses, Witt opted for stronger, cleaner arm movements and famously skated in leggings and a tunic in a program set to music from Robin Hood. She also skated with a stoic bearing that was similar to that of Canadian Elvis Stojko, who won the silver medal in Lillehammer in 1994.

Despite the popular perception of figure skating as a uniformly “girly” sport, there exists within the figure skating world a unique and nuanced code for constructing and understanding gender. In the figure skating world, as in the rest of our culture, that code changes over time, with different representations of masculinity and femininity being rewarded, marked down, or phased out entirely as the sport evolves. And as Plushenko’s comments about Lysacek demonstrated, figure skating’s coding of gender can be invoked by skaters trash-talking their rivals in subtle, but complicated, ways. As yet, Plushenko has made no comment on Lysacek’s upcoming appearance on “Dancing with the Stars,” but it’s not hard to imagine what he might have to say.

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Chloe Angyal is a Contributor at Feministing.com, where she writes about gender in popular culture. She is also a failed figure skater. Daniel Eison is a former nationally-ranked pairs and singles skater who retired in 2005. He is not a failed feminist.

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Gender differences in figure skating are also institutionalized in the form of costume requirements. Women are required to wear dresses, while men are not allowed to wear leggings or sleeveless outfits.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff says,

This isn’t true anymore; “this rule was repealed in 2004, allowing women to wear tights, trousers, or unitards” [1] ([1] http://www.frogsonice.com/skateweb/faq/rules.shtml)

Thanks for the correction!

Related posts: Johnny Weir and Canadian skating gets tough.

Christina W. sent in this 1969 video imagining, basically, the internet:

I found it hysterical. I mean, they were sort of bizarrely accurate in their general predictions. The gender roles also cracked me up.

And since we’re on the topic of the internet, the BBC recently conducted an international poll about the internet and David F. sent us a link to it. The methodology:

The finding that has gotten the most attention is that half of people strongly agree, and another 29% somewhat agree, that internet access should be a “fundamental right of all people”:

Concerns about the internet:

Of those who use the internet, beliefs about several topics:

The fact that 45% of respondents said they couldn’t cope without the internet has also gotten quite a bit of attention. However, it turns out that answers vary quite a bit by country; 79% of respondents in the Philippines and Pakistan said they could cope without it, while on the other end, 84% of Japanese respondents said they couldn’t:

I have to say, I find that question and the responses to it odd. You couldn’t cope without access to the internet? What does that mean, exactly? You’d be depressed and miserable without it? Suffer a mental breakdown? Become suicidal? I am a very heavy internet user–my computer is open with email displayed most of the time, even if I’m doing something else, and I spend enormous amounts of time every day actively using the internet. I get anxious when I can’t get access to it. But would I say I couldn’t cope without it? I would be very unhappy, but I wouldn’t, you know, become entirely incapable of functioning and give up the will to live, I don’t think. So I don’t know what to make of that.

Anyway. Hours spent online per week:

And finally, Michael C. sent us this video of a “skeptic’s take” on Google, including consolidation and privacy issues:

It’s interesting given Google’s recent decision to stop censoring internet access in China due to concerns that human rights activists’ emails were being tracked, as well as accusations of privacy issues with Buzz. A friend and I were talking recently about how normally we’re concerned about corporate concentration and control, and yet we both have entirely enmeshed ourselves with Google–using gmail, storing things on Google Docs and Notebook, tracking websites through Google Reader, using YouTube, getting directions from Google Maps…basically my entire online life is routed through Google services (I tried Chrome but didn’t like it, but if I had, even my browser would have been a Google product).

We’re not sure what to make of this — that it’s easier to lull people into a sense of complacency about corporate control if you provide them really nifty stuff they like using? That we aren’t yet really taking concerns about internet privacy seriously? The way these services are set up, it’s simply easier to use all of them than to insist on using a cloud server, reader, email, and so on separately just so we wouldn’t be supporting the concentration of internet services, and this undoubtedly plays a role in reducing our resistance. And our reliance on Google slowly grew over time so that neither of us really noticed how much we used the company’s products until we were actively talking about it (which we were only doing because of the events in China).

What do you think? Do you worry a lot about control over the internet, and particularly Google’s reach into so many aspects of internet usage? Do you really worry about how internet privacy issues affect you personally?

Liz C. sent in the video for the song “A Kiss with a Fist (Is Better Than None)” by Florence and the Machine. She analyzes it nicely:

The lyrics seem to condone domestic violence, and the video seems to trivialize it, in the sense that the lead singer prances and jumps around while singing about getting punched in the face, having her leg broken, and having plates broken over her head by her partner, while she, in turn, hits and slaps him, breaks his jaw, and refers to “The Burning Bed” by setting fire to their bed.

The lyrics:

You hit me once
I hit you back
You gave a kick
I gave a slap
You smashed a plate over my head
Then I set fire to our bed

You hit me once
I hit you back
You gave a kick
I gave a slap
You smashed a plate over my head
Then I set fire to our bed

My black eye casts no shadow
Your red eye sees nothing
Your slap don’t stick
Your kicks don’t hit
So we remain the same
Love sticks
Sweat drips
Break the lock if it don’t fit

A kick to the teeth is good for some
A kiss with a fist is better then none

A kiss with a fist is better then none

I broke your jaw once before
I spilled your blood upon the floor
You broke my leg in return
So sit back and watch the bed burn
Love sticks
Sweat drips
Break the lock if it don’t fit

A kick to the teeth is good for some
A kiss with a fist is better then none

A kiss with a fist is better then none

You hit me once
I hit you back
You gave a kick
I gave a slap
You smashed a plate over my head
Then I set fire to our bed

You hit me once
I hit you back
You gave a kick
I gave a slap
You smashed a plate over my head
Then I set fire to our bed

UPDATE: Reader Kyle pointed out another example, Chester French’s video for the song “She Loves Everybody.” He asks whether we can imagine seeing this video if the gender roles were reversed:

And commenter Dave gave us a link to a recent discussion of this topic at Jezebel.
Also see our post on sexualized violence in Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” video.

Dmitriy T.M. sent us a report from the Nielsen company of time spent watching TV and using the internet.

We do, of course, want to take into account possible sample bias–the data are based on answers from Nielsen TV and internet panel participants and a survey of cell phone users, and there’s likely some self-selection bias there, with some groups being more likely to participate than others. I know I’ve read about concerns with Nielsen’s data within the entertainment industry.

That said, while I would be cautious about reporting the data as representative of the U.S. overall, the general trends are interesting. People 65+ watched over 47 hours of traditional (non-recorded) TV per week? Can that be possible? The only 65+-year-old whose TV-watching habits I know is my grandma, and she does tend to have the TV on at all times, even when she’s in the kitchen and is just listening, not watching.

According to these data, among those of retirement age, TV watching is basically more than a full-time job. Kids aged 2-11, on the other hand, only have a part-time job watching TV, at about 25 hours per week.

I, of course, had to sit down and calculate my own TV watching, which came out at a little over 6 hours per week when my friends and I have our Friday night TV watching get-together, 3 hours when we don’t. Less than I thought, overall. I am, however, that advertising nightmare, the person who watches 100% of TV online or DVRd, thus reducing the number of commercials I’m exposed to. You can blame me and others like me for the increasing number of product placements you see in TV shows, a way to try to incorporate sponsorship directly into the content rather than in separate commercials that people are finding more ways to skip.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in this video about the production and marketing of bottled water. It’s a little over-the-top at the beginning, but it brings up a lot of really interesting issues surrounding the selling of a product that is, in the U.S., available to the vast majority of people at a much cheaper price in their kitchen. And yes, I know, some people’s water tastes terrible, etc. etc. The point, in general, still stands that we are spending a lot of money and resources carting water around, and I find the advertising for bottled water fascinating.

Also see The Story of Stuff.

Mary, writer of the fabulous blog Cooking with the Junior League, sent in an episode of the PBS series Faces of America. The episode, titled “Becoming American,” looks at the immigrant origins of various celebrities (Meryl Streep, Stephen Colbert) in the period of massive immigration to the U.S. from about 1820 until 1924.

The segment Mary found interesting is about the grandfather of Queen Noor. An immigrant from Syria, he became a naturalized citizen, which Mary says “was unusual because at the time, only ‘white’ and ‘black’ people could be naturalized…but during this time, Syrians started taking their cases to court to prove that they were white, and could, as a result, become naturalized citizens.” It’s a great example of the social construction of race and the way groups have actively resisted the ways they were categorized.

The segment on Queen Noor’s grandfather starts at 36:23.

Also see our post on suing for whiteness.

Since I’ve been obsessed in recent months with marketing techniques and the social psychology of shopping, Dmitriy T.M. sent me a video found at Time; in the video Martin Lindstrom argues that sound can be used to encourage shoppers to buy more items.

So if you need to increase sales in your store, get a bunch of babies and have them sitting around giggling. You don’t even have to pay sound licensing fees!

NOTE: I see that a lot of commenters are discussing their personal lack of reaction to the sound of giggling babies, etc. I totally get it–I raised an eyebrow as well. But we should keep in mind that there may be a difference between actively reacting to something or caring about it greatly (say, loving kids) and being indirectly influenced by sounds that might vaguely evoke some element of it. Of course, from the video we don’t know if any business has actually been successful at getting people to buy things by using sounds similar to babies giggling (or water being poured), only that people seem to react positively to those sounds in the lab. So I don’t know how much legitimacy there is to this, but I know marketers have definitely tried to use smells to influence people to linger in an area, hopefully then leading to higher sales.

Other posts on marketing and psychology: restaurant menus and the meaningless discount.

Kevin, XM, and Laura let me know about an interesting article in the Guardian about acceptable vocabulary in tampon commercials. Kotex recently came out with a new ad campaign that makes fun of some of the usual tropes of tampon commercials–the euphemisms, the dancing around in fields of flowers, and so on. The ads also address the embarrassment or discomfort many people feel about tampons.

In this spot from the Kotex website, a guy asks for help picking tampons for his girlfriend:

Here’s one commercial intended for TV that parodies tampon commercials in general:

The original version didn’t go over well, apparently, and several TV networks rejected the commercial. From the NYT via Gawker:

Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT, said that after being informed that it could not use the word vagina in advertising by three broadcast networks, it shot the ad cited above with the actress instead saying “down there,” which was rejected by two of the three networks. (Both Ms. Harris and representatives from the brand declined to specify the networks.)

So a TV commercial poking fun of the euphemisms in tampon commercials is rejected by not being euphemistic enough…and apparently even the phrase “down there” is too specific. We can talk about erectile dysfunction or leaky bladders, but “down there” just crosses a line.

Related posts: tampons are modern, Tampax ad features menstruating teen male, concerns about tampons and virginity, weird Australian tampon ad, and tampons and female workers during World War II.